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What is Blogging ?
The term ‘blog’ comes from “Web log”
and can be defined as a website where entries are made in a
journal style and exhibited in a reverse sequential order. A
blog usually gives comments, opinions and information on a
specific topic that can range from sports, politics, television
programs, fashion, cuisines and cinema. In some cases, a blog
acts as a personal online diary! A typical blog will consist of
text along with images; links to other blogs; web pages and
media related to its topic. Generally blogs only contain textual
matter; however, in some cases focus is given on photographs
(called photoblog), videos (called vlog) and audio (called
podcasting). In 2004, Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, acknowledged
and declared ‘blog’ as “the word of the year”! According to a
study Technorati, a blog search engine, was monitoring almost 60
million blogs till November 2006,
The journey of blog – from 1994 to
2006
One of the earliest blogger was Justin Hall who started blogging
in 1994, when he was a student of Swarthmore College. In the
earlier years blogging was generally restricted to writers who
called themselves diarists and journalists – in other words blog
was one form of online diary. From early 2001, blogging stated
gaining popularity amongst the web users. Trendy and popular
American blogs like Andrew Sullivan's AndrewSullivan.com, Ron
Gunzburger's Politics1.com, Taegan Goddard's Political Wire and
Jerome Armstrong's MyDD were launched in 2001. The importance of
blogging was slowly understood and accepted as established
schools of Journalism started studying about blogging and noting
the differences between blogging and traditional journalism. In
2002, Markos Moulitsas Zúniga launched DailyKos, which is now
one of the most used blogs in the Internet. From 2004, blogs
became extremely popular as it became a platform for
politicians, electronic media or news services and contesting
candidates. Politicos, who were not actively involved in any
active campaigns, used the blog to bond with constituents.
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Today blogs have become a vital
source of news; a lot of information was gathered about the
Tsunami in 2004 from Medecins Sans Frontieres that used SMS text
messaging to report from affected areas in Sri Lanka and
Southern India. During ‘Hurricane Katrina’ which caused huge
destruction in August 2005, blogs like the Interdictor and
Gulfsails, were able to provide a great deal of information that
was not covered by the main stream media.
So what is the reason behind the
popularity of blogs ?
According to researchers there are two possible reasons that led
to the popularity of blogs – through citations or commendations
and through affiliations (blogroll). It takes some time for the
blogs to gain acceptance through blogrolls; however, permalinks
can heighten its popularity much faster as web users from all
around the world view the content and consider it valuable and
noteworthy in some cases.
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Blogs are also given rankings –
Technorati, a blog search engine ranks them based on the number
of incoming links and Alexa Internet based on the web hits of
Alexa Toolbar users. According to Technorati the ‘most
linked-to’ blog till August 2006 is that of Xu Jinglei, the well
known Chinese actress (reports said that it received more than
50 million page views) and the ‘most read’ blog as a group
written Boing Boing.
Influence of blogs
Blogs have a great deal of influence on minority languages. It
has been successful in drawing together speakers, learners and
experts to reach out to those small sections of society - this
is particularly so with blogs in Gaelic languages, whose
creators can be found as far away from traditional Gaelic areas
as Kazakhstan and Alaska.
What are the popular blog tools ?
There are an array of possible options and configurations
available. Every new blog publisher faces the problem of
selecting, installing and configuring blog software. While all
blog software involves some amount of learning, the amount of
customization possible means that selecting the right software
is important for a quicker, easier start. In some cases
additional modules and plug-ins can add functionality that is
not available in the default installation. Here are some of the
most commonly used blogging tools with a brief description of
each.
Blogger is one of the oldest
blogging tools and has millions of users. It promises customers
blogging within 10 minutes of coming to the site. This is one of
the simplest tools available and is freely available to
prospective bloggers; nonetheless, Blogger has an impressive
array of features.
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There are a couple of issues that
plague Blogger’s offerings: lack of post categorization and the
need to know HTML and cascading style sheets to make custom
changes to the templates provided, though it does provide some
attractive skins to choose from. As a special feature, Blogger
allows to FTP the files generated for one blog to another web
site. Used together with customization of the Blogger template,
this fairly unique functionality means that your readers may
never realize that you are using Blogger. If speed of getting to
blog is the priority, Blogger is the best solution possible.
Typepad has proved very
popular with journalistic blogging efforts. Typepad features are
divided into three levels: Basic, Plus, and Pro. Design
customization is extremely limited at the Basic level and only
fully accessible at the Pro level. If you want to run a group
blog, or give some people editor access and others publishing
access, you must go with the Pro account.
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Typepad has a built-in feature
called Typelists that allows building lists, associating each item
with a URL. These lists can be added with a minimum of fuss to the
left- or right-hand column of your blog – no need to touch the
templates. Use a Typelist for your current reading list, links to
other blogs, or links to new stories.
Blogware
blog software package is a robust system with a great selection of
the top blogging tools. Blogware, like Typepad, can be difficult to
customize, even for an experienced HTML jockey. However, it also
provides a fair number of options within the administration
interface which allows layouts and styles to be set up without
getting into the templates. Blogware also permits uploading of files
via FTP to the server where the blog is hosted. If the objective is
to create a blog that has a few non-blog pages, this is especially
helpful.
WordPress is another solid and a
powerful blogging system ideal for budget publishers who don't want
to give up any functionality. WordPress' built-in blog-roll
management tool allows categorizing blogs, setting criteria for the
display order of the links, and turning off and on visibility.
WordPress promises a 5-minute installation, but for that some
familiarity with uploading files to a Web server and using an FTP
client is necessary.
Movable Type is perhaps the best
known of all blogging software tools. Built by a husband and wife
team, the system is powerful but not simple to install or use.
Although it has been used to create Web sites that don't look
entirely like blogs, doing so requires quite a bit of code tweaking.
As a blogging tool alone, Movable Type has nearly every required
feature and continues to add more. Many of their users are highly
technical themselves, and have created additional plug-ins that can
be added to the standard installation. You might say that Movable
Type is the blogging package chosen by bloggers who care what other
bloggers think, and who notice and appreciate other Movable Type
blogs.
Expression Engine is not one of
the most well-known, but can surely be considered on of the most
powerful tool available to bloggers. Technically, Expression Engine
is more of a content management system than just a blogging tool.
Although it can do much more than just blogging it continues to have
all of the blogging bells and whistles: moblogging, Trackbacks,
archiving and so on. In addition to the usual set of blogging
functionality, Expression Engine has incorporated modules for image
galleries and a mailing list. Uniquely, you can crop, resize, and
rotate images in the Expression Engine photo gallery tool, in
addition to batch processing a set of images.
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