QuickStudy: Blogs

Computerworld - Diaries, journals, columns, essays, musings, daybooks, chronicles, logs and memoirs -- all are ways in which people have kept records of their thoughts and feelings as well as events taking place around them.

In our computer-literate, information-based society, the creation of an electronic equivalent of these personal journals was inevitable. It's called the weblog, often abbreviated to blog, and it has expanded the possibilities for comment, expressing opinion and public discourse.

Traditional diaries come with lockable straps designed to keep others from reading one's private thoughts. In today's world, however, attitudes toward such privacy seem, on the whole, quite different than they used to be. Weblogging represents a distinct movement to share thoughts publicly.

• Personal. Blogs are created by a single person, expressing a distinct personality.

• Web-based. They're frequently updated, inexpensive to maintain and accessible via a Web browser.

• Published. Automated publishing tools help the author present his words in an attractive format, and maybe even syndicate them.

• Communities. Blogs link to other blogs and sites, acknowledging that they're part of a larger world.

One other category of weblog is a community blog, which is generally updated frequently by many people and often has an imposing presence. The best-known and perhaps earliest example of this type is slashdot.org, a good site for news and sometimes offbeat commentary on Linux, open source, gadgets, privacy and other computer-related topics.

Weblogging has been around as a distinct form of communication since the 1990s. By one account, the first bloglike page, with personal comments and links, was Marc Andreesen's "What's New" page for NCSA Mosaic in June 1993 (http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/Docs/old-whats-new/whats-new-0693.html).

Jorn Barger coined the term weblog in December 1997 for his "Robot Wisdom Weblog" (www.robotwisdom.com), and in 1999 the shortened form, blog, appeared.

At the beginning of 1999, the best-known list counted 23 weblogs in existence, though there were certainly others. In early January 2003, Pyra Labs in San Francisco reported over 1 million registered users of Blogger, its free software and hosting site. (One month later, Google Inc. bought Pyra.)

The Impact of Blogging

Most webloggers seem to be avid readers of other blogs and maintain links to them on their own weblog pages. Many Web sites exist just to aggregate links to blogs, often on a geographic or topical basis, and many weblogs are members of Web rings -- linked sets of Web sites that provide navigation to one another. Surprisingly, many webloggers don't seem much concerned with computers except as a simple tool.