5 facts you should know about blogs

What is it all about?

A blog is simply an online journal or dairy where you can digitally express your thoughts, ideas, opinions, views and practically anything that you want people to read. Easy to create and use from anywhere with an Internet connection, blogs are a form of Internet publishing that has become an established communications and business tool.

Blogging has evolved from its origins as a medium for the online publication of personal diaries to a respected vehicle for business marketing and editorials on speci?c topics. Blogs represent an alternative to mainstream media publications. The personal perspectives presented on blogs often lead to discourse between bloggers, and many blog circles generate a strong sense of community.

Who can Blog?

Although online journals have been around longer than the term“blog,” they gained momentum with the introduction of services that allow users to publish blogs easily, without needing to code HTML. Today, thousands of people use services including Blogger, wordpress and Moveable Type to simplify, automate, and accelerate the online publishing process. Blogs are created sphere of life ranging from entertainment and commerce to news and politics.

Many blogs are the musings of a single author; others focus on a particular topic or niche and feature the voices of several authors. There are group blogs, family blogs, community blogs, Photo blogs and corporate blogs.

Blogs can be created around any subject  . In educational settings, faculty are using blogs to express their opinions, to promote dialogue in the discipline, and as an instructional tool, and students are increasingly using blogs both as personal commentaries and as a required part of certain courses.

How does it work?
A blog can be thought of as an online journal, and maintaining a blog is as simple as using an online e-mail program. Bloggers enter posts into a blogging application, add formatting or hyperlinks, and save the post.

The application adds the entry to the blog, making the content available online and alerting users who have subscribed to that blog’s content. Entries can include text, hyperlinks, images, or multimedia. Visitors can read postings, submit comments, ?nd blog entries by date, and search the site by keyword. Most blogs allow visitors to subscribe using an RSS feed or another service. Effective blogs tend to be updated on a regular basis.

Most bloggers solicit feedback, fostering two-way communication between readers and authors. Readers can provide feedback by leaving comments on the blog page itself or by posting a response on their own Blogs and linking back to the original post a feature called trackback. Trackback noti?es bloggers when one of their posts is referenced by another blog, making it possible to determine the popularity of a post based on the number and diversity of incoming links to a post.

Through linking, commenting, and feedback, good (or at least popular) ideas spread quickly through the informal network of blogs (the “blogosphere”), while unpopular ideas are simply ignored. Being referenced by a popular blogger brings instant attention and often credibility, and repeated linking enhances the reputation and authority of a blogger. Through this system of recommendations and referrals, a collaborative ?ltering capacity has emerged in the blogosphere.

How signi?cant it is?

Because blogs engage people in knowledge sharing, re?ection, and debate, they often attract a large and dedicated readership. Blogs are becoming an important component of the Internet landscape, providing authors and readers with an avenue for unedited expression, reaction, and connection, without the censorship of mediated chat rooms or formal media outlets.

The simplicity of creating and maintaining blogs means that open discussions can be established almost immediately, making blogs an ideal venue for far-reaching discussions among the Internet community on new or timely topics. Blogs foster the growth of communities and the dynamics of collaborative ?ltering and recommending/referring may provide new ways to evaluate, vet, and critique student-created knowledge.

What are the downsides?

Because blogs are often produced and maintained by individuals, they can include biased or inaccurate information. Users visiting a blog might see it as factual or authoritative when, infact, it is the online equivalent of a soap box: a place to speak and to be heard. Unlike chat rooms, blogs are unmediated and therefore offer a different type of venue for individuals to express themselves and air their opinions, ideas, and attitudes.

While this may be acceptable for a personal blog, it might be inappropriate for a blog hosted on an institutional server. Intellectual property is another area of concern for higher education, given the implications of hosting blogs that might include content that has been used without proper attribution. Blogs are also highly volatile.

Bloggers can edit or delete posts, and this transient nature can make blogs difficult to archive or index. In addition, the time-limited relationship of students to institutions in?uences the length of time a student blog should be hosted, yet removing posts from the blogosphere once a student has graduated could confound those who linked to the post.