Blogs

A blog, short for Web log, is a powerful two-way Web-based communication tool.A blog is a Web site where people can enter their thoughts,ideas, suggestions, and comments. Blog entries, also known as blog posts, are made in journal style and are usually displayed in reverse chronological order.A blog entry might contain text, images, or links to other blogs and Web pages, as well as to other media related to its topic. Most blogs are primarily textual, but some focus on photographs (photoblog or photolog),videos (videoblog or vlog), or audio (podcast). A blog written from a mobile device such as a pocket PC, mobile phone, or PDA is called an mblog, and real-time blogging is known as liveblogging.

A blog can be private (internal to an organization) or public (open to anyone). Blog entries typically consist of a title, body, permalink (permanent link), post date, comments, category or tag, trackback (the ability to notify another blog that you added a post to your blog that s related to a post or comment on its blog), or pingback (the ability to request notification when somebody links to one of your posts).

The blogosphere (or blogsphere) encompasses all blogs as a community or social network. Many blogs are interconnected, some more densely than others, as bloggers who read other blog entries link to them and reference them in their own blogs. Bloggers also post comments on each others blog entries.A blogroll is a blogge's list of links to other blogs or Web sites that he or she reads.

Blogs have several unique characteristics that together distinguish them from other forms of electronic communications such as email, instant messaging, short message service, and multimedia message service (Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, Naked Conversations: Blogs Are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers,Wiley, 2006). For example, anyone can publish a blog post easily and cheaply through a Web interface, and any reader can place a comment on a blog post.These blog posts and comments are instantly available on the Web.

In addition, blogs are easy to find.You can search for blog posts by various criteria, including subject and author, using blog search engines such as Technorati (http://www.technorati.com) and Feedster (http://www.feedster.com). Some of these search engines can track the interconnections between bloggers and rank blogs depending on how many sites link to them.

Another unique characteristic of blogs is that a blog post can link to other blog posts, so interesting posts travel from site to site.And, through these linked blogs, people with similar interests can build relationships and form communities.

Finally, blog readers can syndicate blogs, so if you subscribe to a blog, you will know when it is updated, saving you search time. You can subscribe to several blogs, and you can get free home delivery of blog entries to your personalized Web page or email software.

Many businesses use blogs to connect and engage with customers, employees, and the general public. Each day, users create 100,000 new blogs and make 1.3 million entries (Dave Sifry, State of the Blogosphere, Technorati Weblog, Oct. 2006, http://technorati.com/weblog/2006/11/161.html).

Comments