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Introduction To Blogs
A few months back, at the ITEA conference I saw this guy sitting next to me typing constantly into his wireless laptop. He was making notes on what the speakers had to say, was finding relevant links and then hitting the send key - instantly updating his Web site. No sooner the site was updated; he would get responses back from readers around the globe. He was a Blogger.
About Blogs
Several years ago, surfers started collecting information and interesting links they encountered in their travels through webspace. As the time passed they started creating logs of the information they collected and soon they started creating their own web logs. The web logs enabled them to update the information and links as often as possible. This was what the guy in the conference was doing. Improvements in Web design tools have certainly made uploading and updating easier for them.
Blogs are more permanent than posts to an online discussion list, more dynamic than older-style home pages. They are more personal than traditional journalism, and definitely more public than diaries. A blog is often a mixture of what is happening in a person's life and what is happening on the Web, a kind of hybrid diary site. So, there are as many unique types of blogs as there are people.
These are a few common characteristics of a blog, but blog types may slightly vary. Some blogs provide succinct description of judiciously selected links. Some others contain commentary and links to the news of the day. Few are endless stream of blurts about the writers day. Few others are - political blogs, intellectual blogs, some are hilarious and some topic driven. They are all - Weblogs.
More than a list of links and less than a full-blown zine, weblogs may be hard to describe but easy to recognize. A blog can be recognized by its format: a webpage with new entries placed at the top, updated frequently. Often at the side of the page is a list of links pointing to similar sites. Some sites consist only of a weblog. Others include the weblog as a part of a larger site. Even though there are so many different blogs, there is one thing common about all the bloggers: most are noncommercial and are impassioned about their subjects.
Weblogs tend to be personal and immediate but they are more simple and straightforward. People can publish their thoughts, even for the first time, with almost no training. Within these constraints, sites such as http://advogato.org/, http://blogger.com/, http://www.livejounal.com/, and the venerable http://slashdot.org/ each serve a different niche. |
