This is another thing im curious about, i see a lot of disscussion on the importance and future of blog's but i don't have a clue what they are, what they do or what they're for.


any insight would be appreciated.

buff

A blog is an online journal. Well thats pretty much the definition for it.

yes the above got it haha... just an online journal, on most you can comment on posts, so sometimes they just turn into discussion forums.

thanks for responding,

but im left wondering what the big deal is? from the little ive read they seemed very important (to the people discussing them anyway). Do they do something special or unique or is the way they do it particularly efficient or useful? Im afraid i don't recall the context of the discussion ive read but the people talking seemed to think they were a significant thing with a big future. If its simply an online journal or another version of a forum i don't understand the intensity of the discussions ive seen.

Well the place i have my blogs is pretty neat! www.xanga.com (http://www.xanga.com) But unfortunately, the site is down. And has been down for about a week now because of some person messing around with their hacking abilities. But you could probably check it out after a couple of days, get an account, and see other people's blog sites there. Maybe you'll see why its seems very special to those people, including I. Hehe. I looove it!

as much as i appreciate your response this question is just out of idle curiosity. im certainly not going to pay anything just to have one of the many trivial questions, floating around my head, answered - id go broke in a week.

Oh hmmm well its all totally free to get an account. Man, i feel like this is a commercial for some odd reason. :bugeye:

im sorry, i got the impression that i could access blog's and blog related information only by becoming a paying customer. When its back on-line i'll give your link a closer look.

There is a lot of discussion about the future of blogs because basicly there are people out there realizing that there is a lot of interest in them right now and if you jump in it you can make a pile of money.

I think we should herd all the blog writers onto a rocket, the USS pretentious F*** and send it to a space station specialy equiped for so they can listen to eachother whine.

i still don't get it, the internet is full of opportunities to pontificate, philosophize or just listen to ones self (or others) talk. What makes blogs unique?

they are different because unlike in a forum where you are one among many, if you have a blog then you are the star of the show, and everyone has to be oh so concerned with what you think about things, or who said what to you or whatever it is you whine about on your blog... in case you couldnt tell these things really irritate me.

random individuals becoming the star of their own little show has been common since personal websites became so easy and inexpensive to make (they're full of not only personal ramblings but photos and any other pointless trivia about themselves they care to share).

i must sound totally thick by now but i still can't see what makes blogs unique.

on of the biggest things with reguards to blogging? the entire reconstruction of mass media as we know it.

Why wait for the Monthly Magazine to get the news when there are daily newspapers? why bother with daily newspapers when their is nightly TV news? Why bother with any of it when you have a fully searchable news information source which is updated and available 24 hours a day? people blogging from cell phones at product release media events; people blogging info from the scenen of an accident; people blogging and commenting on the blog entries; all are removing the barrier between the reader and the event or idea in question. Instead of a guy sitting in an office, writing his ideas for publication on a regular schedule, you have a person on the scene, presenting what is happening, and allowing the readers to comment/clarify/update/or even completely change the tone of the piece in near real time.

It could really remove (and is already showing signs of doing so) alot of the seperation between the coomon individual and the reporter.

and BTW, most of the bloggers I know are WWAAYYY to full of themselves. For somereason the stuff that happens to them is important enough that everyone in the world should be aware of it.

some, however, are good reads, and alot can be learned.

river-wind,

OMG!

i think i finally get it, i was really starting to think id never get there, thanks for clarifying.

I don't think River-wind's comment on why blogs are unique is satisfying. All the things the individual states are more unique to blogs is simply not true. Any website can update their content in real-time. Hell, at the rate the world is falling apart nowadays, CNN, BCC, Reuters and many other news sites update their data as often if not more often than your typical blog. The notion that a blog is more real-time than a non-blog website because the blog has a person on site or on the scene is laughable. What the heck is that suppose to mean? There is not always a real difference between waiting for a guy in an office to publish something on a website and waiting for a guy in an office to publish something on a website. If you can't tell which scenario in the previous statement is a blog and which is a news site, then you're perfectly fine because many blogs are updated on a daily basis much like news sites.

I think some of the things that make blogs somewhat unique may include the fact that they run more like a journal than a personal website. Another thing about blogs that may make them somewhat unique is that they often have a software infrastructure (i.e.: software template, blog engine, etc.) powering the blog. Of course there are similar software for non-blog sites (like the slashdot engine, jive, etc.) too.

Even before Blogs were invented, it would have been fairly easy to put a journal on a website (some people did just that). But now it is even easier - no HTML to edit, no FTP, just type your text on a webpage, and hit 'publish'. The blog engine does all the work of formatting, adding time and date etc.

I use blogger.com for my blog

My blog is mainly for family and friends to keep up on my life. Plus i enjoy coding the engine behind it myself rather than using someone elses. http://antonk.homelinux.com/

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated and promply ignored :)

-AntonK

WEBLOG - hence blog.

The thing about blogs that gets people so excited is the ease of use. It is no longer impressive to have a webpage. Now you can have an attractive, easy to use and feature rich site about you or whatever you like with little or no cost and even less technical ability. Blogs give the power that a computer savvy person had a few years ago to the masses. Even more than that it lets even the savvy worry more about what they are writing and less about how it will look.

I think of most blogs as reverse mailing lists. I can subscribe to the RSS feed with a program like SharpReader (http://www.sharpreader.net/) and then all in one place I can read everything I want to read.

Now I have to tell you all that I read a lot of programmer blogs. Especially the ones on ASP.NET and GotDotNet.com. So those have a specific topic that I always am looking for. I can't imagine reading personal only blogs, but there is almost no way of avoiding the little quips about the writer's life in a blog. They add a human touch anyway.

There are a lot of fun blogs that offer RSS out there that you can read religiously whenever you want, even when disconnected. Check out the links below for some of teh feeds I subscribe to:

Gizmodo (http://www.gizmodo.net)
Penny-Arcade (http://www.penny-arcade.com)
The Scobleizer Weblog (http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/)
SlashDot (http://slashdot.org/)
Wired (http://www.wired.com)
The Register (http://www.theregister.co.uk)
The Lawrence Lessig Blog (http://lessig.org/blog/)
EFF: Electronic Frontier Foundation (http://www.eff.org)

Those are just maybe one tenth of the blogs I subscribe to. It helps me make the most of my pure browsing time so I can really see what is going on. There are blogs for nearly everything, I assure you. Don't let some whiney kid talking about his pet bird for eighteen straight paragraphs scare you away from bloggers. THERE ARE SMART PEOPLE OUT THERE.