Although some bloggers have (or have achieved) prominence and expertise that makes them as influential in politics and other areas as established journalists, reviewers, and critics (some of which maintain blogs themselves), many bloggers reach relatively few readers and discuss matters of largely personal interest. Blogs are also used by politicians, businesses, and others to keep voters, customers, and the like informed on matters of common interest; they can function as a significant alternative to television, newspapers, and other mainstream media, especially in nations where the media are controlled or censored by the government. Bloggers have at times broken important news stories or marshalled public opinion on a matter of public interest.
Online journals first appeared in the early 1990s. The development in the late 1990s of software that made updating an online journal easier and the subsequent rise of websites that specialized in hosting blogs spurred the rapid growth of blogging in the first years of the 21st cent., and by the mid-2000s there were millions of blogs on the Internet.
(2) (WeBLOG) A Web site that contains dated text entries in reverse chronological order about a topic (most recent entry first). Blogs serve many purposes from personal journals to online newsletters to "ranting and raving." Written by one person or a group of contributors, entries contain commentary, observations and opinions and may include images, audio, video, links to other sites and even a search facility for finding earlier entries. See audioblog and vlog.
Blogs may invite comments and feedback similar to the Internet newsgroup discussions that started long before the Web came about (see newsgroup). For bloggers who want to develop a relationship with readers, user feedback is essential. Blogs often support RSS syndication, which automatically notifies users when new blog entries are posted (see syndication feed).
More Personal, But Corporate Too
The blog is often a passionate expression of one individual's thoughts, and blogs are expected to be totally truthful. Although increasingly included, ads have traditionally not been on blogs. Informality and off-the-cuff opinion are what set blogs apart from Web sites, e-zines and other electronic publishing formats (see e-zine).
Companies also encourage employees to write internal blogs to share knowledge, and they use public blogs to keep abreast of customer satisfaction and other issues. Customers often have great faith in employee bloggers. For example, a CEO who writes a blog may greatly enhance the company image as long as there is no extreme bias or obvious marketing.
Blog Software and Services
In the late 1990s, the first blogs were manually coded in HTML and uploaded to a Web server. However, when applications such as Pitas, Blogger and GrokSoup were launched in 1999, blogs took off. This template-based software made it a snap to publish a blog on the company's Web server and add entries without knowing any HTML (see blog publishing software). Soon after, blog hosting services came along that offered the same functionality on their own servers, allowing anyone to set up a free blog on the Web in minutes. A blog service is the simplest way for anyone to publish comments on the Internet (see blog service)..
From Blog to Microblog to Twitter
The blog spawned the "microblog," a short blog about one's daily adventures, which evolved into the wildly successful Twitter.
Everybody's Talking
By 2007, there were more than 100 million blogs on the Web offering a mind-numbing amount of comments about everything. To help wade through, sites such as Technorati (www.technorati.com) and Google Blog Search (http://blogsearch.google.com) were created. See blog network, live blogging, anonymous blog, blog ping, spider, splog, blogroll, blogvertising, blognosing, blogorrhea, blogger, War blog and dooced.
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| From "The Best of The Joy of Tech" cartoon book by Nitrozac and Snaggy (O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., 2003, ISBN 0-596-00578-4). (Image courtesy of GeekCulture, www.geekculture.com) |
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