Blog - Definiton
A blog is an abbrevation of the phrase/term weblog, which refers to a website, domain or subdomain talking about personal experiences, news, events, sports, technology - almost all categories - maintained by a person or a group of individuals which publish/share their ideas using World Wide Web.
Blogs generally, are short online stories/publications/experiences - you can define lots of similar terms - updated regurarly which can be arranged using text, images, videos, comments, feedbacks, linking, feeds,...etc.
Other terms similar to, you could possibly encounter are:
- Blogger - A person who creates and maintains/keeps a blog updating it in a rgular basis.
- Blogging - A verb used to describe the action of making a blog, for example: "I like blogging".
History of Blogging
The very first blog was created on 1993 by a student of Swarthmore University(Justin Hall) called www.Links.net/. Justin Hall created a web-based online diary where he offered guide tours on the web. Later on, in December 2004 he got awarded from "New York Times Magazine" as the "father of personal blogging".
Blogs at first were called weblogs(Jorn Barger was the first to use this term in 1997) hinting for logging into the World Wide Web. Then the term evaluated to blog by Peter Merholz who separated weblog to we blog and then inlcuding it to his website's sidebar(he did this for joke in 1999).
Blogging started to raise in popularity slowly until blogging software and dedicated blog hosting services became available, giving common people - that is, with no programming abilities - the chance to start their own blog. Blogger.com (now acquired by Google) created in 1999, was the first blogging service allowing common people to sign up and create their blogs under a subdomain (e.g., example-example.blogspot.com).
Then other blogging services such as Movable Type, WordPress, LiveJournal and much more were created establishing a new medium/community for online publishing and advertising.
As millions of blogs were just online and thousand of others launched everyday Blog Search Engines were created to store blogs in their databases and index them for search. Such search engines are Amatomu, Bloglines, BlogScope, IceRocket, Sphere, Technorati( as June 2008 indexes over 100 million blogs).
As of 2002 blogs became a political force because of the ability of bloggers(who are mainly professionals such as journalists for instance) to bring up facts and criticism to different political views and political attendance.
As of 2004 blogs became a mainstream source because of its popularity, dissemination and influence over the mass. This was massively used by politicians/organizations as tools for opinon outreaching, making polls on different crucial cases such as wars, racism or to create online communication with their audience.
In addition, blogs turned into business solutions and marketing service. Hence, in 2003 Google incorporates Google Adsense ads to their blog service Blogger.com.
In a negative view, blogging caused many employers to get fired because of revealing companie's secrets or publishing restricted data on their personal online blogs.
(Mark Jen - was fired after 10 days employment on Google for revealing corporate secrets on his blog,
Jessica Cuttler - was fired from being a congressional assistant, because of blogging out her sex life with her chiefs.)
These examples(there are much more) raised a crucial debate about personal blogging versus employers responsabilities and rights and attracted media consideration. In addition, many similar cases ended up through courts and seu processes.
As of nowadays, blogging has become crucial and fundamental. Many companies, corporations, medias, social networks make available and reserve a special space to their online visitors for blogging as a process of deep review, feedback and communication through out the Internet.