How Blog Affect the Mainstream Media Economics

The best way to define an Open Source is by looking at the collaboration it creates among users by providing them unique opportunities to use, program and upgrade important software. Blogs have been compared lately with Open Source projects in the sense that they present similar opportunities for people to collaborate on significant issues of public concerns, and doing so with the liberty to voice their own opinions on these matters. Open Source projects like Linux, Wikipedia, and so on. Linux system, in particular, accounts for 23% of the entire operating systems of all servers. This reveals that Open Source project commands an appreciable amount of the whole operating systems. Similarly, blog projects provided freely by Internet companies like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Word Press, and other independent companies offer the public the unique opportunity to express their views without having to pay so much money for using them. Statistically, it may be impossible to estimate all the number of blogs existing in the blogosphere; however, Technocratic tracked as many as 30 million blogs to discover what they contained various messages targeted at the billions of Internet users globally.

Now that they are comparatively the same, what motivates bloggers and Open Source programmers to do what they are doing? It is important to outline the apparent motivations that push people to blog before explaining if there are some incentives for doing so or not. Bloggers are agitated to exchange their messages with the people of the world: they blog about fashion, cooking, education, lifestyles, religion, politics and so on. In the same way, the programmers of Open Source projects are naturally motivated to share their knowledge with the public—they are glad to give people the chance to use and upgrade these free software and apply them in their businesses, education, day- to-day commercial activities and so on. The list of the Open source software now seems unending: there are Mozilla, Joomla, Apache, Openoffice.org, MongoDB, and GNU Project. But the extent to which these resources could be made available free of charge for public use may be limited owing to the costs of maintaining them.

Open Source Projects' programmers are getting financial, legal, and moral supports from governmental bodies, private corporations and the public as a whole. These have become incredible incentives for the programmers to keep working on making the Open Source Projects great for the numerous users. Similarly, bloggers receive some incentives to keep blogging: in the case of corporate bloggers, they receive monthly or weekly stipends for helping companies of all sizes market their products and services, or they are given commissions on the number of sales the companies make through their blogging.

Comparatively, the incentives received by Media Executives come in form of their monthly salary, which is quite bigger than the amount earned by an average blogger. The statistics reveal that average media personnel receive anything from $32,000 to $40,000 annually while the salary/wage for bloggers vary considerably; but if quantified, it is somewhere between $12,000 to $22,000 a year, depending on the outfits they are working for.