Have you ever kept a diary? I guess most of us have. Keeping a diary is like keeping a log of your life; things, happenings and experiences. A log is just a series of events against a timeline. So, in a diary, you note down a series of events that happened during the day and also note down the time those events took place.

A blog is like an online diary. The person who supplies the content and maintains the blog is called a blogger. In a blog, just as in a diary, you publish content (text, photos, audios or videos) and also note down when they were published. A blog is however different from a diary in that diaries are mostly personal while blogs can take various forms like personal, corporate, content specific, etc (never mind, we will talk about all these later). One striking nature about a blog is that by default, the information is presented in reverse chronology. This means that the most recent information is at the top while the old ones are at the bottom. It is just like putting eggs in a basket. The first eggs go to the bottom while the recent ones find themselves at the top of the basket.

As a diary is a log of events recorded on paper, a bog also is a log of events recorded on the web. The initial name for a blog was weblog (web log) but was later changed to blog for the sole purpose of simplicity simplicity.

The act of publishing and managing information on a blog is called blogging, and a person engaged in such an act is called a blogger.

A unit of information being submitted in a blog by the blog’s author is called a post, while that submitted by a guest is called a guest post. Generally, the act of submitting information to a blog is called posting. So, it is right to say john posted information twice to his blog today, or john made two posts today. John has created a new blog and will start posting on Monday.

In most cases, the public is allowed to submit their opinions on blog posts. Such opinions are called comments, and the blog author may choose whether to moderate them or not. People who comment on blog posts are called commenters or commentators. Honestly, I don’t know which of these words is the standard. Commenters can reply to others’ comments, thereby making a blog some sort of a community.

The virtual community of all blogs and bloggers makes up what is called the blogging atmosphere or simply blogosphere. In the blogosphere, one can find blogs of varying subjects, being owned by bloggers of varying skills from NooBlogger to Probloggers.

We shall be looking at more terms related to blogs and blogging in future posts.
Our next post will be dealing with a breakdown of the type of things we can blog about.

Popularity: 4% [?]