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.
blog
(1) To write a blog entry. Blogs (definition #2 below) became so popular that the noun was turned into a verb; for example, "I'll blog about that subject next month."
(2) (WeBLOG) A Web site that contains dated text entries in reverse chronological order (most recent first) about a particular topic. Blogs serve many purposes from online newsletters to personal journals to "ranting and raving." Written by one person or a group of contributors, entries contain commentary and links to other Web sites, and images and videos as well as a search facility may be included (see vlog).
Although some blogs invite feedback and comments, Internet newsgroup discussions, which started long before the Web, tend to be more question-and-answer oriented (see newsgroup). See also cyberjournal.
Blog Software and Services
The first blogs were manual entries in the late 1990s, typically just part of a Web site that was updated by coding in HTML. In 1999, blogs took off when applications such as Pitas, Blogger and GrokSoup were released. This template-based software made it easy to publish a blog on a Web server and add entries without knowing any HTML coding. Blog hosting services came along and offered the same functionality on their own servers, allowing anyone to set up a free blog on the Web in just minutes.
The News Feed
Many blog sites offer an RSS or Atom syndication feed that provides headlines of their latest entries along with URLs to the content (see syndication feed).
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 them, sites such as Technorati (www.technorati.com) and Google Blog Search (http://blogsearch.google.com) were created. See blog network, blog ping, spider, blogrolling, 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) |
blog
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