What is a blog?
I guess the simplest and most obvious launching point for my research is to ask the question ‘what is a blog?’. Tim Jarrett (2003) provides a comprehensive definition of a weblog:
“Blogs are personally published documents on the web, with attribution and date, collected in a single place, generally published with a static structure to facilitate incoming links from other sources, and updated with some regularity and frequency from every few days to several times daily. Blogs are generally understood to be subjective, with no authority other than that lent by their author generally. Many blogs consist of links and commentary—comments about something or some entity with a web presence, links to enable the reader to discover the original object being commented on and explore it for themselves. Bloggers leave link trails, hyperlinks back to the subjects of their commentary, and the link trails enable others to go beyond the blogger’s subjective opinion and find the original source so that they can evaluate it and form their own opinions.”
In simple terms it is a web log – an online log of events or points of interest concerning the individual or group who authors the blog. Blogs are not simply diaries; they are interactive logs with links, communities, audiences who can interact with the blogs through commenting and cross-referencing in their own blogs. Blogs are a form of media that are at once personal and public. There are blogs for corporations’ news, for advertising, for snippets of entertainment information, for journalism… and the list of uses continues to grow.
“Blogs are personally published documents on the web, with attribution and date, collected in a single place, generally published with a static structure to facilitate incoming links from other sources, and updated with some regularity and frequency from every few days to several times daily. Blogs are generally understood to be subjective, with no authority other than that lent by their author generally. Many blogs consist of links and commentary—comments about something or some entity with a web presence, links to enable the reader to discover the original object being commented on and explore it for themselves. Bloggers leave link trails, hyperlinks back to the subjects of their commentary, and the link trails enable others to go beyond the blogger’s subjective opinion and find the original source so that they can evaluate it and form their own opinions.”
In simple terms it is a web log – an online log of events or points of interest concerning the individual or group who authors the blog. Blogs are not simply diaries; they are interactive logs with links, communities, audiences who can interact with the blogs through commenting and cross-referencing in their own blogs. Blogs are a form of media that are at once personal and public. There are blogs for corporations’ news, for advertising, for snippets of entertainment information, for journalism… and the list of uses continues to grow.
Blogs allow for a new type of media that does not leave the audience passive, but allows response and voice to those who might otherwise not be heard in public.
The history of weblogging is surprisingly well documented, with a number of sites (often blogs!) referencing some of the earliest instances of blogs and their rise to popularity. Some of the authors of such histories are Dave Winer and Rebecca Blood and a good comprehensive history of blogs can be found at wikipedia, which acknowledges a number of different influences and pioneers, and also provides a good general overview of what blogs are and some of the jargon used in and about blogs and blogging. One independent filmmaker has even made a ‘blogumentry’ – a documentary about blogging history and the ‘blogosphere’.
Interestingly, perhaps the first blog appeared at the dawn of the cyberage, with CERN and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) both logging new internet sites as they appeared in the early 1990s. Archives for these first web logs can be found here and here respectively. Perhaps one of the earliest personal web pages was created by Justin Hall, who began blogging about his life in 1994.
In 1999, a number of sites including Pitas, Blogger, and LiveJournal began offering free weblog hosting which was a major catalyst in the explosion of blogging popularity. The popularity of this medium of information posting has exploded in the last couple of years, and continues to be seen as a viable medium of expression both for personal and commercial purposes. Pew Internet (2005) conducted a study that showed that 8 million American adults say they have created blogs and that blog readership in America has jumped 58% in 2004 and now stands at 27% of internet users. However, 62% of American do not know what a blog is.
Despite the millions of blogs existent on the internet, only a fraction of these are actually regularly updated. A survey undertaken by Perseus Development Company in 2003 suggested that two-thirds of blogs had been updated in the previous two months, and there are 1.09 million blogs which have never updated past the first blog.
I find it very interesting that blogging has even developed to the point where it has a history/histories, considering a few months ago I wasn’t even aware of their existence, beyond a general idea that people are writing online journals out there in cyberspace. There is clearly something appealing about blogging and reading blogs which has catapulted its popularity in internet culture. I will look in further detail in later posts about why blogs are becoming popular and how they function in internet culture.
In 1999, a number of sites including Pitas, Blogger, and LiveJournal began offering free weblog hosting which was a major catalyst in the explosion of blogging popularity. The popularity of this medium of information posting has exploded in the last couple of years, and continues to be seen as a viable medium of expression both for personal and commercial purposes. Pew Internet (2005) conducted a study that showed that 8 million American adults say they have created blogs and that blog readership in America has jumped 58% in 2004 and now stands at 27% of internet users. However, 62% of American do not know what a blog is.
Despite the millions of blogs existent on the internet, only a fraction of these are actually regularly updated. A survey undertaken by Perseus Development Company in 2003 suggested that two-thirds of blogs had been updated in the previous two months, and there are 1.09 million blogs which have never updated past the first blog.
I find it very interesting that blogging has even developed to the point where it has a history/histories, considering a few months ago I wasn’t even aware of their existence, beyond a general idea that people are writing online journals out there in cyberspace. There is clearly something appealing about blogging and reading blogs which has catapulted its popularity in internet culture. I will look in further detail in later posts about why blogs are becoming popular and how they function in internet culture.
posted by Alida van Klink @ 3:16 PM
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