Introduction to blogging

Posted on 02. Oct, 2009 by Cat in Blogging, How To

I’ve had quite a few of my friends ask me what a blog is, so I thought I’d put together this article explaining exactly what one is.

What is a blog?

Originally, “blog” was a shortening of “web log” – or a web journal. What differentiates a blog from a traditional website is that blogs facilitate the publishing of “posts” or stories in reverse chronological order. So you will see the most recent blog post first. Like a news feed, blogs meant that a reader could quickly see which entries were the most recent.  Also like news feeds and also like a journal, it is expected that blogs are regularly updated. While if a traditional website hasn’t been touched in a number of months, most people wouldn’t notice – if a blog has had no updates for the same time, it’s considered at the very best “dormant”, but most usually, it would be seen as “dead”.

Blogs are now an important component of online publishing. Major newspapers and many magazines have incorporated blogs into their websites. There are influential publishing companies like b5media and Weblogs Inc that are based solely around networks of blogs. 

That’s not to say that big companies have an advantage when it comes to blogging, they don’t, and in fact, the big media companies have been relatively late to jump on the blogging train. A big part of the popularity of blogs is linked to availability of blogging software which allowed blog authors (bloggers) to post entries to their blog with very little or no coding ability. The main thing that separates blogs is the quality of the writing, the dedication, the personality and the insight of the writer/s – not technical resources. This has meant that blogging has really levelled the playing field and it has provided, and continues to provide, countless opportunities for individuals.

Blogs have really opened up the world of independent publishing – now anyone from kids to grandparents can easily become web publishers.

Why Blog? (more…)