What is a Blog

A blog otherwise known as web log is similar to a diary or personal journal which is the most common website on the internet[1]. It provides a mechanism of unedited on-line publication of personal thoughts and commentaries, including “experiences, observations, advice, impressions, analysis, notes, and comments”[2].

About.com suggests that blogs can be divided up into the following categories and gives examples of each for personal, art, political, news and current events, hobby, technology and computer, photo, sports, travel, commentary, business or professional, and education blogs.
An individual blog can be restricted to invited individuals and groups, or open to anyone on the world wide web to view and contribute their thoughts or comments. These ‘posts’ display the most recent entry first, and past entries are archieved in links displayed on the page. According to ICVET, blogs have “reshaped the web, impacted on politics, shaken up journalism, and enabled millions of people to have a voice and connect with others[3].

Blogs are an example of using Web2.0 social software, where connections with the wider social networks occur through using not only written text, but also photographs, video (videocasting), audio (podcasting), links and feeds to and from other web pages.
According to Technorati over 66 million websites are now found on the Internet (Feb 2007) with 100,000 blogs alone on Edublogs in October 2007[4]. This does not include those who do not make their blog public, or are created within learning management systems or intranets within institutes etc.

Additional blogging terms: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_blogging_terms