For other uses, see Blog (disambiguation).

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A blog is a website for which an individual or a group generates text, photographs, video, audio files, and/or links, typically but not always on a daily or otherwise regular basis. The term is a shortened form of weblog. Authoring a blog, maintaining a blog or adding an article to an existing blog is called "blogging". Individual articles on a blog are called "blog posts", "posts", or "entries". The person who posts these entries is called a "blogger".

A weblog or blog is an online publication with regular posts, presented in reverse chronological order. Blogs are typically made up of the following components:

• Title - main title of the post
  
• Body - main content of the post
  
• Trackback - links back from other sites
  
• Comments - comments added by readers
  
• Category - category the post is labeled with (can be one or more)
  
• Permalink - the URL of the full, individual article
  
• Post Date - date:time the post was published
  

Blogs provide many advantages over traditional sites, including:

• It allows for easy creation of new pages, since new data is entered into a simple form (usually with Title, Category, and the body of the article), and then submitted. The templates take care of adding the article to the home page, creating the new full article page (Permalink), and adding the article to the appropriate date or category-based archive.
• It allows for easy filtering of content for various presentation, like by date, category, author, or one of many other attributes
• Most blog platforms allow the administrator to invite and add other authors, whose permissions and access are easily managed

Blogs are different from forums or newsgroups. For blogs, only one person or group can create new subjects for discussion on their blog. A network of blogs can function like a forum in that every entity in the blog network can create subjects of their choosing for others to discuss. Such networks require interlinking to pull off, so a group blog with multiple people holding posting rights is now becoming more common. Because they "go first," blog owners often have right to discuss the objects on their blog due to their ability to frame the issue.

Other than straight text and hyperlinks, some blogs place emphasis on incorporating other forms of media such as video (see videoblogging) or images (see web comics, photoblog). Some bloggers that otherwise only support text may use audioblogging to be able to phone in or otherwise post spoken entries on their blogs. (See also podcasting.) A notable niche type of blog is the MP3 blog, which specializes in posting music from specific genres. New words have been coined for many of these content-oriented blogs, such as "moblog" (for "mobile blog").

• Electronic communities existed before internetworking, but generally had some quality to them. For example the AP wire was, in effect, similar to a large chat room where there were "wire fights" and electronic conversations. Another pre-digital electronic community, Amateur (or "ham") radio, allowed individuals who set up their own broadcast equipment to communicate with others directly. Ham radio also had logs called "glogs" that were personal diaries made using wearable computers in the early 1980s.
• Before blogging became popular, digital communities took many forms, including Usenet, email lists and bulletin boards. In the 1990s Internet forum software, such as WebX, created running conversations with threads. The term "thread", in reference to consecutive messages on one specific topic of discussion, comes from email lists and Usenet as well, and "to post" from electronic bulletin boards, borrowing usage directly from their corkboard predecessors. Many of the terms from weblogging were created in these earlier media. See "Common terms", below.
• Diarists kept journals on the Web: most called themselves online diarists, journalists, journallers, or journalers. A few called themselves escribitionists. The Open Pages webring contained members of the online-journal community. The first famous journaller was probably Justin Hall.
• Other forms of journals kept online also existed. A notable example was game programmer John Carmack's widely read journal, published via the finger protocol.
• Websites, including both corporate sites and personal homepages, had and still often have "What's New" or "News" sections, often on the index page and sorted by date.

The term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger on 17 December 1997. The short form, "blog," was coined by Peter Merholz. He broke the word weblog into the phrase "we blog" in the sidebar of his weblog in April or May of 1999. [1] This was interpreted as a short form of the noun [2] and also as a verb to blog, meaning "to edit one's weblog or a post to one's weblog". Justin Hall, who began eleven years of personal blogging in 1994 while a student at Swarthmore College, is generally recognized as one of the earliest bloggers. The site Xanga, launched in 1996, had only 100 diaries by 1997, and over 50 000 000 as of December 2005. Blog usage spread during 1999, with the word being further popularized by the near-simultaneous arrival of the first hosted blog tools: Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan's company Pyra Labs launched Blogger.com (which was purchased by Google in February 2003) and Paul Kedrosky's GrokSoup. As of March 2003, the Oxford English Dictionary included the terms weblog, weblogging and weblogger in their dictionary. [3]

Dave Winer is the one of the pioneers of the tools that makes blogging more than merely websites. One of his most significant contributions was the creation of servers which weblogs would ping to show that they had been updated.

Blogging combined the personal web page with tools to make linking to other pages easier, specifically blogrolls and TrackBacks. By doing this, instead of only a number of people have the right to control the threads on the forum, all people are able to make their own threads, it was a moderating effect that was the personality of the weblog's owner.

Among the first established political blogs with U.S.-wide audiences were Andrew Sullivan's AndrewSullivan.com, Ron Gunzburger's Politics1.com, Jerome Armstrong's MyDD, and Markos Moulitsas Zúniga's DailyKos — all of which launched widely read blogs in 2001-02. The first blog-driven political controversy was probably the fall of U.S. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, who had remarked, at a party honoring U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond:

"I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either."

Since Thurmond spent much of his early political career sympathetic to white supremacists, and had explicitly supported racial segregation in the his campaign to be president, Lott's statements in favor of Thurmond's pro-segregation campaign could logically be deduced to mean that he also supported racial segregation, and this is how his statement was conveyed in the media. In the aftermath, bloggers such as Josh Marshall strove to demonstrate that Lott's remarks were not an isolated misstatement, by finding evidence including quotes from other previous speeches of Lott's which were taken to be racist. Their efforts kept the story alive in the press until a critical mass of disapproval forced Lott to resign his position as Senate Majority Leader.

By this point blogging was enough of a phenomenon that how-to manuals had begun to appear, primarily focusing on using the tools, or creating content. But the importance of a blog as a way of building an electronic community had also been written on, as had the potential for blogs as a means of publicizing other projects. Established schools of journalism began researching the blogging phenomenon, and noting the differences between current practice of journalism and blogging.

Since 2003, blogs have gained increasing notice and coverage for their role in breaking, shaping, or spinning news stories. One of the most significant events was the sudden emergence of an interest in the Iraq war, which saw both left-wing and right-wing bloggers taking measured and passionate points of view that did not reflect the traditional left-right divide. The blogs which gathered news on Iraq, both left and right, exploded in popularity. The use of blogs by established politicians and political candidates—particularly Howard Dean and Wesley Clark—to express opinions on the war and other issues of the day, cemented their role as a news source. Meanwhile, the increasing number of experts who blogged, such as Daniel Drezner and J. Bradford DeLong, gave blogs a built-in source of in-depth analysis.

The Iraq war was the first "blog war" in another way: Iraqi bloggers gained wide readership, and one, Salam Pax, published a book of his blog. Blogs were also created by soldiers serving in the Iraq war. Such "milblogs" gave readers a new perspective on the realities of war, as well as often offering differing viewpoints from those of official news sources. Blogs were often used to draw attention to obscure news sources, for example posting links to the traffic cameras in Madrid as a huge anti-terrorism demonstration filled the streets in the wake of the March 11 attacks. Bloggers would often provide nearly-instant commentary on televised events, which became a secondary meaning of the word "blogging", such as "I am blogging Rice's testimony," i.e., "I am posting my reactions to Rice's testimony to my blog as I watch it" (such real-time commentary is also known as "liveblogging").

By the end of 2003 top rated blogs Instapundit, Daily Kos, and Atrios were receiving over 75,000 unique visitors per day.

In 2004, the role of blogs became increasingly mainstream, as political consultants, news services and candidates began using them as tools for outreach and opinion formation. Even politicians not actively involved in a campaign such as Tom Watson, a UK Labour Party MP, began to use blogging as a means for creating a bond with constituents and creating a channel for their ideas and opinions. Minnesota Public Radio broadcast a program by Christopher Lydon and Matt Stoller called "The Blogging of the President", which covered the transformation in politics that blogging seemed to presage. The Columbia Journalism Review began regular coverage of blogs and blogging. Anthologies of blog pieces began to reach print, and blogging personalities began appearing on radio and television. In the summer of that year both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions credentialed bloggers, and blogs became a standard part of the publicity arsenal, with mainstream programs, such as Chris Matthews' Hardball, forming their own blogs. Merriam-Webster's Dictionary declared "blog" as the word of the year in 2004. (Wikinews)

Blogs were some of the driving forces behind the "Rathergate" scandal involving Dan Rather of CBS and memos used on the show 60 Minutes II. Within 72 hours a group of conservative bloggers had built a case that they were likely forgeries. The evidence presented eventually created such concern over the issue that CBS was forced to address the situation and make an apology for their inadequate reporting techniques. Two months later, Dan Rather announced that he would step down from the CBS anchor chair. This is viewed by many bloggers as the advent of blogs' acceptance by the mass media as a source of news. It also showed how blogs could keep the pressure on an established news source, forcing defenses and then a retraction of the original story.

Blogging is also used now to break consumer complaints and vulnerabilities of products, in the way that Usenet and email lists once were. One such example is accusations about vulnerability of Kryptonite 2000 locks.

Bloggers have also moved over to other media. Duncan Black (a.k.a. Atrios), Glenn Reynolds, Markos Moulitsas Zúniga (a.k.a. Kos), Ana Marie Cox (a.k.a. Wonkette), and others have appeared on radio and/or television. Hugh Hewitt is an example of a media personality who has moved in the other direction, adding to his reach in "old media" by being an influential blogger.

In the United Kingdom, The Guardian newspaper launched a redesign in September 2005, which included a daily digest of blogs on page 2.

In January 2005, Fortune magazine listed Peter Rojas, Xeni Jardin, Ben Trott and Mena Trott, Jonathan Schwartz, Jason Goldman, Robert Scoble, and Jason Calacanis as eight bloggers that business people "could not ignore." [4]

Blogging also involves politics. The proliferation of tools to run blogs and the communities around them connected blogging with the Open Source movement. The free speech imperative of the blog world has also had a deep social impact. For example, a number of companies have clashed with bloggers, firing a few of them (for example Heather Armstrong, Mark Jen or Jessica Cutler).

Many bloggers have large agendas, and see blogging as part of Open Source Politics, or the ability of people to participate more directly in politics, helping to frame the debate (See George Lakoff). Many bloggers differentiate themselves from the mainstream media, while others are members of that media working through a different channel. Some institutions see blogging as a means of "getting around the filter" and pushing messages directly to the public. One of the current discussions within acticles and blogging is what "blogging" means for the way news "happens" and is covered. This leads to a lot of problems over intellectual property and the promary role of the mass media in society.

Blogs have been seen as libraries for information about the ideas thought by the others. They could provide insight in the minds of people who become murderer, people who hi-jack, people who rob the bank. (in 2005, a blogger named his murderer in the last entry on his blog [5]).

Blogs have also had an influence on minority languages, bringing together scattered speakers and learners; this is particularly the case with Scottish Gaelic blogs, whose creators can be found as far away from traditional Gaelic areas as Kazakhstan and Alaska [6]. Blogs are also used regularly by Welsh language activists. Minority language publishing has traditionally been expensive with a small readership, and blogs have been used to counteract this.

With their introduction, there are many software packages appeared to allow people to create their own weblog.

Many bloggers prefer to make their blogs by Nucleus CMS, Movable Type, Drupal, b2evolution, boastMachine, Antville, Serendipity and WordPress to publish on their own website. Such programs do not only provide a user-friendly interface, but also a greater flexibility. If they provide a Web interface for editing, server-based systems make it easy for travelers to create and edit text.

Multi-blogging refers to personal or companys that maintain multiple blogs simultaneously. If a person runs a single blog,he is called a blogger; however there is multi-blogger who maintains 2, 10, 50, 100 blogs.

Two features which are common to blogging are "blogrolls" and "commenting".

A blogroll means a blogger creates a context for his blog, by listing other blogs that are similar to the original, or blogs the blogger thinks may be of relevance to users. It is now commonly used to rank "blog authority", just like Google uses the hard coded HTML linking to create "page rank." "blogroll" is reciprocal linking: bloggers agree to link to with the other bloggers or another blog. They aims to have a link in return. 'blogroll' is used as measure of the number of citations a blog has.

feedback comment systems is a comment system which allows users to post their own comments on the blog. Commenting can be added by using a service or built into the software. If a blog has regular commenters, this means the blog is being more and more popular. However, there are blogs do not allow people to leave comments, or have a closed commenting system which requires the authorization of the owner to leave comments. For other bloggers, comments are the critical feature which distinguishes a "real" blog from other blogs.

Tools such as Ecto, Elicit and w.bloggar allow users to maintain their Web hosted blog without the need to be online while composing or editing posts. Enhancements to weblog technology continue to be developed, such as the TrackBack feature introduced by Movable Type in 2002 and subsequently adopted by other software companies to enable automatic notification between websites of related content—such as a post on a particular topic or one which responds to a post on another blog [7]. bBlog has gone as far as implementing threaded trackbacks on comments, and comments on trackbacks.

Blogs with features such as TrackBack are credited with complicating search engine page ranking techniques [8] [9]. Integrating these into search engines has proven to be a challenge, and has been used to deliberately "push" page rankings. However, as one Google executive remarked, it is the search engine's job to find the ways that a website represents a "vote" for another website.

Web hosting companies and online publications also provide blog creation tools, such as Salon, Tripod, and America Online. Blog hosting sites and Web services to provide editing via the Web have proliferated.

Some people program their own blogs from scratch by using ColdFusion, CGI, pure Ruby, Rails or other server side software. While these are much more difficult to create, they add a maximum potential for creativity.

When discussed in the media, the term blog is often understood to refer to a political blog. Political blogs may take a number of forms. Often an individual will link to articles from news web sites and post their own comments as well. Others focus on long essays about current political topics. Most news, activism, and issue-based weblogs follow the same format.

Of note is the recent trend of political candidates to incorporate blogging into their campaigns. Lower level politicians may do their own blogging, while more prominent candidates, such as presidential candidates, will leave the blogging to their campaign staff.

In common speech, the term blog is often used to describe an online diary or journal, such as LiveJournal. The weblog format of an online diary makes it possible for users without much experience to create, format, and post entries with ease. People write their day-to-day experiences, complaints, poems, prose, illicit thoughts and more, often allowing others to contribute. In 2001, mainstream awareness of online diaries began to increase dramatically.

Online diaries are integrated into the daily lives of many teenagers and college students, with communications between friends playing out over their blogs.

Topical blogs focus on a specific niche, often a technical one. An example is the Google Blog, covering nothing but news about Google. Another example is a soldier blog. Many blogs now allow categories, which means a general blog can be reshuffled to become a topical blog at the user's need. Topical blogs can also cover local information. See Topical weblogs section.

The stock market is a popular subject of blogging. Both amateur and professional investors use blogs to share stock tips.

Business blogs are used to promote and defame businesses, to argue economic concepts, to deseminate information, and more. See Business weblogs section.

Many blogs are written by more than one person about a specific topic. Collaborative weblogs can be open to everyone or limited to a group of people. MetaFilter is an example of this type of blog.

Slashdot, whose status as a blog has been debated, nevertheless has a team of editors who approve and post links to technology news stories throughout the day. Although Slashdot does not refer to itself as a blog, it shares some characteristics with blogs.

Indymedia is an early (1999) example of a collaborative blog (although the term blog wasn't in circulation yet) that was created to cover a specific event (the WTO in Seattle), but has since spread around the world.

A new form of blog represents a fusion of bloggers and traditional media sources, allowing for topics covered in the traditional media, both print and broadcast, to be reiterated out on the web.

From the Slashdot style blog come "Eclectic blogs," which tend to focus on specific niches. Such sites contain articles and stories from other blogs and news sources on the web. There are often few articles actually written by the authors of these blogs and instead the blogs themselves tend to function as passageways for readers to find the actual source of the article or original posting.

Blogs have been used for several educational applications. Students can use blogs as records of their learning and teachers can use blogs as records of what they taught. For example, a teacher can blog a course, recording day-by-day what was taught, including links to Internet resources, and specifying what homework students are required to carry out. This application has many advantages: (1) a student can quickly catch-up if they miss a class; (2) the teacher can use the blog as a course plan; and (3) the blog serves as an accurate summary of the course that prospective students or new teachers can refer to.

There are other educational applications of blogs. Students can blog an educational excursion, recording day-by-day (or hour by hour) where they went, what they saw and what they learned - including photographs, audio or video. The collaborative features of blogs can be used to permit several students to contribute to the blog.

Directory weblogs are useful for web-surfers because they often collect numerous web sites with interesting content in an easy to use and constantly updated format. News-related weblogs can fall into this category or be political blogs.

Directory blogs should not be confused these with weblog directories, which provide a more structured collection of links to blogs, and will often offer novel services and interesting views of the data within the directory. These can be a good source of like-minded bloggers, or bloggers situated near you.

An internet forum can sometimes be regarded as a blog, though usually there is a distinction between the two; the most obvious difference is that in a forum any user can post a new topic of discussion, while in a blog only one or a handful of site owners can do so. However, if forum software is used for the purposes of publishing, for example, an online journal, it could be regarded as a blog. The distinction between blogs and forums is sometimes gray in real life, and sites such as Slashdot, Indymedia and Daily Kos can all be said to combine elements of the two.

Spam blogs (splogs) are a form of high-pressure advertising. Like spam e-mails, splogs are characterized by bold lettering and outrageous claims. Affiliated splogs often link to each other to increase their Internet presence (See PageRank.)

These are some areas of common interest in the blogosphere.

Health blogs include personal accounts of living with injuries and diseases, and these accounts enable people with similar problems to share experiences.

A category of health blogs is medical blogs, wherein health care professionals share medical news and work experiences. Medical blogs could prove useful by acting as early indicators of disease outbreaks and as sources of direction regarding off-label uses of prescription drugs. (When writing about patient cases, health care professionals must protect their patients' confidentially as mandated by HIPAA.)

Given the obvious focus on words, it is not surprising that the Grub Street tradition has continued on the internet with daily commentary emanating from literary blogs (or litblog). Many authors are also creating works of blog fiction.

Famous explorers wrote their journeys down on paper. These days, modern travelers have used blogs as a way to share their stories and photos, even while they are traveling around the world.

An increasing number of scholars and students blog their research notes, combining the traditional scholar's private notebook with public discussion. A related genre is the anonymous professor's blog, where the various issues related to academia may be freely discussed.

Blogs by lawyers or law students, or which discuss law and legal affairs are often referred to as blawgs. By extension, the creator of such a blog is a blawger, sometimes spelled blawgger (variant, rare). Some blawgs are narrow and deal with a focused and/or technical area of law, while others deal with whatever topic the blawgers wish to discuss.

Some blogs discuss religious topics. Religious blogs show the public's points of view on various topics in religion, politics, economics, and life in general.

Some blogs serve as media watchdogs, reporting on falsehoods or inconsistencies that are presented as facts in the mass media. Many media blogs are focused exclusively on one newspaper or television network.

Some bloggers narrate their pets' experiences. An amusing technique is to allow the pets to "speak" in the first person.

These are the major types of business blogs.

Increasingly, employees of corporations are posting official or semi-official blogs about their work. With the rise in popularity of blogs, corporate management caught on to the trend and several types of organizations, including universities, had started using blogs to communicate with their stakeholders.

Many weblogs provide expert advice.

Many small businesses are also using blogs to offer advice and better connect with their clients. These blogs are particularly prevalent in the real estate industry where agents typically have a great deal of flexibility in marketing themselves.

Another type of small online business using blogs are independent software development firms.

Blogging, like any human practice, has developed a specialized vocabulary. See List of blogging terms.

• Content Management System
• Blog client
• Blogebrity
• Commonplace: a historical precedent for the weblog
• Diary
• Google bomb
• News aggregator
• Iranian blogs
• Podcasting
• Chronicle
• Massively distributed collaboration

• Handbook for Bloggers and Cyberdissidents by Reporters Without Borders
• Legal Guide for Bloggers by the Electronic Frontier Foundation
• "Web of Influence" — by Daniel W. Drezner, Henry Farrell from Foreign Policy Magazine