A blog is a type of website where entries are made as in case of any journal or diary ad is displayed in a reverse chronological order. It can de defined as a frequent chronological publication of personal thoughts and web links. The word blog can also be used as a verb™. It then means to maintain or add content to a blog.
A typical blog combines text, images and links to other blogs, web pages, and any other media linked to the topic. Most blogs are primarily text matters though some might focus on photographs (photoblog), videos (vblog) or audio (ipodcasting) and are part of a wider network of social media. Blog can be summarized as a regularly updated online journal of information and opinions.
History of blog
Chronicles, commonplaces, diaries can all be termed as predecessors of blogs. A blog is often a mixture of all that is happening in a person’s life and that is happening in the web. It is a kind of hybrid guide site and there are as many links as there are people. That is the reason for innumerable blogs today.
The trend of blog gained force with the introduction of automated published systems most notably ‘blogger’. People use these services to simplify and accelerate the entire process of publication.
The modern blog actually generated from the online diary of yester years where people would keep a running commentary of their personal lives. These writers used to call themselves journalists. Justin Hall, while still a student at Swarthmore College began blogging eleven years back in 1994 and is considered as one of the earliest bloggers. Brad Fitzpatrick is also an eminent name amongst early bloggers.
Earliest blogs were simply manually updated components of common websites. Now-a-days, use of a browser-based software is a typical aspect of blogging that can be hosted by a dedicated blog hosting services or can be used by running blog software such as WordPress, blogger or on regular web hosting services such as Hosterio Web Hosting, Web Hosting India etc.
History of the terminology
The term ‘web log’ was coined by John Barger on 17th December, 1997. After a relatively slow start, blogging considerably gained popularity. The site xanga was launched in 1996 and had about 100 diaries in 1997. But blogs have since then come a long way and studies show as on December, 2005 we had about 50,000,000 blogs. Today every day innumerable new blogs are created.
The changing face of blogs
Blogs which started of as personal diaries have now undergone a total makeover. It has gained increasing notice and coverage for their role in breaking, shaping or enlightening new stories. The Iraq war saw bloggers taking such points of view which can never be coined under traditional left-right divide. ‘Blogging’ combined with personal web page with tools to make linking to other easier; specifically permalinks, blogrolls or trackbacks has emerged today changing the earlier blog scenario. These together with web log search engines enables bloggers of today to track the threads that connect them to other bloggers who share the same platform, ideology, areas of interest and thoughts.
Types of Blog
There are various types of blogs depending on the way the content is written.
Blogs can be:
 General (relating to anything) or
 Specific (related to a particular topic like travel blog or political blog.
Again a blog can be of the following type depending on the use:
 Private or
 Commercial.
Contents of Blog
A blog usually consists of:
• Title- the main title or headline of the post
• Body- the main content of the post
• URL or permalink of the full, individual article.
• Date- Post date and time when the article was last updated
A blog optionally includes the following:
• Comments i.e. discussion on blog entries
• Categories or tags i.e. subjects that the entry discusses
• Trackbacks or ping backs- links to other sites
Popularity of blogs and its measuring tools
Blogs are gaining popularity day by day. Researchers have analyzed the dynamics of the rising popularity of blogs. There are two types of measures to calculate the popularity of blogs:
• Measuring popularity through citations
• Measuring popularity through affiliation
It was reported by Chinese media Xinhua that the blog of Xu Jinglei received more than 50 million page views, claiming to be the most popular blog in the world. In mid 2006 it also had the highest incoming links of any blogs on the internet.
Legal issues on blogs
The emergence of blogging has brought a range of legal liabilities. The major areas of concern are the issues of propriety or confidential information and defamation. Several employers have fired employees who maintain personal blogs and have illegally discussed their employers, employment conditions, working environment etc. In Singapore two Chinese bloggers were punished for posting anti-Muslim racial remarks on their personal blogs.
Legal issues relating to blogs are arising in countries like Malaysia, United Kingdom and United States of America on a regular basis. Even in India there are instances of legal complications arising due to controversial content of blogs.
Blog and Search Engines
Blog Search engines are used to search contents from a blog.
Blogging software is a simple content management system (CMS) that easily adds new pages or links and integrates them into your site’s navigational structure and linkage making the access to these pages easy and convenient. Blogs are content rich and link rich regularly updated web pages that are usually search engine friendly.
Search engine optimization is based upon making a blog accessible to search engines to gather information stored in a database and to help the users to search the relevant websites cropping up as a result of search through the search engines. The goal is to make the crawlers of the search engines more efficient by providing more information to be stored in the search engine’s database. Continue reading →
