Blogs and the internet in FL education

I must confess that even though I am a big fan of the internet and I spend more than half of my day online, I've always had a problem keeping up with postings on my blog, my facebook, myspace, and all of those my-life-online sites that have taken over the world. I like sharing with people, and I like reading about other people's opinions, tastes, perspectives...I like posting my own debates and even some of my own creative writing, and I definitely like receiving comments on those. The problem is that I'm also a very social person OFF-line and I fear the fact I cannot control my privacy the same way on the internet.
Today the the internet is a vast universe of information where you can answer almost every single question, including what is Mr. X is wearing today as he passes the London Eye near the Big Ben (check out www.earthcam.com for some amazing live webcams around the world). Thanks to the internet, we can get a recipe for smoked salmon Tokio Sushi-Ya style in one second and impress our mother on her birthday...but most amazingly...we can make all kind of shopping, investing, politics (!!!), and even have our own community of friends from all over the world without ever leaving your desk. In this endless space of cosmic proportions blogs are a hand-picked selection based on individual interests that somehow organize the information in an easier, more "organic" way.
Even though many students have the same problem I have with blogging, I think that of all online resources out there, blogs have the most potential in FL teaching because they are a very simple and "familiar" way to approach technology. In my opinion the "affective factor" (as researchers call it in our readings) has a more positive weight on the outcomes of blogging for a FL class. First of all, I think that blogs help breaking the fear barrier to make mistakes and sound ridiculous..and it creates a very different kind of interaction with the teacher. Your student's blog can be a discussion forum about things they are actually interested, and because is online...they can feed from all the websites on the target language and create their own kind of immersion. I would say that combining blogs and podcasts would be an ideal way to enrich your FL teaching. Considering the amazing popularity of online communities like Facebook or Myspace or Hi5, I think that Blogs can also simulate an online Spanish or French or whatever language immersion that can produce a very different kind of interest towards the foreign language and culture amongst young students. Due to time constrains it would be impossible to bring the blog to the classroom, but I think that is exactly the point: your students will be dedicating a lot of valuable time outside the school to interact with the second language and the culture in a more attractive, fun way. The difference between this and a long distance FL course would be...blogs can (should) be way lighter on the grammatical explanations and more concentrated into actually USING the language to communicate. Simply put, they can be just more social than anything else...and that is the kind of approach to FL education that in my opinion brings the best results.
So if I was going to commit to start a Spanish blog for teaching...I would probably make it a little closer to what facebook is right now. Blogs hold all kind of media and feeds from other sites that I would suggest my students, and then I would let them decide what to use and how to use it. I would only monitor their comments on each other posts and make the corrections right there. The cool thing would be...no need to say the truth....they get to be whoever they want to be.
I'm sure this is not precisely a novelty idea...there must be a lot of FL education through blogs right now (in fact, ask Moniqua about her spanish class blog!)...but I foresee that it won't be long before blogs or other some other kind of interactive online forums become the standard supplement to foreign language education.