intro
If you are new to blogging, this is the first question that naturally comes to mind. “What are blogs?”
On this page we will try to answer that question. Once you are done reading, you will have a fairly good idea of whether this forum is, or isn’t for you.
A blog is basically a journal that is available on the web (it can be
private or public). The activity of updating a blog is “blogging” and
someone who keeps a blog is a “blogger.” Blogs are typically updated
daily using software that allows people with little or no technical
background to update and maintain the blog. Postings on a blog are
almost always arranged in chronological order with the most recent
additions featured most prominantly. From the WSJ, Businessweek,
Fortune and countless other publications - Blogs - corporate or
personal are influencing more people.
“The power of weblogs comes not just from their easy publishing and
management of the content, but the social networks of readers and
writers that weblogs participate in, as well as the ways in which
audience is addressed by the weblog writer in order to participate in
the conversations of the Web. Understanding the power of personal
webpublishing through blogs is not accomplished by conceptualizing them
as huge documentation repositories; it is their ability to support
ever-expanding networked connections in the mega conversations on the
Internet. In thousands of groups across the blogosphere, communities
are defined through the memes they create, not a specific virtual
location, a “conversational mess,” as Tom Coates describes it, enabled by permalinks, RSS, and trackbacks.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
A weblog (usually shortened to blog, but occasionally spelled web log) is a web-based publication consisting primarily of periodic articles (normally in reverse chronological order). Although most early weblogs were manually updated, tools to automate the maintenance of such sites made them accessible to a much larger population, and the use of some sort of browser-based software is now a typical aspect of “blogging”.
Blogs range in scope from individual diaries to arms of political campaigns, media programs, and corporations. They range in scale from the writings of one occasional author, to the collaboration of a large community of writers. Many weblogs enable visitors to leave public comments, which can lead to a community of readers centered around the blog; others are non-interactive. The totality of weblogs or blog-related websites is often called the blogosphere. When a large amount of activity, information and opinion erupts around a particular subject or controversy in the blogosphere, it is sometimes called a blogstorm or blog swarm.
The format of weblogs varies, from simple bullet lists of hyperlinks, to article summaries or complete articles with user-provided comments and ratings. Individual weblog entries are almost always date and time-stamped, with the newest post at the top of the page, and reader comments often appearing below it. Because incoming links to specific entries are important to many weblogs, most have a way of archiving older entries and generating a static address for them; this static link is referred to as a permalink. The latest headlines, with hyperlinks and summaries, are frequently offered in weblogs in the RSS or Atom XML format, to be read with a feed reader.
The tools for editing, organizing, and publishing weblogs are variously referred to as “content management systems”, “publishing platforms”, “weblog software”, and simply “blogware”.