Blogs: This definition of a
Blog comes from a Blogger.
A weblog, also known as a *blog, is a
frequently updated website consisting of dated
entries arranged in reverse chronological
order so that the reader sees the most recent
post first. The style is typically personal
and informal. Freely available tools on the
World Wide Web make it easy for anybody to
publish their own weblog, so there is a lot of
variety in the quality, content and ambition
of weblogs, and a weblog may have anywhere
from a handful to tens of thousands of daily
readers. Weblogs first appeared in the
mid-nineties and became more widely popular as
simple and free publishing tools such as
Blogger.com became available towards the turn
of the century.
Examples of the genre exist on a continuum
from online *diaries that relate the
writer’s daily activities and experiences to
less *confessional weblogs that comment and
link to other material, discuss a particular
theme or function as soapboxes. In addition to
the dominant textual form of weblogs there are
experiments with adding sound, images and
videos to the genre, resulting in photoblogs,
videoblogs and audioblogs.
Each entry in a weblog tends to link to
further information. Weblog authors also link
to other weblogs that have dealt with similar
topics, allowing readers to follow
conversations between weblogs by following
links between entries on related topics.
Readers may start at any point of a weblog,
seeing the most recent entry first, or
arriving at an older post via a search engine
or a link from another site. Once reading a
weblog, readers can read in several orders:
chronologically, thematically or searching by
keywords. Weblogs also generally include a
blogroll, which is a list of links to other
weblogs the author recommend, and many weblogs
allow readers to enter their own comments to
individual posts.
