All about blogs

So, what’s a “blog”? The term “blog” is short for weblog. A blog is a website which is organized as a series of news items in reverse chronological order. Blogs are often maintained by individuals, but there are also group blogs, and companies are starting to have blogs, too.

• Blog items are said to be “posted” when they are created and displayed on a blog.
• “Blogging” is the activity of posting items to a blog.
• A “blogger” is someone who has a blog, or who posts to blogs.
• The “blogosphere” is collectively the universe of all bloggers, which is expanding rapidly :)

Blog items generally have a "permalink", which is a web URL that will always be valid to display the item. The links between blog items are as valuable as the commentary around them.

Blogs often allow “comments”. A comment may be posted regarding any item by a visitor to the blog, and all posted comments are public. Bloggers can comment on comments, as can other visitors. This enables a nice dialog between the author(s) of the blog and their visitors.

Most blogs support “RSS feeds”. An RSS feed is a file which has a table-of-contents of the most recent items posted on the blog. RSS feeds are displayed by software programs called “feed readers” (or sometimes “aggregators”). A feed reader can “subscribe” to a large number of website simultaneously. At some interval, typically once per hour or so, the feed reader checks each site’s feed to see if anything new has been posted. By using a feed reader it is possible to monitor the contents of a large number of websites very easily. RSS feeds are not just for blogs, a large number of news and feature websites publish feeds as well, such as CNN, the New York Times, CNET, Yahoo, etc. Most likely any websites you monitor for news or information on a daily basis have a feed, and can be easily monitored using a feed reader instead of surfing to the website.

If you’re interested in experimenting with a feed reader, I recommend FeedDemon ($30) or SharpReader (free). There is also a feed reader named NewsGator ($30) which runs as an Outlook plug-in, so you can read website feeds right alongside your email. (For Mac users, I recommend NetNewsWire ($40) or Shrook ($20). These programs all allow a free trial period and are easily uninstalled if you decide you don’t want them.

Even if you’re not a blog aficionado you’ll find feed readers save you a lot of time!

Finally, many blogs support “trackbacks”. A trackback is a notification that another website somewhere has linked to a particular item. Viewing trackbacks allows visitors to follow a “discussion” taking place between several bloggers which are linking back and forth to each other.