A blog (a truncation of "weblog")[1] is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal

diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order so that
the most recent post appears first, at the top of the web page. Until 2009, blogs were often the work
of a single individual, occasionally of a small group, and often covered a single subject or topic. In
the 2010s, "multi-author blogs" (MABs) emerged, featuring the writing of multiple authors and
sometimes professionally edited. MABs from newspapers, other media outlets, universities, think
tanks, advocacy groups, and similar institutions account for an increasing quantity of blog traffic. The
rise of Twitter and other "microblogging" systems helps integrate MABs and single-author blogs into
the news media. Blog can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.
The emergence and growth of blogs in the late 1990s coincided with the advent of web publishing
tools that facilitated the posting of content by non-technical users who did not have much experience
with HTML or computer programming. Previously, knowledge of such technologies as HTML
and File Transfer Protocol had been required to publish content on the Web, and early Web users
therefore tended to be hackers and computer enthusiasts. As of the 2010s, the majority are
interactive Web 2.0 websites, allowing visitors to leave online comments, and it is this interactivity
that distinguishes them from other static websites.[2] In that sense, blogging can be seen as a form
of social networking service. Indeed, bloggers not only produce content to post on their blogs but
also often build social relations with their readers and other bloggers.[3] Blog owners or authors
often moderate and filter online comments to remove hate speech or other offensive content. There
are also high-readership blogs which do not allow comments.
Many blogs provide commentary on a particular subject or topic, ranging from philosophy, religion,
and arts to science, politics, and sports. Others function as more personal online diaries or online
brand advertising of a particular individual or company. A typical blog combines text, digital images,
and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. Most blogs are primarily
textual, although some focus on art (art blogs), photographs (photoblogs), videos (video blogs or
"vlogs"), music (MP3 blogs), and audio (podcasts). In education, blogs can be used as instructional
resources; these are referred to as edublogs. Microblogging is another type of blogging, featuring
very short posts.
'Blog' and 'blogging' are now loosely used for content creation and sharing on social media,
especially when the content is long-form and one creates and shares content on regular basis. So,
one could be maintaining a blog on Facebook or blogging on Instagram.
A 2022 estimate suggested that there were over 600 million public blogs out of more than 1.9 billion
websites.[4]

History
Main articles: History of blogging and online diary
 An early example of a "diary" style blog consisting of text and
images transmitted wirelessly in real-time from a wearable computer with head-up display,
February 22, 1995
The term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger[5] on December 17, 1997. The short form "blog" was
coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase we blog in the sidebar
of his blog Peterme.com in May 1999.[6][7][8] Shortly thereafter, Evan Williams at Pyra Labs used "blog"
as both a noun and verb ("to blog", meaning "to edit one's weblog or to post to one's weblog") and
devised the term "blogger" in connection with Pyra Labs' Blogger product, leading to the
popularization of the terms.[9]
Origins
Before blogging became popular, digital communities took many forms, including Usenet,
commercial online services such as GEnie, Byte Information Exchange (BIX) and the
early CompuServe, e-mail lists,[10] and Bulletin Board Systems (BBS). In the 1990s, Internet
forum software created running conversations with "threads". Threads are topical connections
between messages on a virtual "corkboard".[further explanation needed]
Berners-Lee also created what is considered by Encyclopedia Britannica to be "the first 'blog'" in
1992 to discuss the progress made on creating the World Wide Web and software used for it.[11]
From June 14, 1993, Mosaic Communications Corporation maintained their "What's New"[12] list of
new websites, updated daily and archived monthly. The page was accessible by a special "What's
New" button in the Mosaic web browser.
In November 1993 Ranjit Bhatnagar started writing about interesting sites, pages and discussion
groups he found on the internet, as well as some personal information, on his website Moonmilk,
arranging them chronologically in a special section called Ranjit's HTTP Playground.[13] Other early
pioneers of blogging, such as Justin Hall, credit him with being an inspiration.[14]
The earliest instance of a commercial blog was on the first business to consumer Web site created
in 1995 by Ty, Inc., which featured a blog in a section called "Online Diary". The entries were
maintained by featured Beanie Babies that were voted for monthly by Web site visitors.[15]
The modern blog evolved from the online diary where people would keep a running account of the
events in their personal lives. Most such writers called themselves diarists, journalists, or
journalers. Justin Hall, who began personal blogging in 1994 while a student at Swarthmore College,
is generally recognized as one of the earlier bloggers,[16] as is Jerry Pournelle.[17] Dave Winer's
Scripting News is also credited with being one of the older and longer running weblogs.[18][19] The
Australian Netguide magazine maintained the Daily Net News[20] on their web site from 1996. Daily
Net News ran links and daily reviews of new websites, mostly in Australia.
Another early blog was Wearable Wireless Webcam, an online shared diary of a person's personal
life combining text, digital video, and digital pictures transmitted live from a wearable computer
and EyeTap device to a web site in 1994. This practice of semi-automated blogging with live video
together with text was referred to as sousveillance, and such journals were also used as evidence in
legal matters. Some early bloggers, such as The Misanthropic Bitch, who began in 1997, actually
referred to their online presence as a zine, before the term blog entered common usage.
The first research paper about blogging was Torill Mortensen and Jill Walker Rettberg's paper
"Blogging Thoughts",[21] which analysed how blogs were being used to foster research communities
and the exchange of ideas and scholarship, and how this new means of networking overturns
traditional power structures.
Technology
Early blogs were simply manually updated components of common Websites. In 1995, the "Online
Diary" on the Ty, Inc. Web site was produced and updated manually before any blogging programs
were available. Posts were made to appear in reverse chronological order by manually updating
text-based HTML code using FTP software in real time several times a day. To users, this offered
the appearance of a live diary that contained multiple new entries per day. At the beginning of each
new day, new diary entries were manually coded into a new HTML file, and at the start of each
month, diary entries were archived into their own folder, which contained a separate HTML page for
every day of the month. Then, menus that contained links to the most recent diary entry were
updated manually throughout the site. This text-based method of organizing thousands of files
served as a springboard to define future blogging styles that were captured by blogging software
developed years later.[15]
The evolution of electronic and software tools to facilitate the production and maintenance of Web
articles posted in reverse chronological order made the publishing process feasible for a much larger
and less technically-inclined population. Ultimately, this resulted in the distinct class of online
publishing that produces blogs we recognize today. For instance, the use of some sort of browser-
based software is now a typical aspect of "blogging". Blogs can be hosted by dedicated blog hosting
services, on regular web hosting services, or run using blog software.
Rise in popularity
After a slow start, blogging rapidly gained in popularity. Blog usage spread during 1999 and the
years following, being further popularized by the near-simultaneous arrival of the first hosted blog
tools:

• Bruce Ableson launched Open Diary in October 1998, which soon grew to thousands of
online diaries. Open Diary innovated the reader comment, becoming the first blog
community where readers could add comments to other writers' blog entries.
• Brad Fitzpatrick started LiveJournal in March 1999.
• Andrew Smales created Pitas.com in July 1999 as an easier alternative to maintaining a
"news page" on a Web site, followed by DiaryLand in September 1999, focusing more on
a personal diary community.[22]
• Blogger (blogspot.com) was launched in 1999[23]
Political impact
 On December 6, 2002, Josh Marshall's
talkingpointsmemo.com blog called attention to U.S. Senator Lott's comments regarding Senator
Thurmond. Senator Lott was eventually to resign his Senate leadership position over the matter.
An early milestone in the rise in importance of blogs came in 2002, when many bloggers focused on
comments by U.S. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott.[24] Senator Lott, at a party honoring U.S.
Senator Strom Thurmond, praised Senator Thurmond by suggesting that the United States would
have been better off had Thurmond been elected president. Lott's critics saw these comments as
tacit approval of racial segregation, a policy advocated by Thurmond's 1948 presidential campaign.
This view was reinforced by documents and recorded interviews dug up by bloggers. (See Josh
Marshall's Talking Points Memo.) Though Lott's comments were made at a public event attended by
the media, no major media organizations reported on his controversial comments until after blogs
broke the story. Blogging helped to create a political crisis that forced Lott to step down as majority
leader.
Similarly, blogs were among the driving forces behind the "Rathergate" scandal. Television
journalist Dan Rather presented documents on the CBS show 60 Minutes that conflicted with
accepted accounts of President Bush's military service record. Bloggers declared the documents to
be forgeries and presented evidence and arguments in support of that view. Consequently, CBS
apologized for what it said were inadequate reporting techniques (see: Little Green Footballs). The
impact of these stories gave greater credibility to blogs as a medium of news dissemination.
In Russia, some political bloggers have started to challenge the dominance of official,
overwhelmingly pro-government media. Bloggers such as Rustem Adagamov and Alexei
Navalny have many followers, and the latter's nickname for the ruling United Russia party as the
"party of crooks and thieves" has been adopted by anti-regime protesters.[25] This led to The Wall
Street Journal calling Navalny "the man Vladimir Putin fears most" in March 2012.[26]
Mainstream popularity
By 2004, the role of blogs became increasingly mainstream, as political consultants, news services,
and candidates began using them as tools for outreach and opinion forming. Blogging was
established by politicians and political candidates to express opinions on war and other issues and
cemented blogs' role as a news source. (See Howard Dean and Wesley Clark.) Even politicians not
actively campaigning, such as the UK's Labour Party's Member of Parliament (MP) Tom Watson,
began to blog to bond with constituents. In January 2005, Fortune magazine listed eight bloggers
whom business people "could not ignore": Peter Rojas, Xeni Jardin, Ben Trott, Mena Trott, Jonathan
Schwartz, Jason Goldman, Robert Scoble, and Jason Calacanis.[27]
Israel was among the first national governments to set up an official blog.[28] Under David Saranga,
the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs became active in adopting Web 2.0 initiatives, including an
official video blog[28] and a political blog.[29] The Foreign Ministry also held a microblogging press
conference via Twitter about its war with Hamas, with Saranga answering questions from the public
in common text-messaging abbreviations during a live worldwide press conference.[30] The questions
and answers were later posted on IsraelPolitik, the country's official political blog.[31]
The impact of blogging on the mainstream media has also been acknowledged by governments. In
2009, the presence of the American journalism industry had declined to the point that several
newspaper corporations were filing for bankruptcy, resulting in less direct competition between
newspapers within the same circulation area. Discussion emerged as to whether the newspaper
industry would benefit from a stimulus package by the federal government. U.S. President Barack
Obama acknowledged the emerging influence of blogging upon society by saying, "if the direction of
the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put
stories in context, then what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void,
but not a lot of mutual understanding".[32] Between 2009 and 2012, an Orwell Prize for blogging was
awarded.

Types

A screenshot from the BlogActive website

There are many different types of blogs, differing not only in the type of content, but also in the way
that content is delivered or written.
Personal blogs
The personal blog is an ongoing online diary or commentary written by an individual, rather
than a corporation or organization. While the vast majority of personal blogs attract very few
readers, other than the blogger's immediate family and friends, a small number of personal
blogs have become popular, to the point that they have attracted lucrative advertising
sponsorship. A tiny number of personal bloggers have become famous, both in the online
community and in the real world.
Collaborative blogs or group blogs