What is a blog?
A blog is a type of website with regular entries that are shown in reverse-chronological order.
The word “blog” was introduced in early 1999 by Peter Merholz when he decided that he’s going to pronounce the original term of “weblog” (introduced by Jorn Barger in late 1997) to be “we blog”, which then shorten as “blog”. The word “blog” can also means “to maintain a blog”. This was introduced by Evan Williams co-founder of Pyra Labs, who also using the term “Blogger”(for someone who creates a blog) to named one of their product. Blogger is one of the first web applications that offers a free service for creating and managing a blog. Since then, the popularity of blogs and bloggers are growing continuously.
Type of Blogs
There are many type of blogs. There are personal blogs (e.g online journal), which is the most common type of blogs and there are focus-specific blogs which covers specific topics you are interested in (e.g Technology blog, Fashion blog). There are also blogs that are named based on the type of media it presenting (e.g Photoblog) and based on the type of medium the content is created in (e.g. Moblog for a blog created by a mobile device).
Why blogs are popular?
In my opinion, human is a naturally social creature in general. They survive by communicating with each other. People have opinions they would like to share with others. They like their opinions to be heard. A blog is one of the many mediums that support these needs. Blog creates a sense of community, where you can publish your opinion and your readers can publish their comments. It creates a conversation. Free web application such as Blogger and WordPress, makes it even easier and more accessible for people to create and manage a blog. They do not need to be a web programmer to start a blog and publish their opinions on the web.
Issues with blogs
This blog I have created for this course would be my first taste of the web technology. I started bookmarking the blogs that covers the topics that I’m interested in. Applications such as google reader with rss feeds allow me to subscribe to those blogs. However, the nature of the blogs to be updated regularly making it harder to keep up with all the updates.
With many commentaries posted based on the author’s personal opinions, it is hard to predict the reliability of the source without thinking about the author’s biasness.
There’s no doubt that blogs are becoming more popular. Businesses and marketers increasingly incorporate blog on their website as a way to generate connections to their customers. It changes the culture of passive consumer as the reader to active consumer as the creator of content.
To finish of, I would like to share this cartoon from Dave Walker ("We Blog Cartoons")
Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.
No comments:
Post a Comment