What is blogging?

First things first, where did the word blog come from?

The term blog actually came from the word weblog. It is a website where various entries are created and made similar to a diary ora journal, but they are displayed in a chronological yet reverse order.

What blogs basically are is that they provide different commentaries online as well as news on particular topics. Thesecould include politics, food or any opinion voiced by the blogger in a fashion that is similar to a personal journal.

An average blog contains a mixture of text, links to other website blogs or websites, images and other forms of media that could be related to the blog topic. Although most blogs are more text-heavy, others also offer photographs (also known as a photoblog), video log (or vlog) or audio.

The word blog is also used as a verb which means to add or maintain content.

The origin of blogs

Believe it or not, blogs were first called chronicles, diaries and even perzines. There were even e-mail lists as well as BBS orbulletin board systems which are also considered as predecessors of the blog.

One of the early bloggers

A man named Brad Fitzpatrick was one of the early bloggers in the internet. However, these early bloggers never called themselves bloggers but journalists and diarists. Some even called themselves and even coined the term escribitionists.

The precursor to the blog that most know now was updated frequently by Kibo. This early form of blog was a personally made website that expressed its views in a manner that is tongue-in-cheek.

Early forms of weblog were actually just components that were updated manually. But when the tools that would facilitate the creation, maintenance of articles for the web became a lot more accessible to the larger population, this resulted in the mainstream utilization of blogs.

Where the term "blog" came from

"Weblog" was first coined by a man named Jorn Barger back in 1997. The word "blog' was then created by Peter Merholz who then separated the words "we" and "blog" on the sidebar of his own blog back in 1999.

One of the sites that helped blogging become more popular was Xanga. Back in 1997, there were only 100 online diaries in its site. However, by the year 2005 there were more than fifty million blogs in Xanga..

Political blogs

It was in the year 2004 when blogs were used as a forum to voice out political opinion that political candidates used them as tools to reach out and be "near" to their constituents and even form opinions. This was shown when both the 2004 Republican and Democratic parties used blogs as a part of their arsenal.

Blog types

There exists a video log, a photoblog as well as a linklog (a blog that is composed primarily of links). There are also blogs written with the use of a cell phone or any other mobile device such as a PDA, these are called moblogs.

The blog entry anatomy

A blog basically consists of a title (usually the headline), a body (where the post's content is found), permalink (the URL of the full article), post date (the date as well as the time when the blog was posted).

Other optional blog entries include the comments page, the categories (various subjects which a particular entry discuss), the trackback (the links to the sites that the entry refers to).

All in all, blogging is one way to voice out comments as well as link up to other similarly themed blog sites or individuals.