Blog

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This article is about the type of website. For the record of web server activity, see server log.

A weblog, or simply a blog, is a website which contains periodic, reverse chronologically ordered posts on a common webpage. Such a web site would typically be accessible to any Internet user. Part of the reason "blog" was coined and commonly accepted into use is the fact that in saying "blog", confusion with server log is avoided. Individual posts (which taken together are the blog or weblog) either share a particular theme, or a single or small group of authors.

The totality of weblogs or blog-related webs is usually called the blogosphere [1]. The format of weblogs varies, from simple bullet lists of hyperlinks, to article summaries with user-provided comments and ratings. Individual weblog entries are almost always date and time-stamped, with the newest post at the top of the page. Because links are so important to weblogs, most blogs have a way of archiving older entries and generating a static address for individual entries; this static link is referred to as a permalink. The latest headlines, with hyperlinks and summaries, are offered in weblogs in the RSS XML-format, to be read with a RSS feedreader.

History

Precursors

Electronic communities existed before internetworking, for example the AP wire was, in effect, similar to a large chat room where there were "wire fights" and electronic conversations. Another pre-digital electronic community Amateur (or "ham") radio allowed individuals who set up their own broadcast equipment to communicate with others directly. Ham radio also had logs called "glogs".

Before blogging became popular, digital communities took many forms, including Usenet, email lists and bulletin boards. In the 1990's electronic form software, such as WebX, created running conversations with threads. Many of the terms from weblogging were created in these earlier media. For example troll, a person who disrupts a discussion, dates back to Usenet. The word "thread" from email lists and usenet as well. The verb "to post" from electronic bulletin boards.

Blogging combined the personal web page, with tools to make linking to other pages easier, specifically blogrolls and trackbacks, as well as comments. This way, instead of a few people in control of threads on a forum, or anyone able to start threads on a list, there was a moderating effect that was the personality of the weblogs owner.

Blogging Begins

The term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger in December 1997.

"Weblogs are often-updated sites that point to articles elsewhere on the web, often with comments, and to on-site articles. A weblog is kind of a continual tour, with a human guide [whom] you get to know. There are many guides to choose from, each develops an audience, and there's also comraderie and politics between the people who run weblogs, they point to each other, in all kinds of structures, graphs, loops, etc." -- Dave Winer, [2]

The shorter version, "blog," was coined by Peter Merholz who in April or May of 1999 broke the word weblog into the phrase "wee' blog" in the sidebar of his weblog [3]. This was interpreted as a short form of the noun [4] and also as a verb, to blog, meaning "to edit one's weblog or a post to one's weblog". Usage spread during 1999 and the word was popularized by Pyra's creation of their weblog service Blogger. As of March 2003, the Oxford English Dictionary included the terms weblog, weblogging and weblogger in their dictionary. [5]

One of the pioneers of the tools that make blogging more than merely websites that scroll is Dave Winer of the Berkman Center at Harvard University. One of his most important contributions was the creation of servers which weblogs would "ping" to show that they had updated. This made it possible for blogs to easy "trackback" other blogs that referenced a particular story, a key feature of blogging.

In early 2002, blogs began to spring up to support the invasion of Iraq, these "war bloggers" were primarily from the right end of the spectrum, and included Instapundit and Little Green Footballs. The first "blog" driven controversy is probably associated with the fall of Trent Lott, where bloggers found quotes from his previous speeches which were taken to be racist, and "kept the story alive" in the press.

By this point blogging is enough of a phenomenon that howto manuals had begun to appear, primarily focusing on using the tools, or creating content. But the importance of a blog as a way of building an electronic community had also been written on, as had the potential for blogs as a means of publicizing other projects.

Through 2003, weblogs gained increasing notice and coverage for their role in breaking, shaping or spinning news stories. The triggering event was the sudden emergence of an opposition to the Iraq war which was not rooted in the traditional anti-war left. The blogs which gathered news on Iraq, both left and right, exploded in popularity, and Forbes magazine covered the phenomenon. The use of blogs by political candidates, particularly Howard Dean and Wesley Clark cemented their role as a news source, while the increasing number of experts who blogged, including Daniel Drezner and J. Bradford DeLong gave the blog world a cachet among regular journalists.

The Iraq War was the first "blog war" in another way - bloggers in Baghdad gained wider readership, and one published a book of his blog. Reading the thoughts of people who were "on the spot" provided a counterpoint, if not a counterweight, to official news sources. Blogs were often used to draw attention to obscure news sources, for example posting links to the traffic cameras in Madrid as a huge anti-terrorism demonstration filled the streets in the wake of the M11 attack. Bloggers would often provide nearly instant commentary on televised events, which became a secondary meaning of the word "blogging", such as "I am blogging Rice's testimony", i.e. "I am writing my reactions to Rice's testimony as I watch it."

In 2004, the role of blogs became increasingly mainstream, as political consultants, news services and candidates began using theme as tools for outreach and opinion formation. Minnesota Public Radio broad cast a program by Christopher Lydon and Matt Stoller called "The Blogging of the President", which covered the transformation in politics that blogging seemed to presage. The Columbia Journalism Review began regular coverage of blogs and blogging. Anthologies of blog pieces began to reach print, and blogging personalities began appearing on radio and television.

Creating and publishing weblogs

Since their introduction, a number of software packages have appeared to allow people to create their own weblog. Blog hosting sites and Web services to provide editing via the Web have proliferated. Common examples include Pitas, Blogger, LiveJournal and Xanga.

Many more advanced bloggers prefer to generate their blogs by using server-side software tools such as Movable Type, WordPress, and Manila to publish on their own Web site or a third party site, or to host a group of blogs for a company or school. Such programs provide greater flexibility and power, but require more knowledge. If they provide a Web interface for editing, server-based systems may reduce the ease of creating and editing text for travellers, some of whom like to produce their travelblogs from Internet cafes as they travel around the globe.

Many blogging tools have also been developed to improve the blogging experience, with commonly used ones providing blogrolls and feedback comment systems. Well known examples of these are blogrolling and the commenting system HaloScan. Tools such as Ecto and w.bloggar allow users to maintain their Web hosted blog without the need to be online while composing or editing posts. Enhancements to weblog technology continue to be developed, such as the TrackBack feature introduced by Movable Type in 2002 and subsequently adopted by other software companies (e.g., Userland) to enable automatic notification between websites of related content -- such as a post on a particular topic or one which responds to a post on another blog [6].

Blogs with features such as TrackBack are credited with complicating search engine page ranking techniques [7] [8] and confusing (perhaps deliberately gaming) search engines that try to establish context.

Web hosting companies and online publications also provide blog creation tools, such as Salon, Tripod, and America Online, which calls its subscriber blogs "journals."

Types of weblogs

Personal

Often, the word blog is used to describe an online diary or journal, such as LiveJournal. The weblog format of an online diary makes it possible for users without much experience to create, format, and post entries with ease. People write their day-to-day experiences, complaints, poems, prose, illicit thoughts and more, often allowing others to contribute, fulfilling to a certain extent Tim Berners-Lee's original view of the World Wide Web as a collaborative medium. In 2001, mainstream awareness of online diaries began to increase dramatically.

Online diaries are integrated into the daily lives of many teenagers and college students, with communications between friends playing out over their blogs. Even fights may be posted in the diaries, with not-so-veiled insults of each other easily readable by all their friends, enemies, and complete strangers. Online diaries may also be a bane to job seekers, if their diaries are discovered by potential employers.

The University of Texas at Austin ran a set of six journals kept by first-year students in 2002-2003 and 2003-2004.

Topical

Another common blog type is a topical blog. It focuses on a specific niche, often a technical one. (An example is a Google Blog, covering nothing but Google news.)

FriendBlog

A FriendBlog is a distributed networked journal on the web, composed of short, frequently updated posts written by friends connected through their similar interests. The author allows his FriendBlog to connect to other FriendBlogs, belonging to friends and acquaintances, and by doing so, their posts also appears in his.

Collaborative (also Collective or Group)

A weblog which is written by more than one person about a specific topic. It can be either open to everyone or limited to a group of people.

Examples:

Political

Another common kind of blog is a political blog. Often an individual will link to articles from news web sites and post their own comments as well. Many of these blogs comment on whatever interests the author. Some of them are more specialized. One subspecies is the watch blog, a blog which sets out to criticize what the author considers systematic errors or bias in an online newspaper or news site - or perhaps even by a more popular blogger. One of the earliest and most popular examples of this genre of blog is www.AndrewSullivan.com, the personal blog of Anglo-American journalist and writer Andrew Sullivan which claims (as of late 2002, early 2003) over 250,000 unique visitors per month. The most influential liberal blog is the dailykos which is run by political consultant Markos Moulitas Suniga, which has a weekly traffic of over 1,000,000.

Political blogs attracted attention because of their use by two insurgent political candidates in 2003: Howard Dean and Wesley Clark. Both gained political buzz on the internet, and particularly among bloggers, before they were taken seriously by the establishment media as candidates. Joe Trippi, Dean's campaign manager, made the internet a particular focus of the campaign. Both candidates stumbled in the end, but were, at one time or another, thought of as front runners for the Democratic Nomination.

Directory

Weblogs are useful for web-surfers because they often collect numerous web sites with interesting content in an easy to use and constantly updated format. News-related weblogs (such as Slashdot) can fall into this category or the previous one (political blogs).

Formats

Some weblogs specialise in particular forms of presentation, such as images (see web comics), or videos, or on a particular theme, and acronyms have been developed for some of these, such as moblogs (for "mobile" blog).

Notable weblogs

(see also Friends of Wikipedia/Personal weblogs)

Blog directories

Blogging systems

Blog search engines

  • Blogdigger -
  • technorati - Also similar to blogdex and popdex, but also analyzes weblog popularity not just link popularity.
  • blo.gs - tracks weblog updates
  • Popdex - similar to Blogdex
  • BlogPulse - Full-text search engine for blog postings. Also analyzes Top Links, Key People, Key Phrases, and produces BlogBites every day. Showcases trend graphs from the blogosphere. Allows you to create your own trend graphs.

Websites that analyze weblogs maybe with search engine

Websites that analyze weblogs, not focussed on searching blogs

  • Blogshares - A fantasy stock market where weblogs are the companies. Players invest fictional dollars on shares in blogs. Blogs are valued by their incoming links and add value to other blogs by linking to them. Prices can go up or down based on trading and the underlying value of the blog.
  • Weblogs.com - a list of weblogs updated in the last three hours


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