What is a blog? If you have come across this page then you must be interested to know the definition of blog. It’s a common question now a days and many people have different opinion about ‘blog’ except that everybody believe it to be a kind of website that we use to publish a wealth of information that can be accessed in a way as they have been organized in a chronological order like a diary. This is the easiest answer for the seeker of blog definition.
Now, a blog can be defined in two ways; one in a practical, easily understandable way and the other would be highly technical. If you are keenly interested in blogging (opening a blog of your own), then I recommend that you should understand a blog from both point of view.
A blog is generally considered a personal website focusing a specific (or a few) topic usually written by one person. A blog at the same time, can be written by any number of authors (See Public Blogs) and may contain any range of topic. Actually it depends on the blogger. If you want to write about your pets or about your profession, who is going to bar you, anyway. Yet you must remember that readers are the key and you must keep them content with your targeted information and writing a specific and attractive content is really important for a blog to get more and more visitors.
Blogs are usually updated in a regular basis and is arranged date wise, generally the recent post appears at the top so that a visitor can get the most recent publishing first. The past publications are put in an archive and are also arranged by categories so that a visitor can navigate through the blog the way they wish.
A blog can contains any kind of information from text to videos. But ‘TEXT’ is the most important element of a blog; even if you run a Photo Blog that contains hundreds of nice photos and images, don’t forget to add charming description for your photos so that readers can know more about the background and significance of the photo.
In technical terms, a blog is a web-engine / application that allows a user (even a novice internet user) to easily publish information through a quite familiar interface. A blog has Blog Posts or Blog Entries as the most essential element; most blogs allow users to comment on the post topic while some may require to register or subscribe to comment. It also contains links to other blogs and websites. However, A blog generally have the following elements:
A BLOG POST or BLOG ENTRIES
A blog entry is the actual content that is read or seen by the reader and deals with a very specific topic. It can be of any length but a smaller blog post is skipped by most of the readers because they may not satisfy their expectation about the information they are looking for. Also it should be taken care of that the blog post is not too lengthy unless the length is really important for the sole sake of the topic. Many blogger love to chop a large topic to many parts but this should be done carefully.
COMMENTS
Comments are the liveliness of the blog. It makes your post most interesting as comments contain discussion about the same topic as the post. While this can be good for the health of the blog moderation of the comments should be taken seriously or it may ruin the reputation of your blog.
ARCHIVE
Sounds familiar and is exactly what the word sounds like. An archive is the collection of all the past entries; for the convenience of the reader, a blog archive appears chronologically (can be in both ascending or descending order)
CATEGORIES
Blog categories are the list of topics that a blog contains. Similar categories will always add more weight to the blog and usually get more visitor since most posts contain similar range of information.
I hope that the definition of blog given above will satisfy your question.
In fine, blogs have changed the way we look at around our world in the web with so many personalized content and information. But not all blogs are source of authentic information (just like any other website is). But a good blogger always spreads the words that is confirmed, authentic and useful or enjoyable. Rumors are widely published in the blogs but if they should have authentic sources.
And yes, blogs are very easy to set up and maintain and there are a wide range of option available for blogging. You can easily get started to blog (or learn more about setting up a blog) here. If you have any question, you can always drop me a line here.
