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*Writing and Publishing tools
*Writing and Publishing tools
**[http://hometown.aol.com/ AOL Hometown]
**[http://hometown.aol.com/ AOL Hometown]
**[http://www.bbcity.co.uk bbCity]
**[http://www.bblog.com bBlog] Free PHP blogging tool
**[http://www.bblog.com bBlog] Free PHP blogging tool
**[http://www.blogger.com Blogger] (owned by [[Google]])
**[http://www.blogger.com Blogger] (owned by [[Google]])

Revision as of 18:27, 16 February 2004


A weblog (often web log, also known as a blog, see below) is a website which contains periodic, reverse chronologically ordered posts on a common webpage, with hyperlinks playing an important role. The individual posts (which taken together are the weblog) either share a particular theme, or a single or small group of authors.


The totality of web logs and blog-related webs is usually called the blogosphere [1]. The format of web logs varies, from simple bullet lists of hyperlinks, to article summaries with user-provided comments and ratings. Individual web log entries are almost always date and time-stamped, and tend to be presented in reverse chronological order, with the newest post at the top of the page. Because links are so important to web blogs, most web blogs have a way of archiving older entries and generating a static address for individual entries; this static link is often referred to as a permalink. The latest headlines, with hyperlinks and summaries, are offered in weblogs in the RSS xml-format, to be read with a RSS feedreader.

History

Amateur radio is, in many ways, the predecessor of the modern internet. Ham radio logs formed a sort-of precursor to the modern web log. With miniaturization, ham radio equipment evolved from fixed (located in homes and offices) to mobile (automotive, in cars, vans, and boats) to portable (handheld, wearable, and even implantable) [2]. Portable ham radio gear made possible the CyborgLog (cyborglog, or "glog" for short) in which early cyborg communities were possible. Glogs also gave rise to early electronic newsgathering on the Web. [3]

Weblogs have some similarities with wikis, in that they may stimulate community interaction, and some allow reader feedback. Web logs do not generally permit readers to modify existing text, though some exist that do (see, blikis, chat rooms).

The term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger in December 1997.

"Weblogs are often-updated sites that point to articles elsewhere on the web, often with comments, and to on-site articles. A weblog is kind of a continual tour, with a human guide who you get to know. There are many guides to choose from, each develops an audience, and there's also comraderie and politics between the people who run weblogs, they point to each other, in all kinds of structures, graphs, loops, etc." -- Dave Winer, [4]

The shorter version, "blog," was coined by Peter Merholz who in April or May of 1999 broke the word weblog into the phrase "wee' blog" in the sidebar of his weblog [5]. This was interpreted as a short form of the noun [6] and also as a verb, to blog, meaning "to edit one's weblog or a post to one's weblog". Usage spread during 1999 and the word was popularized by Pyra's creation of their weblog service Blogger. The Oxford English Dictionary has considered including it in their dictionary. [7]

Creating and Publishing Weblogs

Since their introduction, a number of software packages have appeared to allow people to create their own web log. Blog hosting sites and Web services to provide editing via the Web have proliferated. Common examples include pitas, blogger, livejournal and xanga.

Many more advanced bloggers prefer to generate their blogs by using server-side software tools such as Movable_Type and Manila to publish on their own Web site or a third party site, or to host a group of blogs for a company or school. Such programs provide greater flexibility and power, but require more knowledge. If they provide a Web interface for editing, server-based systems may reduce the ease of creating and editing text for travellers, some of whom like to produce their travelblogs from Internet cafes as they travel around the globe.

Many blogging tools have also been developed to improve the blogging experience, with commonly used ones providing blogrolls and feedback comment systems. Well known examples of these are blogrolling and the commenting system HaloScan. Tools such as w.bloggar allow users to maintain their Web hosted blog without the need to use the (generally somewhat slower) Web based editing tools.[8] Enhancements to weblog technology continue to be developed, such as the trackback feature introduced by Movable_Type in 2002 and subsequently adopted by other software companies (e.g., Userland) to enable automatic notification between websites of related content -- such as a post on a particular topic or one which responds to a post on another blog [9].

Blogs with features such as Trackback are credited with complicating search engine page ranking techniques [10] [11] and confusing (perhaps deliberately gaming) search engines that try and establish context.

Web hosting companies and online publications also provide blog creation tools, such as Salon, Tripod, and America Online, which calls its subscriber blogs "journals."

Types of Weblogs

Personal

Often, the word blog is used to describe an online diary or journal, such as LiveJournal. The weblog format of an online diary makes it possible for users without much experience to create, format, and post entries with ease. People write their day-to-day experiences, complaints, poems, prose, illicit thoughts and more, often allowing others to contribute, fulfilling to a certain extent Tim Berners-Lee's original view of the World Wide Web as a collaborative medium. In 2001, mainstream awareness of online diaries began to increase dramatically.

Online diaries are integrated into the daily lives of many teenagers and college students, with communications between friends playing out over their blogs. Even fights may be posted in the diaries, with not-so-veiled insults of each other easily readable by all their friends, enemies, and complete strangers. Online diaries may also be a bane to job seekers, if their diaries are discovered by potential employers.

FriendBlog

A FriendBlog is a distributed networked journal on the web, composed of short, frequently updated posts written by friends connected through their similar interests. The author allows his FriendBlog to connect to other Friendblogs, belonging to friends and acquaintances, and by doing so, their posts also appears in his.

Political

Another common kind of blog is a political blog. Often an individual will link to articles from news web sites and post their own comments as well. Many of these blogs comment on whatever interests the author. Some of them are more specialized. One subspecies is the watch blog, a blog which sets out to criticize what the author considers systematic errors or bias in an online newspaper or news site - or perhaps even by a more popular blogger. One of the earliest and most popular examples of this genre of blog is www.AndrewSullivan.com, the personal blog of Anglo-American journalist and writer Andrew Sullivan which claims (as of late 2002, early 2003) over 250,000 unique visitors per month.

Directory

Weblogs are useful for web-surfers because they often collect numerous web sites with interesting content in an easy to use and constantly updated format. News-related weblogs (such as Slashdot) can fall into this category or the previous one (political blogs).

Formats

Some web logs specialise in particular forms of presentation, such as images (see web comics), or videos, or on a particular theme, and acronyms have been developed for some of these, such as moblogs (for "mobile" blog).

Example Weblogs

(see also Friends of Wikipedia/Personal weblogs)

Blog directories

Blogging systems

Websites that analyze weblogs

  • Blogshares - A Fantasy Blog Stock simulation (though not an exact stock market simulation)
  • Weblogs.com - a list of weblogs updated in the last three hours
  • Blogdex - tracks links from blogs, part of the MIT Media Lab
  • Popdex - similar to Blogdex
  • Blogosphere Ecosystem
  • Daypop - weblog search engine, also tracks links from blogs
  • blogosphere.us - similar to blogdex and popdex, but provides graphs and commentary as well
  • [12] - Also similar to blogdex and popdex, but also analyzes weblog popularity not just link popularity.

Further References

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