Defining Blogs

Blog: a frequent, chronological publication of personal thoughts and Web links. Blogs are alternatively called Web Logs.

Blogs & The Worldwide Web
Both personal sites and lists of links have existed since the web was born. Indeed, the ability to link one document to the other that existed on the global network drew early enthusiasts to the Web. They published pages and eagerly perused the pages published by others. That was the time when the accessibility to the pages from any computer with a modem and a browser was more important than the content of that page. For a while, webpages became an interesting addition to the cyberspace. Then the space got crowded. As a result the web grew at an exponential rate and search for the required information became difficult and simultaneously more time consuming.

Until, a few of these enthusiasts decided to put the links they collected daily onto a single webpage. These people placed their stuff – descriptive text and link/s, for example: their travel records, on the web. The text enabled the reader to know why they should click the link and wait for the page to download. And so a particular type of website was born.

The New York Times article about a website named ‘LemonYellow’, published in July 1999, didn’t say a word about weblogs, but affirmed the notion that webloggers were onto something. Most of the early weblog editors designed or maintained websites for a living. Few of these editors just knew HTML - the simple coding language used to create webpages.

With Weblogs becoming popular, the personal websites became extensions of their day-to-day lives. Webloggers started rolling personal journals — ongoing links-laden riffs on a favorite subject. Soon they linked to general interest articles to online games, and often to Web-related news.