What is a Blog?

Though Merriam-Webster seems to be catching up to times by making the word "blog" the word of the year for 2004 (due to being the most looked up word at its site), the definition you will find at their site is incomplete.

According to them, a blog is "a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer."

That’s a good definition of a personal blog, but it is incomplete. And about two and a half years ago, it would have been a sufficient definition for most blogs. But times, they have a-changed.

The word Blog originated as an abbreviation for the phrase "web log".

So why don’t we just call them web logs?

Well, the term created a bit of confusion, as this term was already short-hand among techies for a log one would publish to the web tracking changes to a site that were more technical in nature.

A blog is different in that it is a log or journal built around a theme, and is published on the web. Web + Log.

The process of inputting those entries is called blogging. The person who does so is a blogger.

A blog can be a web site all on its own, or it can be a section added to a web site that already exists.

The major difference between just any web site and a blog fall into one of three basic groups.

1. Blogs are dated and updated.

   While many web sites are static, in that they provide information that seldom changes, blogs are updated in some type of regular frequency.

   It is most often several times a day, once daily, all the way up to weekly, but rarely less than that.

   Entries to a blog, often called posts, are normally arranged in reverse chronological order, with the most recent entry at the top of the front page.

   They are also dated, so the reader can determine how fresh the information is.

   Their freshness and relevance are part of what make them popular with search engines, especially Google and Yahoo, but we’ll get into more detail about that later.

2. Blogs are themed.

   Every blog is built around the theme. In the case of personal blogs, that theme is often the person writing them.

   In the case of a business blog, sometimes the theme is the company (in the case of internal blogging, which we’ll talk about briefly), and other times, the blog is about a product line.

   A blog can be a collection of industry news, opinions on industry news, or sometimes, several of the above.

   Supporting the idea of themes is a blog’s ability to hyperlink to other pages within the same site, or at other sites that talk about the same issues or themes.

   Which brings us to another reason why catnip is to cats as a blogs is to a search engine spider - fresh, timely information on a single topic often evolves into or mimics the resource or authority sites that often enjoy high search engine rankings.

3. Blogs are informative and/or interesting communication tools.

   Personal blogs often act as the internet’s soap opera. Even if that day’s entry was a little dry, the visitor will often come back tomorrow to see if anything juicy was sparked in topics that came up on other days.

   Business blogs often act as the internet’s media, as created by and for the internet community. Sometimes they are company newsletters, either internally within its own body, or externally to its customers and potential clientele.

   Or at a site that sells comic books they might be a sitcom.

   They can act as magazines, with informative articles and the occasional op-ed, with promotion of several products or product lines as its commericals - not ads per se, simply additional information about the products sold at that site.

Whichever category they fall under, they must provide entertainment and/or information that is in rapport with that audience to earn continual return visits. They must relay that content in a way that engages the reader, (or the search engine spider) or all if for naught.

In the next part we’ll go deeper into the differences between a personal blog and a business blog.