One of my friend told me: “Fred, I want you to show me what a blog is”. More and more people are like him, they want to know what his blogging. They know the word but they need to know what it signify. Then it is what I done, giving him an overview of what is a blog and the main services that exist to support them. Then, when I came back from the rendezvous, I asked to myself: Fred, after one year of blogging, what is for me a blog? There we go.
The name blog came from the two words: web log. Technically a blog is nothing more than a website with a certain typical layout and functionalities. Then, technically, what a blog is for me is nothing else than a web page template. This is a common layout used by millions of people. There is nothing new here.
Then, if a blog is technically nothing new, why people talk about them? Good question. We could try to define a blog by his usage, by checking how people are using their blogs.
A blog is used for many purposes:
- To share daily adventures of an individual person
- For the marketing of a new product or a whole company
- To communicate with people that work in the same field of expertise
- To share ideas
- To manage knowledge
- To start discussion
- To inform about a specific subject or domain
- To create new contacts with other people
Yes but people are using the web like this since his beginning, no? Yes. Then, my question remains, why people talk about blogs?
Personally, I see blogging as a philosophy, a way to do things. What makes blogs, blogs, is the way people are using them, the bloggers community. This community is drive by an etiquette: the blogging etiquette. It is that etiquette that makes blogs, blogs. All the interactions between bloggers form the Blogsphere. Then, I could now define a blog by a website that follows the blogging etiquette by adding texts to the Blogsphere in hope to start a conversation with other users of that Blogsphere.
This is my vision of blogs and blogging after 1 year.
You, what are blogs for you? What is blogging? What make someone a blogger?
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