Brady Mark, 2005

Blogging: personal participation in public knowledgebuilding on the web

http://www.essex.ac.uk/chimera/content/pubs/wps/CWP-2005-02-blogging-in-the-Knowledge-Society-MB.pdf

From a humble beginning as ‘What’s New’ pages, blogs have arisen to become arguably the most popular online personal publishing platform on the internet. Over the last few years blogs have come to the fore appearing not only in the news media but also in search engine results pages. Blogs (also known as web logs, or weblogs) are web sites that contain frequently updated ‘posts’ with the most recent entry at the top of the page and the previous ones displayed reverse-chronologically. The type of information contained within a blog varies greatly from individual to individual. Authors of blogs (known as bloggers) can describe day-to-day observations in their lives, or more specific topics of interest to them, such as web design or cycling. Some frequently visited blogs are topic related (e.g. http://www.instapundit.com, one of the most visited blogs). Some mix this in with personal events in the author’s life (e.g. www.kottke.org, another popular blog), such as going on holiday or meeting new people. Since blogs are web sites, they are controlled and navigated using hyperlinks, and posts typically incorporate hyperlinks to other blogs or news sources, together with related comments and discussions. When blogs start linking to each other and commenting on what has been said, huge, distributed discussions can erupt that include many different bloggers, and concern many different topics.