Blog is another word for weblog.
A weblog is a website that is like a diary or journal. Most people can create a blog and then write on that
blog. Bloggers (a word for people who write on blogs) often write about their opinions and thoughts. A blog containing video material is called a video blog or video
log, usually shortened to vlog.
When a person writes on a blog, what
they write is in the form of a post, which is a single piece of writing on
the blog. Posts often include linksto other websites.
Blogs can have one or more writers.
If they have more than one writer, they are often called community blogs, team
blogs, or group blogs.
How blogs
work
On many blogs, the person reading
the posts can leave comments, which are notes in which a person says what they
think about the blog post. This makes blogs good for discussion — if someone writes something that someone
else does not believe to be true, someone else can fix it by writing a comment
on that blog or on their own blog. Someone else cannot change what the post
says, but the writer of the post can. Not all blog posts need to be talked
about or fixed. But if there are a lot of people interested in a topic, they
can start a discussion on the original blog, on their own blogs, or both. These
people can discuss a topic or their point of view.
Very often, a community blog or
group blog will shrink into a small group of bloggers (writers) who know and
trust each other, called a creative network. That
kind of community blog will also have a larger group of people, a social network, who only read (and maybe comment on) the blog.
Some blogs have scoring (ranking) of posts that makes these networks more
solid, so that postings that people like the most are shown first or in a way
that is easier to find.
Often people have their own blog and
make an RSS feed to it. When blogs have RSS feeds, other programs, called content
aggregators, can put postings from all the blogs that a person likes
in one place. Many people find it easier to read all the new posts from blogs
they like in one place, through RSS, instead of going to each site one at a
time.
Some experts think that community
blogs, and some groups of individual (one-person) blogs that talk about similar
topics, have a power structure like
that inside a political party. These
experts think that a clique (a small, exclusive group of
people) will control discussions by choosing when someone has "won"
an argument, and when a matter is decided. But an advantage of blogs is that
even people outside that clique can comment on the original discussion.
