What's this BLOG thing then?

Everywhere you turn these days everyone is talking about BLOGGING!
What is it you may ask yourself? Well here's the answer...

Whats does it mean?
It's a shortened term derived from the original phrase "WEB LOG".

WEB LOG = weB LOG = BLOG

Well that doesn't exactly answer your question now does it!
What it does tell you is that once upon a time BLOG's were called WEB LOGS!
So now the question has changed... what is a WEB LOG ?

What does it do?
The simplest way to explain a Web Log would be to compare it to a diary. An online diary.
The main difference being that rather than keeping it stashed away under your pillow you take all the contents and publish them to the world with the assistance of the World Wide Web.

Contents of blogs are entirely dependent upon the author. Some people do infact keep blogs as accurate diaries, others use them to broadcast their opinions, some blogs may be maintained by more than one person perhaps to publish news for a club or society. Some companies even publish blogs online.

Whatever the topic of discussion it is universally agreed that blogs are an informal method of sharing opinions and information to others. It is necessary to include the term informal because it's exactly that. The formal equivalent would be an online journal which is a whole different ball park.

So where did blogs come from?
It has been noted that the recording of information for electronic publication goes back as far as a moderated newsgroup way back in 1983!

In January 1994, a student by the name of Justin Hall, began writing a blog (Justin's links) that to this date is still live and maintained! Many of the sources in my research recognise Justin and credit him as one of the earliest bloggers.

Nearly four years later at the end of 1997, Jorn Barger, an online diarist coined the name "Weblog" for "Logging on the Web". Approximately 18 months later Programmer Peter Merholz is recognised for shortening “Weblog” to “Blog”.

It is later in 1999 that marks the start of the blogging revolution, nearly sixteen years after that initial moderated newsgroup! A very slow start indeed, especially in the era of modern technology! This was the year that saw the beginning of free blog creation facilities being made publicly available on the web.

The first of which was Blogger.com - The very site you are reading this blog from now!

Today it would be virtually impossible to measure the number of online blogs. At a guess I would say there could be as many as a billion blogs floating around in cyberspace if not more!

Anyway, I hope you have enjoyed this "informal" blog into the world of blogging!

Please come back soon to see how I am progressing with the course!


Resources
Justin's Links
(http://www.links.net)

New York Times -
(http://nymag.com/news/media/15971/)

Wikipedia - Blog
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog)

Wikipedia - History of Blogging Timeline
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_blogging_timeline)