HISTORY OF BLOGS

HISTORY OF BLOGS

Blogs have become an integral part of online culture. Merriam Webster dictionary currently defines a blog as “a website that contains online personal reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks, videos, and photographs provided by the writer.” According to the two articles under review we learn that Blogs have been around since 1994. A Swarthmore-College undergrad, Justin Hall, who created a site called links.net in January 1994, is supposed to be the founder of Blogging.

The first person to use the word blog was Peter Merholz in 1999, and he derived it from the longer weblog, which was coined by John Barger in 1997. Those days a web log or blog was basically an online life log or journal.

A blog is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (“posts”). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order, so that the most recent post appears first, at the top of the web page.

The early 2000s saw a few significant events within the blogging realm. The early 2000s showed the first signs of a rise in political blogs. Then came video blogging with the launch of Youtube in 2005. The start of life in 140 characters (or less) began in March 2006, when Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey sent out the world’s first tweet.Until 2009, blogs were usually the work of a single individual occasionally of a small group, and often covered a single subject or topic. In the 2010s, “multi-author blogs” (MABs) have developed, with posts written by large numbers of authors and sometimes professionally edited. MABs from newspapers, other media outlets, universities, think tanks, advocacy groups, and similar institutions account for an increasing quantity of blog traffic. The rise of Twitter and other “micro blogging” systems helps integrate MABs and single-author blogs into the news media. 

CHARACTERISTIC OF GOOD BLOG

It is easy to create a blog. The most popular blogging platform are‘blogger” and “WordPress”. There can be three kinds of blogs or media content in the blogs:

Written content

 Audio
Video

In some cases, we can add still image to this list, like in Instagram.

Some of the features of the good Blogs are:-

• Blog posts or articles are presented in a chronological order.
• There is regular updation of the contents.
• There is provision for providing comments and discussions.
• Blog posts are archived by date, category, author, tags and sub-categories.
• RSS feeds for posts or comments.
• Articles providing in depth information and knowledge to visitors are important feature of a successful blog.

A good blog is the one which is updated on a regular basis, has visual appeal, in simple and correct language and putting the opinion and points in concise and logical manner. It is also important that quality content,which is relevant to the blog, is always given priority. There are various guidelines for writing blog posts. One should also have basic SEO knowledge which will help to write quality contents.

CONCLUSION

Vlogs and podcasts have taken on a bigger role in the blogosphere, with a lot of bloggers opting to use primarily multimedia content. Services that cater to these kinds of posts (like Tumblr and Posterous) are likely to keep growing in popularity. Since blogs are about communication and with communication technology evolving very fast, we will find blogging in a wide sense continue and grow more towards being mobile, graphics oriented. It will continue to a major player in online culture.