What is a blog?

This question may be silly to some. You might even comment to express your annoyance at such a “silly post” by me. I won’t be insulted. Nor will I hold it against you. I am still writing this post.

Why?

Because, every once in a while I get an email from an interested reader asking me this exact question. What is a blog? Why do I keep referring to my website as a “blog”?

So, heck, I thought I’d throw it out there.

A blog is usually defined as a website whose entries ( or posts ) are arranged in a chronological manner - latest posts first, followed by the older posts.

Blogs are usually written by a single person although recently we have seen quite a few blogs run by a team of bloggers.

In general, blogs express the blogger’s points of view. They also reflect the blogger’s points of interest. Some blogs concentrate on a narrow niche - money making, domaining, pet keeping, funny stuff, flowers - whatever. Other blogs look at things from a wider perspective.

Blogs are usually characterized by a couple of physical attributes. A blog has an RSS feed which allows users to syndicate blog content via their RSS readers. A blog enables visitor commenting unless commenting is explicitly switched off. A blog has a blog archive showcasing all the past posts written by the blogger. A blog provides easy categorization of blog posts and pages. Bloggers usually include a Blogroll - which is a list of links the blogger exchanges with other bloggers.

Blogs can be written on various blogging platforms of which Wordpress is the most popular. Wordpress is an opensource software which is free to use by anyone ( under it’s terms and conditions ). Because Wordpress is so widely used and accepted, developers create new Wordpress plugins on almost a daily basis. These plugins are usually free too.

There, that about sums up the simple definition of a blog.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 27th, 2008 at 10:04 pm and is filed under Domain News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.