Introduction
A blog is a type of website that focuses on regularly publishing posts on a specific topic or range of topics for the education, reporting, entertainment or enlightenment of interested readers. Blogs can be found on virtually every topic under the sun and they're generally maintained by an single author or a small group of authors.The term blog is an abbreviation of weblog which was first coined by Jorn Barger in 1997. Soon after, Peter Merholz started using the term followed by Evan Williams from Pyra Labs as both a noun and a verb. Williams also devised the term blogger which helped popularize the term.
Blogging software and websites that provide people with a blogging platform are designed to make it as easy as possible for anyone to have a voice on the web and focus on their writing opposed to building and maintaining the software or website itself. While many bloggers are technically savvy, capable people, blogging software and services have opened the doors to everyone that has something to say without requiring any notable technical skill.
In general, a blog consists of the following elements:
- Blog Pages
A page about the author(s) of a blog, their portfolio, photo gallery, contact form, disclaimer and privacy statements are examples of blog pages. - Blog Posts
A post is the written content on a blog. They're often short, but may also be larger and of the article variety. Posts are usually displayed newest first and readers can interact with authors through attached comment forms. - Post Categories
Blog posts are placed under one or more categories, which allow readers to browse all posts in a given category such as programming or mobile phones. - Post Tags
Tags are keywords assigned to posts to further classify them and allow readers to browse all the posts with a very specific keyword assigned to them such as PHP or iPhone. - Posts Archive
A posts archive is a blog page that displays a complete lists of blog posts ordered by date, newest to oldest. Often, you can browse all posts in a given year or month.
People that write blog posts are said to be blogging and they're called bloggers. The term blogosphere is used to collectively refer to all of the blogs across the Web, which form the blogging community. Blogs are interconnected through blogrolls, backlinks, comments and linkbacks (aka trackback or pingback).
A blogroll is a list of links to other related blogs that a blog author thinks their readers will find interesting or helpful. A backlink is a link from another blog or website to your blog and a linkback is a means for those sites to notify you (often in the comments section of a blog post) that they have linked to your post.
Types of Blogs
In general, blogs can be divided into the follow types: 1) personal blog; 2) business blog; 3) blog by genre; or 4) blog by media type. The devices by which a blog post is created, published or viewed (mobile phone etc.) could also be considered a fifth type, being by device. Very often, you'll find a blog falls into one or more of the aforementioned type classifications.
Blog types can also be further classified, and one interesting trend is known as micro-blogging. A micro-blog consist of individual messages sometimes as short as a single sentence opposed to traditional blog posts.
Twitter is a very popular micro-blogging platform, where users post short messages called "tweets". On Twitter, users can share their thoughts and feeling instantaneously with their followers, which are a group of people that subscribe to their tweets. Both individuals and businesses use twitter and for many individuals it has become a preferred personal, micro-blogging service.
Personal Blogs
A personal blog is one where its author writes about their everyday life, activities, thoughts and convictions. Personal blogs are also sometimes referred to as the author's personal web journal or diary. These types of blogs do not typically have a set range of topics and they may or may not be accessible to the general Internet going public. In one post the author may talk about the food at a restaurant and in the next write about an important political issue.
Below you'll find three personal blogs by ITNewb members.
Frank Lakatos
Jacob Torrey
Amr Gawish
Business Blogs
As the name suggests, a business blog is one that primarily focuses on business related announcements, discussions and product information. Companies can use their blogs to distribute information to their customers, stock holders and other interested parties such as the press very easily. A business blog will often have a category devoted to press releases and buzz related to the company.
Dell Corporate Blog
Official Google Blog
Yahoo! Search Blog
Blogs by Genre
Many blogs are by genre, focusing on a particular topic or range of topics such as technology, science, politics, music, education, cooking and so forth. Blogs by genre develop a following of interested readers that subscribe to posts through various syndication services such as RSS which we'll talk about shortly on the next page.
Below we have a list of popular blogs in the technology related genre.
Gizmodo
TechCrunch
Engadet
Mashable
Smashing Magazine
Blogs by Media Type
A blog can also be classified by means of the different media types used to build its content such as videos, photos or sketches. As you might expect, these blogs are called video blogs (vlogs), photo blogs and sketch blogs.
On a video blog the posts are actually videos embedded into a web page along with some text describing the content of the video. TV and news channels, radio stations and journalists often use of vlogs to bring a greater level of interactivity to their viewers and listeners.
A photo blog consists of photos with supporting text-based descriptions, tags and categories. You can find photo blogs by not only professional photographers but everyday people that just enjoy taking pictures and sharing them with the world. Millions of users use sites like Flickr and Fotolog as a their preferred photo blogging service.
Another type of blog by media type is the sketch blog, which usually consists of hand drawn sketches. The posts on a sketch blog generally consist of scanned copies of sketches with a supporting description for each. Often you'll also find artwork on sketch blogs that were touched up or even radically altered using applications such as Adobe Photoshop. Below you'll find a short list of some of the more popular sketch blogs.
On the next page we'll take a look at various blogging services and tools that will help you get started as a blogger including: Blogger; WordPress; Movable Type; TypePad; Tumblr; Posterous; getting noticed; RSS; plagiarism; and earning revenue with your blog.