Welcome to my presentation on blogs and blogging. This is meant to be an overview of the development of weblogs and an introduction to the ways you might use a weblog. I welcome your comments and suggestions - send me a message. Blogs are frequently updated web pages on which authors post short comments about news items, interesting websites, their thoughts and more. Blogs are part of a nanopublishing revolution that allows individuals to express themselves to the world. Blogs are easy to create, easy to maintain and fun to read.
In the early days of the Internet, each new page was a cause for celebration. The early pioneers watched in excitement as the network grew, and they wanted to keep people informed about this growth. In 1992, Internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee created the first What’s New page; later, another pioneer, Marc Andreesen, put up a similar page. Each had hotlinks to the new pages springing up on the Net.
As the Internet grew and the World Wide Web came about, other programmers created hand-coded pages with their recommendations for surfing the Net – they “filtered” the Net. Justin Hall started his filter log in 1994. In 1998, Jorn Barger coined the term “weblog.”
Soon, says weblogger and author Rebecca Blood, these “link-driven sites” were very popular, and webloggers became a community. Each weblog included a list of similar filter sites.
In 1999, websites Blogger and Pitas began to offer a simpler way to create a weblog. These hosted services allowed any person to easily sign up, create a blog, and write numerous postings. All without having to know HTML.
Since then, millions of weblogs have been created. The term is now pronounced web-log or we-blog, or shorted to blog. And these blogs evolved into personal diaries or journals. Many journal-blogs still do include a list of other similar sites. This is a called a blogroll.
Other blog software programs and services include LiveJournal, Movable Type, TypePad, TextPattern, Radio Userland and pMachine. Some of these programs are simple to use while others are more complicated to install. These programs include many powerful publishing tools, and are often called content management systems. The systems allow any individual to be a publisher on a global scale. This new type of publishing is called microcontent, thin media or nanopublishing.