Blogging

Simple web publishing... more than "diaries" and quite a meal!


Creative Commons licensed photo by flickr user \"llnt01\"

Contents

  1. Blogging
    1. About Weblogs
    2. A Blog Buffet
    3. Blogs in Education
    4. Creating A Blog

About Weblogs

"Blog" is short for "weblog" the action of "logging" one's activities/ideas on a web site. Merriam-Webster selected "blog" as its 2004 word of the year (see the story from BBC)-- their definition being:

Blog noun [short for Weblog] (1999) : a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer

However, this definition too seems limiting (Google is full of other attempts). A key aspect of blogs is that it provides a web interface to publish a site, the tools are easy for a non technical person to use, and most offten, the content publish is organized in reverse chronologicla order (so that the newest published items are at the top of the site). The topics of blogs are usually of topical interest, ranging from teen angst to hobbies to technical specialties to politics to gardening to ...

More About Blogs
* What We're Doing When We Blog Meg Hourihan
* weblogs: a history and perspective Rebecca Blood
* The History of Weblogs Dave Winer
* an introduction to weblogs d2r
* Exploding the diary myth Corante: Strange Attractor

The October 2005 Blog Herald estimates the total number of blogs worldwide as 100 million. Forrester research suggests that 10 percent of internet users read blogs once or more a week. Techorati tracks 20 million blogs and estimates in October 2005 the number is doubling every 5 months.

What are all this millions of people blogging about?

A Blog Buffet

We've selected just a few out of 100 million for you to quickly taste. Explore a few quickly and post some notes to your Wiki page about what you saw See HowTo for instructions on editing your pages. You may want to right-click (Windows) or hold-click (Mac) and then select the option to open the link in a new window. That way you can keep these links in view)

Sites the lists more blogs (no accounting for taste!):

Blogs in Education

Creating A Blog

There are many ways and numerous web tools for creating and managing blogs- many of them require technical knowledge or access to your own web server. The easiest way to get started is to use some of the free services that allow you to create your own blog, and these sites will host it for you:

  • Blogger Now owned by Google, one of the easist ways to instantly create a blog, simple interface and a selection of templates to customize appearance
  • MSN Spaces
  • EduBlogs.org offers free blogs to college faculty and staff
  • LearnerBlogs free blogs for secondary school students
  • UniBlogs free blogs for university/college students


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