Blogs & blog entries
Created | Updated Apr 15, 2004
What in the world are blogs?
Blogs are public diaries, which have come into increasing prominence (mostly because some people think that they provide journalistic and sociopolitical content which is not necessarily true ).
Blogging History
The word Blog itself was derived by shortening web-logs, so the original creator (unknown to most) may have intended that they be used as logs rather than diaries, which would mean that they be less personal and more factual in nature. Presently you can come across both kinds in the blogosphere (collection of all the blogs available on the World Wide Web), with some people using their blogs to objectively record observations, links, news, weather and the like, and others using them to record their thoughts and analyze events of the day in a more subjective manner.
Blogs and their contents themselves have existed long before the terms blogs and blogging (writing and posting blog entries) were coined, and since the inception of the World Wide Web sites have existed where certain groups of people have noted their observations and thoughts in a regular manner. However blogging in itself relies one of the myriad of blogging software and services available (the services available on Earth include Blogger, and TypePad, softwares include iBlog), which simplify the act of blogging, since once you setup your service or software properly, you can pretty much type in whatever you want published and rely on the service/software to do the rest. This has enabled most people to concentrate their efforts on content creation rather than content management, thus leading to proliferation of Blogs.
Tips on blogging
No one can really teach others how to write a blog entry, people can at most give pointers about how to do it. Most of what follows is for those who are writing subjective blogs, objectivity simplifies things to an extent where writing becomes trivial. Most good Blog entries are written when you don't concentrate on writing the blog entry itself and instead just relive through the days events, analyzing them, and find the funny ones and write them out. Most people don't have very interesting days, however even normal, mundane life can seem interesting if presented in an interesting way, so you could try being humorous about things or you could start giving one of those TV new type analysis about your day, or something similar (there are a billion ways to do it, and using a unique way really helps you out with the writing and thinking part of it).
Implications, why blog and historic context.....
Some people also use there blogs to say things or act in ways in which they can't in real life because most readers understand that the rules of engagement are different online as compared to real life. However certain actions can still cause damage and horror stories of damage caused by blogs abound including a story about how some guy was fired from Microsoft, because his blog entry showed Apple G5's being delivered to Microsoft's headquarters. That is not to say that Blogs can only or invariably lead to bad publicity. Stories abound where people have managed to get book deals because of their Blogs including Salam Pax, the author of the Dear Raed whose blog entries from Bagdhad in the middle of the second Gulf War made him famous world wide and got him a book deal. The thing to remember is that blogs are pretty much like public diaries of old (such as Samuel Pepy's Diary and probably even Anne Frank's diary though it wasn't originally intended for public consumption) and much like these diaries of old they are prone to both praise and controversy. In essence blogging has simply democratized the process of publishing everything from your thoughts, to your own Pepys' Diary styled diary by simplifying the process of giving a large section of society and the world access to your writing.
People say writing a blog encourages thinking, because it forces you to remember interesting things that happened throughout the day. You should try and collect your thoughts long before you sit down to write your blog, because trying to collect thoughts while writing the entry itself makes you concentrate too much on the task at hand. Blogging is a little like flying, you are at your best when you don't pay any attention to how you're doing it.
