What is a Blog
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
What is a Blog Today?
What is a blog? Well first of all the term blog is actually an abbreviation, or contraction, of the words ‘web log’. Blogs started out as a form of personal diary or journal that was posted onto the Internet for others to read and comment on.
Very quickly blogs became specific; they were not only personal stories but could relate to any subject matter or interest. They also moved from being written by a single individual to groups or corporations. Many commercial web sites will include a blog section to keep customers, clients etc. up to date with current news, events and opinions.
The arrival of Twitter gave rise to the term ‘microblogging’ as users are limited to posts of 140 characters to voice their opinion news or other comment.
Most blogs are interactive with a comments section for readers to add their point of view, or further information on the subject of the blog post.
The big rise in blogs came with the advent of web publishing tools which allowed those with no knowledge of web tools such as HTML and FTP to create and post their work without the need to learn the basics of internet publishing. The most famous and widely used of the web publishing content management systems are WordPress and Blogger which allow users to have a site up and publishing content within a very short space of time and little or no knowledge of any programming language or script.
A flurry of blog platforms were also born that allow users to simply create a log in id and begin posting right away. These sites will also host the blog and provide simple tools for including photographs, video, music etc. Some of the more well known of these platforms are Tumblr, Posterous and Scribd.
Figures estimated at the end of 2011 state that there were in excess of 156 million public blogs and the numbers continue to rise daily.
Blogs can be found on almost any subject matter and some subjects have acquired specific names for their type of blogs for example photography blogs are known as photoblogs, video blogs are often called vlogs and audio blogs are known as podcasts.
The content management systems such as WordPress not only allow writer to quickly and easily publish their articles, they also deal with a lot of the administration of the blog such as archiving of old content, indexing of articles by keywords and tags, displaying articles in the required sequence (most often reverse chronological) and formatting of the blog, so that is appealing and easy to read.
Harvard law answer the question “what is a blog?” with description that is is a hierarchy of text, media and data, arranged chronologically or reverse chronologically, as is most common which can be viewed in an HTML browser. But that is just the technical description. They also believe that the voice of the author must come through in the writing.
So, “what is a blog?” is a difficult question to answer, it can be a wide variety of things, but I hope that our technical description and examples give you enough background so that you will recognise a blog when you see one.