What Is a Blog, Blogging and Blogger?
What is a Blog?
A blog is also known weblog or web log, is a kind of a website that consists articles (which are called posts) appearing in reverse chronological order.
The setup of a blog is such that the most-recent articles always appears on the home page. Blogs typically include features such as comments, archive, pings, trackbacks, calendar, blogroll, RSS etc.
Here are a few definitions from credible sources:
wikipedia.org: A blog is a website in which items are posted on a regular basis and displayed in reverse chronological order. The term blog is a shortened form of weblog or web log.
Authoring a blog, maintaining a blog or adding an article to an existing blog is called “blogging”. Individual articles on a blog are called “blog posts,” “posts” or “entries”. A person who posts these entries is called a “blogger”.
A blog comprises text, hypertext, images, and links (to other web pages and to video, audio and other files). Blogs use a conversational style of documentation. Often blogs focus on a particular “area of interest”, such as Washington, D.C.’s political goings-on. Some blogs discuss personal experiences.
matisse.net: A blog is basically a journal that is available on the web. The activity of updating a blog is “blogging” and someone who keeps a blog is a “blogger.” Blogs are typically updated daily using software that allows people with little or no technical background to update and maintain the blog.
Postings on a blog are almost always arranged in chronological order with the most recent additions featured most prominently.
It is common for blogs to be available as RSS feeds.
webopedia.com: Short for Web log, a blog is a Web page that serves as a publicly accessible personal journal for an individual. Typically updated daily, blogs often reflect the personality of the author.
blogs.law.harvard.edu: A weblog is a hierarchy of text, images, media objects and data, arranged chronologically, that can be viewed in an HTML browser. A weblog post has three basic attributes: title, link and description. All are optional. Some weblogs only have descriptions. Others always have all three.
marketingterms.com: A blog, or weblog, is often a mixture of what is happening in a person’s life and what is happening on the Web, a kind of hybrid diary/guide site, although there are as many unique types of blogs as there are people.
webblogs.com: A weblog is kind of a continual tour, with a human guide who you get to know. There are many guides to choose from, each develops an audience, and there’s also comraderie and politics between the people who run weblogs, they point to each other, in all kinds of structures, graphs, loops, etc.
What Is Blogging and Blogger?
To maintain or add content to a blog is known as blogging and the person who does that is a blogger. Blogging can also be seen as a form of social networking service.
Indeed, bloggers do not only produce content to post on their blogs, but also build social relations with their readers and other bloggers.
Earlier, to make a website, knowledge of technologies such as HTML and FTP was must. However, the present scenario is totally different, with the advent of web publishing tools, there has been a tremendous growth of blogs.
A user with no technical skills can even start a blog with free blog sites. There are various websites that provide a free blog. Starting a blog is as simple as registering en email account and sending email.
Types Of Blogs
Blogs come in different shapes and size, differing not only in the type of content, but also in the way that content is delivered or written.
Personal Blogs: A personal blog is a basic level of blogging where a blogger updates it with personal issues or hobbies.
Business Blogs: Blogs used with the intention to enhance the communication and culture in a corporation or externally for marketing, branding or public relations purposes are called business blogs.
Micro Blogs: It is also known as microblogging where a blogger’s post only small pieces of digital content such as text, pictures, links, short videos, or other media. A very popular example is twitter.com.
Niche Blogs: Blogs which blogs focus on a particular subject, such as political blogs, health, travel, gardening, fashion, money, music, education, etc. is known as niche blogs.
Benefits Of Blogs and Blogging
- It helps you to become a better writer.
- It helps you to stay focused.
- It helps you to become more creative.
- It helps you to make some extra money when you blog become popular.
- It helps you to connect with present and potential customers.
- It helps you to find business partners.
- It helps to generate traffic and sales.
- It helps you to establish as an authority in your business.
- It helps you to inspire your social media followers.
- It helps you to increase your reach.
- It helps you to grow your email database.
- It helps you to give your company a voice.
- It helps you to generate publicity.
- Last but not the least, blogging can always be fun, even if you are not making any money out of it.
How to Start a Blog
There are various online service which provide you free blog, but the most popular blogging platform you should try is blogger, tumblr or WordPress.
Blogger.com: Blogger is considered as the easiest blogging platform to use, mainly because the interface and editor are so easy to use. With Blogger’s recent addition of search engine preferences, the faster indexing (Faster indexing means your blog can attract more traffic) makes it even more favorable.
Since blogger is owned by Google, you can easily integrate Google tools such as Google+, Google Places, Picasa Web, Picasa Creative Kit, Google Drive, Google Docs, FeedBurner, Google Webmaster, Google Analytics, Google Merchant, to your blog.
You can also add your custom domain name to your Blogger blog, or you can use their own sub domain, for example, yourblog.blogspot.com.
Tumblr.com: Tumblr is a great microblogging platform and social networking site, but can take some to understand its full potential.
Tumblr is known for its simplicity and diversity. The dashboard is very easy to use and allows anyone to start a visual appealing blog. You can easily post articles, photo, video, or music.
The social features on Tumblr are much better than other blogging platforms.
WordPress.com: WordPress is more known for its SEO benefits than the blogging platform itself.
With WordPress you can create a beautiful website or a simple blog; you don’t need to be an Internet expert or an HTML coder to understand how to use WordPress.
WordPress is the perfect starting point for any small business. When you are ready to customize your blog/website further, you can easily migrate your blog to your own web hosting server.