A blog short for ‘weblog’ or ‘Blogging’ is a the new modern version of a journal, the only difference being that it is live on the internet and anyone (usually) can read it, blogger.com describes blogging as giving users their own voice on the web. Information contained within a blog ranges from proffessional to private thoughts and have a varied audience ranging through ages. Most blogs on the internet have some form of feedback associated so users do not just read them, but can leave comments with opinions or information on the webpage, so ideas and content can be shared. Blogging can also be compared to content management systems, as they both are very similar, where a content management system is essentially a way to organise and manage data blogging is the same, many of the websites such as this one offer options for continously editing and organizing data.
There are many different ways to blog, websites such as these offer features to quickly publish and style websites using pre-made layouts, but there is software available that allows blogging to be run personally on your own server so it can be customized however you want it. The Blogging system I tested was Thingamablog (http://thingamablog.sourceforge.net/) this application was very easy to use, and allowed me to customize and create blogs very quickly and effortlessly, the program has lots of fancy features that allow users to quickly and easily update their blogs from wherever they are, at work, school or whatever. There are advantages to using this kind of software and approach to operating blog, as they are designed to be user friendly but due to the fact that they have to be installed onto a server and managed suggests that anyone using it would need some computer experience or atleats learn how to do this. With the online Blogging websites and applications it becomes a lot easier for novice users to manage as all of the features are easy to understand and find. In September 2007 blogging website problogger.com issued a survey to find out how popular blogging had become and how long people had been blogging for, there were 2151 responses and results show:
Source: http://www.problogger.net/archives/2007/09/17/how-long-have-you-been-blogging-poll-results/
In comparison with a Content Management System (CMS), blogging is more centered towards what is being written on the website and what the content on the site should be, although it still organises the content in the same way that CMS does it’s primary focus is on giving the user an easy method of adding their information and letting the blogging application or website take care of managing the look and feel of the website including the layout and style which are customizable. These days blogging is extremely popular and there are lots of available systems out there for creating these, some are focused mainly on customizing the look and feel of it like http://www.typepad.com where users can customize the layout of the site using CSS. Or some which are more directly based on the content like http://www.blogger.com and http://www.wordpress.com. Althrough these aren’t the only sorts of websites that offer blogging features, websites like MySpace and Bebo have built in blogging systems, the wide variety on these kinds of websites make them incredibly popular, classing them as advanced content management systems rather than being just for blogging.
Resources:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/webwise/askbruce/articles/browse/blogging_1.shtml
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