Blogs are websites that consist of periodic posts displayed in reverse chronological order. They evolved from personal online diaries to include multi-author blogs from organizations. Blogs are interactive websites that allow users to comment and form social connections. They cover a wide range of topics and can be used for personal diaries, commentary, advertising, and education. The number of public blogs grew rapidly in the late 1990s as publishing tools made creating blogs easier.
Blogs are websites that consist of periodic posts displayed in reverse chronological order. They evolved from personal online diaries to include multi-author blogs from organizations. Blogs are interactive websites that allow users to comment and form social connections. They cover a wide range of topics and can be used for personal diaries, commentary, advertising, and education. The number of public blogs grew rapidly in the late 1990s as publishing tools made creating blogs easier.
Blogs are websites that consist of periodic posts displayed in reverse chronological order. They evolved from personal online diaries to include multi-author blogs from organizations. Blogs are interactive websites that allow users to comment and form social connections. They cover a wide range of topics and can be used for personal diaries, commentary, advertising, and education. The number of public blogs grew rapidly in the late 1990s as publishing tools made creating blogs easier.
Blogs are websites that consist of periodic posts displayed in reverse chronological order. They evolved from personal online diaries to include multi-author blogs from organizations. Blogs are interactive websites that allow users to comment and form social connections. They cover a wide range of topics and can be used for personal diaries, commentary, advertising, and education. The number of public blogs grew rapidly in the late 1990s as publishing tools made creating blogs easier.
discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order, so that the most recent post appears first, at the top of the web page. Until 2009, blogs were usually the work of a single individual, occasionally of a small group, and often covered a single subject or topic. In the 2010s, "multi-author blogs" (MABs) emerged, featuring the writing of multiple authors and sometimes professionally edited. MABs from newspapers, other media outlets, universities, think tanks, advocacy groups, and similar institutions account for an increasing quantity of blog traffic. The rise of Twitter and other "microblogging" systems helps integrate MABs and single- author blogs into the news media. Blog can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog. The emergence and growth of blogs in the late 1990s coincided with the advent of web publishing tools that facilitated the posting of content by non-technical users who did not have much experience with HTML or computer programming. Previously, a knowledge of such technologies as HTML and File Transfer Protocol had been required to publish content on the Web, and early Web users therefore tended to be hackers and computer enthusiasts. In the 2010s, the majority are interactive Web 2.0 websites, allowing visitors to leave online comments, and it is this interactivity that distinguishes them from other static websites.[2] In that sense, blogging can be seen as a form of social networking service. Indeed, bloggers do not only produce content to post on their blogs, but also often build social relations with their readers and other bloggers.[3] However, there are high-readership blogs which do not allow comments.
Many blogs provide commentary on a
particular subject or topic, ranging from politics to sports. Others function as more personal online diaries, and others function more as online brand advertising of a particular individual or company. A typical blog combines text, digital images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability of readers to leave publicly viewable comments, and interact with other commenters, is an important contribution to the popularity of many blogs. However, blog owners or authors often moderate and filter online comments to remove hate speech or other offensive content. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (art blogs), photographs (photoblogs), videos (video blogs or "vlogs"), music (MP3 blogs), and audio (podcasts). In education, blogs can be used as instructional resources. These blogs are referred to as edublogs. Microblogging is another type of blogging, featuring very short posts.
On 16 February 2011, there were over
156 million public blogs in existence. On 20 February 2014, there were around 172 million Tumblr[4] and 75.8 million WordPress[5] blogs in existence worldwide. According to critics and other bloggers, Blogger is the most popular blogging service used today. However, Blogger does not offer public statistics.[6][7] Technorati lists 1.3 million blogs as of February 22, 2014.[8]
History 1997, actually referred to their online presence as a zine, before the term blog entered common usage.
Technology
Early blogs were simply manually updated
components of common Websites. In 1995, the "Online Diary" on the Ty, Inc. Web site was produced and updated manually before any blogging programs were available. Posts were made to appear in reverse chronological order by manually updating text based HTML code using FTP software in real time several times a day. To users, this offered the appearance of a live diary that contained multiple new entries per day. At the beginning of each new day, new diary entries were manually coded into a new HTML file, and the start of each month, diary entries were archived into its own folder which contained a separate HTML page for every day of the month. Then menus that contained links to the most recent diary entry were updated manually throughout the site. This text- based method of organizing thousands of files served as a springboard to define future blogging styles that were captured by blogging software developed years later.[16] The evolution of electronic and software tools to facilitate the production and maintenance of Web articles posted in reverse chronological order made the publishing process feasible to a much larger and less technically-inclined population. Ultimately, this resulted in the distinct class of online publishing that produces blogs we recognize today. For instance, the use of some sort of browser- based software is now a typical aspect of "blogging". Blogs can be hosted by dedicated blog hosting services, on regular web hosting services, or run using blog software. Rise in popularity
After a slow start, blogging rapidly gained
in popularity. Blog usage spread during 1999 and the years following, being further popularized by the near-simultaneous arrival of the first hosted blog tools:
Bruce Ableson launched Open Diary in
October 1998, which soon grew to thousands of online diaries. Open Diary innovated the reader comment, becoming the first blog community where readers could add comments to other writers' blog entries. Brad Fitzpatrick started LiveJournal in March 1999. Andrew Smales created Pitas.com in July 1999 as an easier alternative to maintaining a "news page" on a Web site, followed by DiaryLand in September 1999, focusing more on a personal diary community.[22] Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan (Pyra Labs) launched Blogger.com in August 1999 (purchased by Google in February 2003)