Blog (or Weblog)

Blog FAQ & USER GUIDE

What's a blog?

            Introduction.  A blog is a personal diary. A daily pulpit. A chronological list of links to stuff that interests you, interspersed with information, editorializing and personal asides. A political soapbox. Your own private thoughts. Your blog is whatever you want it to be.

        There are millions of them, in all shapes and sizes, and there are no real rules. In simple terms, a blog is a web site, where you write stuff on an ongoing basis. New stuff shows up at the top, so your visitors can read what's new. Then they comment on it or link to it or email you. Or not.

        Some suggest that a good weblog is updated often, in a kind of real-time improvisation, with pointers to interesting events, pages, stories and happenings elsewhere on the Web. Since blogs were launched, more than eight years ago, they have reshaped the web, impacted politics, shaken up journalism, and enabled millions of people to have a voice and connect with others.

            Personal publishing communities. According to Dave Winer,* there is a perennial debate on what a weblog is. He goes on to suggest that a weblog is an effort in personal publishing communities, which he breaks down as follows:

  1. A weblog is personal -- it's done by a person, not an organization. You see a personality. It's not washed-out and normed-up, the bizarre shows through. That's why weblogs are interesting.
  2. A weblog is on the Web -- it doesn't get printed, it can be updated frequently, it's very low cost to produce, and it can be accessed through a Web browser.
  3. A weblog is published -- words flow through templates, the process is automated, the writer and designer are elevated. Publishing technology applies to weblogs.
  4. And finally, a weblog is part of communities. No weblog stands alone, they are relative to each other and to the world in which we live.

            At Sun City Anthem. Your own blogging efforts here at Sun City Anthem will be part of two such communities: the weblog community and part of the Sun City Anthem Community or other community of common interest. The same can be said of most weblogs that gain audiences, they connect people together using the Web through common interests.

          Additional information. For a more extensive article on this subject, visit Weblog from the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

*Dave Winer, an inveterate blogger from 1997, is with the Berkman Center for Internet Society at Harvard Law School, at Weblogs at Harvard Law, www.blogs.law.harvard.edu, and he blogs at Scripting News, http://scripting.com/