Blogs and Blogging

What is a Blog?

A blog is an informational website where a person (blogger) can write and post entries that are of importance to them. Posts are displayed in reverse chronological order (most recent posts appear on top), and posts on a blog are typically linked by a universal subject. Most blogs are discussion based. In other words, visitors and readers can post comments to blog posts and engage in a conversation with other readers. Readers can even subscribe to a blog or blog post to make sure they stay up to date with the conversation.

People create blogs about anything and everything. The most popular kind of blog is the kind that individuals create and treat as an personal online diary. Some of these personal blogs are topically specialized and created about a personal hobby like cooking, or fashion . Sometimes, these blogs gather a particular following, and some of these become so famous that they gain critical acclaim—for example, the blog that inspired the book and film Julie and Julia, spawned from the blog by Julie Powell, Julie/Julia Project. There are blogs that are associated with a specific organization or company and thus used as a reliable source of information for news based on this association. Some companies are even taking it a step further using blogs as a social networking device for senior management to be better in touch with their employees making them more accessible and transparent.

Blogs have a relatively short history and it really wasn’t until the past 5-10 years that its popularity really began to take off. Blogs stemmed from the online diary format and many began as manually updated websites. In 1997, Jorn Barger coined the term “weblog” stemming from the process of “logging the web”. The first known instance of a blog documenting through a traditional news site was in 1998 as Jonathan Dube blogged Hurricane Bonnie for The Charlotte Observer. The first most notable blog was LiveJournal, which was created in March of 1999.

Blogs have gained great popularity over the last decade. One feature that helped blogging gain such popularity was the AdSense advertising platform, launched in 2003. AdSense matches ads to the content of the blog and allows bloggers to make money from their blogs. Some of the most popular blogging sites currently include Wordpress, Tumblr, and Bloggr.

Stemmed from blogging, microblogging has also become quite popular over the past decade. A microblog is essentially a blog with a limited number of characters in each post. The most popular platform for this is twitter. In addition to being able to post pictures, videos and links, Twitter can also be integrated into other social media platforms and be fed back into a traditional blog like the ones discussed above or through other social media outlets such as Facebook or LinkedIn.

A fun representation of the evolution of the blogger is reflected in the following infographic:

Blogs have taken a strong stance in the way we get information nowadays, and as technology continues to stretch its current boundaries, it will be very interesting how blogs will develop alongside.