Blogs

Maybe you have heard the term “blog” before and quickly attributed it to a website where one can freely journal about any topic; but what actually is a blog? A blog is not just any website but a website with a very specific format and characteristics. According to Marshall Brain, the characteristics that define a blog are:

• A blog is normally a single page of entries. There may be archives of older entries, but the "main page" of a blog is all anyone really cares about.
• A blog is organized in reverse-chronological order, from most recent entry to least recent.
• A blog is normally public -- the whole world can see it.
• The entries in a blog usually come from a single author.
• The entries in a blog are usually stream-of-consciousness. There is no particular order to them. For example, if I see a good link, I can throw it in my blog. The tools that most bloggers use make it incredibly easy to add entries to a blog any time they feel like it. (Brain, n.d., para. 6).

In the early years of the internet, the internet was less of a social platform and more of an information tool. Publishing content to the World Wide Web required knowledge of HTML and thus imposed great limitations on the general public’s ability to create web pages. With the development of tools in the late 1990s that aided non-technical users in creating and publishing content for the web, the blogosphere quickly took form. These tools allowed for anyone and everyone to post about any topic they wanted to. However, according to Susan Gunelius, the earliest blogs started out primarily as online diaries in which individuals posted information on a daily basis about their lives and opinions (Gunelius, n.d., para 5). Blogs originated as a one-way street in which there was no communication between an author and his audience. As blogs evolved, features were added to allow for readers to interact with an author by posting comments or “liking” a post.

Blogging has become an incredibly popular form of social media. As of November 20, 2013, there are over 152 million blogs in existence (Gaille, 2013). At the time of this writing, Tumblr is statistically the most popular blogging platform with over 178 million blogs (Tumblr, 2014). While Blogger is often regarded as the most popular blogging platform, there is no statistical data to back up this claim as Blogger keeps all of its statistics private.  

References

[Blog Icons]. Retrieved April 2, 2014 from

          http://awas.aweber-static.com/images/features-pages/bbc-blogs.jpg 

Brain, M. How Blogs Work. (n.d.). Retrieved March 30, 2014, from http://computer.howstuffworks.com/internet/social-networking/information/blog.htm

Gaille, B. How Many Blogs are on the Internet. (n.d.). Retrieved March 30, 2014, from http://www.wpvirtuoso.com/how-many-blogs-are-on-the-internet/

Tumblr. Tumblr. (n.d.). Retrieved March 30, 2014, from http://www.tumblr.com/about

Gunelius, S. What is a Blog? (n.d.). Retrieved March 30, 2014, from http://weblogs.about.com/od/startingablog/p/WhatIsABlog.htm