According to Wikipedia (2004), a weblog is a web application that contain periodic, reverse chronologically ordered posts on a common webpage (Wikipedia, 2004). The term “weblog� was coined by Jorn Barger in December 1997, not long after blogging emerged onto the Internet mainframe. The first weblog, built by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, also the first website was http://info.cern.ch/ and is now archived (Winer, 2002). From this a community of bloggers sprung up, such as Rebecca’s Pocket and CamWorld, which documented new bloggers and today have a great influence in the blogosphere.
The original weblogs were link-driven sites with a mix of links, commentary and personal thoughts and essays and could only be created by people who already knew how to make a website. Today however, through the introduction of how-to manuals and consumer friendly web tools, even the least tech-savvy people can create a weblog (Blood, 2000).
The role of weblogs has changed dramatically over the past five years. From link based sites to personal blogs with a diary like style to “war blogs� after the invasion of Iraq to breaking, shaping or spinning news stories and finally to their mainstream role in today’s society as tools for outreach and opinion formation by political parties and to promote social models (Wikipedia, 2004).
Blogging in today’s society takes many forms and serves varied purposes for each blogger. There are several types of weblogs that are playing a part in today’s technological society, such as personal blogs, topical blogs, war blogs, political blogs, blogging as a form of journalism and corporate blogs.
According to a recent study by Herring, Scheidt, Bonus and Wright (2004) the most popular form of weblog is the journal, which includes the bloggers thoughts and internal workings. The other types of more popular weblogs are filters – links to world events, online happenings – and k-logs or knowledge blogs which are repositories of information and observations with a typically technological focus (Herring, Kouper, Scheidt and Wright (2004).
The question of where blogging will be in the future is one that has provoked thoughts and ideas from bloggers worldwide.
One blogger commented that when weblogs get really popular the lines between blogs and discussions will blur as will the lines between blogs and emails; many blogs will be event-based and time-limited, e.g. someone’s graduation blog that lasts for a month, and finally the word “blog� will expand to cover any linkable posting where a person gets to speak their mind more than once. “If it’s more permanent than an instant message it will be a blog� (Weinberger, 2003).
Fabrice thinks that in the future, blogging will be used by grand parents to stay in touch with their family, wikis and weblogs will get closer and everyone will have a weblog – like everyone has an email address and an instant messaging ID (Fabrice, 2004).
Over the years blogging has been a major influence in many people’s life and will continue to grow as society becomes more technologically savvy and reliant on time and space.
Hailey Puller 09:18, 25 Oct 2004 (EST)
