You’re reading a post on a blog right now. Chances are you knew that. Like the judge’s description of pornography, you know a blog when you see it.
Nevertheless it’s surprisingly difficult to define what a blog is. After all, blogs range from the personal journal to the professional output of several journalists. Blogs can be about anything; they can have many different (or overlapping) purposes.
If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and swims like a duck…
We define blogs by a set of common features. Not every blog has all of them, but on the whole, if something has most of these, it’s a blog.
What are the common features?
1) Reverse chronological order
New stories (‘posts’) appear on the front page of the blog with the newst post at the top of the page, the next newest under that and so on.
As new posts are added, older posts are pushed further down, and eventually off the front page
All posts will be archived on separate pages, which may be organised by date or topic.
2) Comments
Not all blogs have a space for reader comments, but most do. The ability to get readers involved in the article is one of the things that makes blogging interesting.
3) Permalinks
Because the pages of the blog change like this every post has a unique address which never changes. This address is a “permalink. This allows other people to share links to the specific story, rather than just the front page, or the archive page.
The permalink for this post is: http://porternovelli.typepad.com/pneo/2008/05/what-is-a-blog.html
4) Trackbacks
If I use a permalink to link to another blogger’s post from my blog, my blogging software will notify the author’s blogging software of the article.
An excerpt from my article may even appear in the comments section of the other author’s blog.
The combination of permalinks and trackbacks means that not all reader comments need be written on the blog itself. In fact the conversation can spread over several or even many blogs, as one blogger writes an article citing and commenting on another blogger’s article, reaching new readers who may in turn pick up the thread of the discussion.
5) RSS Feeds
An RSS feed is a text file that contains details about the most recent entries on a website. This file is generated automatically by the blogging software as an author posts a new story.
We’ll talk about RSS elsewhere, but for now, it’s worth knowing that RSS lets readers subscribe to blogs. This means that they don’t have to come to the blog every day to see if there’s a new post: if there is it will be delivered to them.
You can subscribe to this blog’s feed in a number of ways. The easiest way would be to click the link in the right-hand column that says “Subscribe to this blog’s feed” and following the instructions that follow.
Where does the name come from?
Blog is an abbreviation of “Weblog” – which in turn is a condensation of “web log.”
“Log” just means “record”; as in “Captain’s Log”.
What is the blogosphere?
The blogosphere is the word we use to describe all the blogs on the internet and the links between them. Like “Mainstream Media”, it’s sort of a theoretical term.
blog, RSS