Your third questions presents a genuine concern, in a world where bloggers appear to increase every day and everywhere. Audiences are key. Bloggers write to their friends, to people with a common interest, to people with similar problems, or, probably in the case of your question, to a general public. Often it is other bloggers who read and respond to these writers, but the "population" is probably too broad to define. The issue of credibility, more than anything, would separate this population, from one that relies on newspapers and traditional media for information coverage. As time passes, networks may devote a brief section of their coverage to text and video bloggers (which CNN does on a brief level already). This coverage may, however, be limited as the "opinion" section of broadcast news. Posting blogs is easy, and mostly free. There are no requirements to becoming a blogger, much more than being able to read, type, and connect to the internet. News networks invest education, money, time, marketing devices, and the resources of their office into publishing stories for the public. It may be impossible to replace networks with bloggers--however the inclusion of "gossip" and every day events may be finding platform in the form of human interest stories. Again, these issues are widespread over blogs, because a blogger loses no resources by publishing it. News networks have their money on the line.

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In reference to your second question, I think that people absolutely do not realize just how much information they are putting out there. Networking has become such a huge aspect of people's lives today and are doing it with the intentions of letting people know more about them - not realizing that probably the majority of the information they are providing could effect their personal safety. Specifically providing your address and birth date allows anyone to obviously find out where you live, your age, etc.. and to go in to further detail about how you live, if they wish to do so. So not only could someone get information about you from one (networking) site - they can now google you with more specific details, and perhaps find more information that way. (i.e. who you you are friends with, what events you have participated in recently, etc.) Putting your address and birth date on the internet could undoubtedly lead to robbery or identity theft, it's just a matter of someone taking the time to do so - and the way that the networking sites are working now and the amount of information people give out voluntarily - makes it seem like they're just asking for it (or something similar) to happen. The question people need to ask themselves is, if I choose to put detailed/personal information about myself on the internet, at what risk am I putting myself? How much information am I willing to put out there that I think is necessary for others to know?

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