The first use of the term weblog.

A weblog, web log or simply a blog, is a web application which contains periodic time-stamped posts on a common webpage. These posts are often but not necessarily in reverse chronological order. Such a website would typically be accessible to any Internet user. Weblog is a portmanteau of 'web' and 'log.' The term blog came into common use as a way of avoiding confusion with the term server log. Download high resolution version (839x573, 88 KB)Screen capture of first weblog at http://www. ... Download high resolution version (839x573, 88 KB)Screen capture of first weblog at http://www. ... In software engineering, a web application is an application delivered to users from a web server over a network such as the World Wide Web or an intranet. ... For the postal system, see mail For Usenet, see newsgroup For World Wide Web, see discussion groups In computing, Power-On Self Test, see booting For the cereal maker, see Post Cereals For the twentieth century mathematician, see Emil Leon Post Post is also a location on a basketball court... A webpage or web page is a page of the World Wide Web, usually in HTML/XHTML format (the file extensions are typically htm or html) and with hypertext links to enable navigation from one page or section to another. ... A portmanteau (plural: Portmanteaux or portmanteaux) is a word that is formed by combining two words. ... A server log is a file (or several files) automatically created and maintained by a server of activity performed by it. ...

Blogs run from individual diaries to arms of political campaigns, media programs and corporations, and from the writing of one occasional author to the collaboration of a large community of writers. Many weblogs enable visitors to leave public comments, which can lead to a community of readers centered around the blog; others are non-interactive. The totality of weblogs or blog-related websites is usually called the blogosphere. When a large amount of activity, information and opinion erupts around a particular subject or controversy in the blogosphere, it is commonly called a blogstorm or blog swarm. A political campaign is an effort to reach a certain political goal. ... A corporation is a legal entity (distinct from a natural person) that often has similar rights in law to those of a Civil law systems may refer to corporations as moral persons; they may also go by the name AS (anonymous society) or something similar, depending on language (see below). ... Community is a set of people (or agents in a more abstract sense) with some shared element. ... Blogosphere (alternate: blogsphere) is the collective term encompassing all weblogs or blogs; blogs as a community; blogs as a social network. ...

The format of weblogs varies, from simple bullet lists of hyperlinks, to article summaries with user-provided comments and ratings. Individual weblog entries are almost always date and time-stamped, with the newest post at the top of the page, and reader comments often appearing below it. Because links are so important to weblogs, most blogs have a way of archiving older entries and generating a static address for individual entries; this static link is referred to as a permalink. The latest headlines, with hyperlinks and summaries, are offered in weblogs in the RSS or Atom XML format, to be read with a feed reader. A hyperlink, or simply a link, is a reference in a hypertext document to another document or other resource. ... A permalink (a portmanteau made by contracting the phrase permanent link) is a type of URL designed to refer to a specific information item (often a news story or weblog item) and to remain unchanged permanently, or at least for a lengthy period of time to prevent linkrot. ... RSS is a family of XML file formats for web syndication used by news websites and weblogs. ... Atom is an XML-based document format and HTTP-based protocol designed for the syndication of Web content such as weblogs and news headlines to Web sites as well as directly to user agents. ... The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a W3C-recommended general-purpose markup language for creating special-purpose markup languages (it is a metaformat). ...

A weblog is edited, organized and published often through a content management system or CMS. A content management system (often shortened to CMS) is a system used to organize and facilitate collaborative content creation. ...

History

Precursors

• Electronic communities existed before internetworking. For example the AP wire was, in effect, similar to a large chat room where there were "wire fights" and electronic conversations. Another pre-digital electronic community Amateur (or "ham") radio allowed individuals who set up their own broadcast equipment to communicate with others directly. Ham radio also had logs called "glogs" that were personal diaries made using wearable computers in the early 1980s.
• Before blogging became popular, digital communities took many forms, including Usenet, email lists and bulletin boards. In the 1990s Internet forum software, such as WebX, created running conversations with threads. Many of the terms from weblogging were created in these earlier media.
• Diarists kept journals on the internet: some called themselves escribitionists.

For example, "troll," a term for a person who disrupts a discussion by posting messages to trick other users into reacting in hostility or aggravation, dates back to Usenet. "Thread," in reference to consecutive messages on one specific topic of discussion, comes from email lists and Usenet as well, and "to post" from electronic bulletin boards, borrowing usage directly from their corkboard predecessors. Internetworking is connecting two or more computer networks with some sort of routing device to exchange traffic back and forth, and guide traffic on the correct path (among several different ones usually available) across the complete network to their destination. ... Associated Press logo The Associated Press, or AP, is an American news agency that claims to be the worlds oldest and largest. ... A chat room is an online forum where people can chat online (talk by broadcasting messages to people on the same forum in real time). ... Amateur radio, commonly called ham radio, is a hobby enjoyed by many people throughout the world (as of 2004 about 3 million worldwide, 60,000 in UK, 70,000 in Germany, 5,000 in Norway, 57,000 in Canada, and 700,000 in the USA). ... A CyborgLog (often abbreviated to glog) is a first-person recording of an activity, in which the person doing the recording is a participant in the activity. ... Events and trends The 1980s marked an abrupt shift towards more conservative lifestyles after the momentous cultural revolutions which took place in the 1960s and 1970s and the definition of the AIDS virus in 1981. ... Usenet is a distributed Internet discussion system that evolved from a general purpose UUCP network of the same name. ... Electronic mailing lists are a special usage of email that allows for widespread distribution of information to many Internet users. ... A bulletin board system or BBS is a computer system running software that allows users to dial into the system over a phone line and, using a terminal program, perform functions such as downloading software and data, uploading data, reading news, and exchanging messages with other users. ... Events and trends Technology Explosive growth of the Internet; decrease in the cost of computers and other technology Reduction in size and cost of mobile phones leads to a massive surge in their popularity Year 2000 problem (commonly known as Y2K) Microsoft Windows operating system becomes virtually ubiquitous on IBM... Gaia Online, the largest English language forum-based community as of April 2005 — powered by phpBB. An Internet forum, also known as a message board, discussion board, discussion forum, web board, webboard, or, more simply, a forum, is a web application which provides a place for discussion, often for online... An escribitionist is a person who keeps a diary or journal via electronic means, and in particular, publishes their entries on the web. ... An Internet troll is either a person who sends messages on the Internet hoping to entice other users into angry or fruitless responses, or a message sent with such content. ...

Blogging begins

Blogging combined the personal web page with tools to make linking to other pages easier, specifically blogrolls and TrackBacks, as well as comments. This way, instead of a few people being in control of threads on a forum, or anyone able to start threads on a list, there was a moderating effect that was the personality of the weblog's owner. A blogroll is a collection of links to other weblogs that are found on most weblogs. ... TrackBack is a system implemented by many blogging tools, including Movable Type and WordPress, that allows a blogger to see who has seen the original post and has written another entry concerning it. ... Gaia Online, the largest English language forum-based community as of April 2005 — powered by phpBB. An Internet forum, also known as a message board, discussion board, discussion forum, web board, webboard, or, more simply, a forum, is a web application which provides a place for discussion, often for online...

The term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger in December 1997. The shorter version, "blog," was coined by Peter Merholz, who, in April or May of 1999, broke the word weblog into the phrase "we blog" in the sidebar of his weblog [1] (http://www.peterme.com/archives/00000205.html). This was interpreted as a short form of the noun [2] (http://www.bradlands.com/weblog/1999-09.shtml#September%2010,%201999) and also as a verb, to blog, meaning "to edit one's weblog or a post to one's weblog." Usage spread during 1999, with the word being further popularized by the near-simultaneous arrival of the first hosted weblog tools: Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan's company Pyra Labs launched Blogger (which was purchased by Google in 2004) and Paul Kedrosky's GrokSoup. As of March 2003, the Oxford English Dictionary included the terms weblog, weblogging and weblogger in their dictionary. [3] (http://www.oed.com/help/updates/motswana-mussy.html) Jorn Barger (born 1953 in Yellow Springs, Ohio) is a United States writer, best known on the Internet as editor of Robot Wisdom, an influential early weblog. ... 1997 is a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International Year of the Reef. ... Peter Merholz (born 1972) is a weblogger. ... 1999 is a common year starting on Friday of the Common Era, and was designated the International Year of Older Persons by the United Nations. ... Sidebar is a term for information placed at one or both sides of an article in a printed or Web publication, graphically separate from the rest of the display but with some contextual connection. ... Evan Williams is a brand of bourbon whiskey which is distilled and bottled in Bardstown, Kentucky at the Heaven Hill facility. ... Meg Hourihan co-founded Pyra Labs, the company behind Blogger before its acquisition by Google. ... Pyra Labs is the company who coined the word Blogger, and made the service a big success. ... Blogger logo Blogger, a coined word created by Pyra Labs, is a service that provides Web-based tools used by individuals to publish to the Web. ... Google, Inc. ... 2004 is a leap year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... 2003 : January - February - March - April - May - June - July - August - September - October - November - December - → A timeline of events in the news for March, 2003. ... The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is a comprehensive multi-volume dictionary published by the Oxford University Press (OUP). ...

One of the pioneers of the tools that make blogging more than merely websites that scroll is Dave Winer. One of his most important contributions was the creation of servers which weblogs would ping to show that they had updated. Blog reading utilities, such as Blogrolling [4] (http://www.blogrolling.com/), use the aggregated update data to show a user when their favorite blogs have new posts. Dave Winer (b. ... In computing, a server is: A computer software application that carries out some task (i. ... ping in a Windows 2000 command window ping is the name of a computer network tool used on TCP/IP networks (such as the Internet). ...

Blogging's rise to influence

After the September 11, 2001 attacks, many blogs which supported the U.S. "War On Terrorism" quickly gained readership among a public searching for information to understand that event; many new blogs in the same genre sprang up in this environment. By 2002, many of these were supporting the policy of an invasion of Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein from power (based on U.S. policy since 1998) and eliminate supposed stockpiles of WMDs. These "war bloggers" came primarily, though not exclusively, from the right side of the political spectrum, and included Instapundit. The term was later broadened to include all bloggers whose focus was the war in Iraq, which spread representation across the political spectrum. By the spring of 2003, Forbes Magazine used "war blogger" in this larger sense when listing the "best warblogs." The September 11, 2001 attacks were a series of coordinated terrorist attacks carried out in the United States on September 11, 2001. ... The United States of America — also referred to as the United States, the U.S.A., the U.S., America, the States, or (archaically) Columbia—is a federal republic of 50 states located primarily in central North America (with the exception of two states: Alaska and Hawaii). ... The War on terrorism or War on terror (abbreviated in policy circles as GWOT for global war on terror) is a global effort by the governments of several countries (primarily the United States and its principal allies) to neutralize international groups it deems as terrorist (primarily radical Islamist terrorist groups... 2002 is a common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... The neutrality and accuracy of this article are disputed. ... Saddam Hussein Saddām Hussein ʻAbd al-Majīd al-Tikrītī (Often spelled Husayn or Hussain; Arabic صدام حسين عبدالمجيد التكريتي; born April 28, 1937 1) was President of Iraq from 1979 to 2003. ... 1998 is a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International Year of the Ocean. ... Weapons of mass destruction (WMD) are weapons designed to kill large numbers of people, typically targeting civilians and military personnel alike. ... A warblog is a weblog devoted mostly or wholly to covering news events concerning an ongoing war. ... A political spectrum is a way of comparing or visualizing different political positions, by placing them upon one or more geometric axes. ... Instapundit is a U.S. political weblog produced by Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee. ... 2003 is a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar, and also: The International Year of Freshwater The European Disability Year Events January January 1 - Luíz Inácio Lula Da Silva becomes the 37th President of Brazil. ... Alternate meaning: For the Boston Brahmin family associated with John Forbes Kerry, see Forbes family. ...

The first blog-driven controversy was probably the fall of Trent Lott, who had remarked, at a party honoring Strom Thurmond, that Thurmond's leadership abilities may have made him a good president. Since Thurmond had spent much of his early political career sympathetic to white-supremacists, Lott's statements were conveyed in the media to be racist. In the aftermath, bloggers such as Josh Marshall strove to demonstrate that his remarks were not an isolated misstatement, by finding evidence including quotes from other previous speeches of Lott's which were taken to be racist—their efforts kept the story "alive" in the press until a critical mass of disapproval forced Lott to resign his position as Senate Majority Leader. Sen. ... Strom Thurmond James Strom Thurmond (December 5, 1902–June 26, 2003), known as Strom Thurmond, was the oldest and longest serving United States Senator, who represented South Carolina from 1954 to April 1956 and November 1956 to 1964 as a Democrat and from 1964 to 2003 as a Republican. ... Categories: Stub | 1969 births | Bloggers ... An African-American drinks out of a water fountain marked for colored in 1939 at a street car terminal in Oklahoma City. ... The Senate Majority Leader is a member of the United States Senate who is elected by his or her party conference to serve as the chief Senate spokesman for his or her party and to manage and schedule the legislative and executive business of the Senate. ...

By this point blogging was enough of a phenomenon that how-to manuals had begun to appear, primarily focusing on using the tools, or creating content. But the importance of a blog as a way of building an electronic community had also been written on, as had the potential for blogs as a means of publicizing other projects. Established schools of journalism began researching the blogging phenomenon, and noting the differences between current practice of journalism and blogging. Journalism is a discipline of collecting, verifying, reporting and analyzing information gathered regarding current events, including trends, issues and people. ...

Since 2003, weblogs have gained increasing notice and coverage for their role in breaking, shaping or spinning news stories. One of the most significant events was the sudden emergence of an interest in the Iraq war, which saw both left-wing and right-wing bloggers taking measured and passionate points of view that did not reflect the traditional left-right divide. The blogs which gathered news on Iraq, both left and right, exploded in popularity, and Forbes magazine covered the phenomenon. The use of blogs by established politicians and political candidates—particularly Howard Dean and Wesley Clark—to express opinions on the war and other issues of the day, cemented their role as a news source. Meanwhile, the increasing number of experts who blogged, such as Daniel Drezner and J. Bradford DeLong, gave blogs a built-in source of in-depth analysis. 2003 is a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar, and also: The International Year of Freshwater The European Disability Year Events January January 1 - Luíz Inácio Lula Da Silva becomes the 37th President of Brazil. ... News is the reporting of current events usually by local, regional or mass media in the form of newspapers, television and radio programs, or sites on the World Wide Web. ... The neutrality and accuracy of this article are disputed. ... In politics, left-wing, political left, leftism, or simply the left, are terms that refer (with no particular precision) to the segment of the political spectrum typically associated with any of several strains of socialism, social democracy, or liberalism (especially but not exclusively in the American sense of the word... In politics, right-wing, the political right, or simply the right, are terms which refer, with no particular precision, to the segment of the political spectrum in opposition to left-wing politics. ... Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean Howard Brush Dean III, M.D. (born November 17, 1948) is a prominent American Democratic politician, currently serving as chairman of the Democratic National Committee. ... Wesley Kanne Clark (born December 23, 1944) is a retired four-star general in the U.S. Army. ... J. Bradford DeLong (b. ...

The Iraq war was the first "blog war" in another way: bloggers in Baghdad gained wider readership, and one (Salam Pax) published a book of his blog. Blogs also arose amongst soldiers serving in the Iraq war. Such milblogs have given readers a new perspective on the realities of war. Reading the thoughts of people who were "on the spot" provided a counterpoint, if not a counterweight, to official news sources. Blogs were often used to draw attention to obscure news sources, for example posting links to the traffic cameras in Madrid as a huge anti-terrorism demonstration filled the streets in the wake of the M11 attacks. Bloggers would often provide nearly instant commentary on televised events, which became a secondary meaning of the word "blogging," such as "I am blogging Rice's testimony," i.e., "I am posting my reactions to Rice's testimony to my blog as I watch it." The neutrality and accuracy of this article are disputed. ... A street map of Baghdad Average temperature (red) and precipitations (blue) in Baghdad Baghdad (بغداد) is the capital of Iraq and the Baghdad Province. ... Salam Pax (Arabic and Latin for peace) is a pseudonymous blogger from Iraq whose site Where is Raed? (see external links) received notable media attention during (and after) the 2003 invasion of Iraq. ... 2003 GMO USDA protest Protest expresses relatively overt reaction to events or situations: sometimes in favour, more often opposed. ... The scene of one of the Madrid bombings. ...

By the end of 2003 top rated blogs Instapundit, Daily Kos and Atrios were receiving over 75,000 unique visitors per day. Instapundit is a U.S. political weblog produced by Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee. ... Daily Kos is an American political weblog aimed at Democrats and progressives. ... Dr. Duncan Black, known under his internet publishing pseudonym as Atrios, is the author of the popular liberal weblog Eschaton, which receives an average of over 100,000 hits per day. ...

Blogging goes mainstream

In 2004, the role of blogs became increasingly mainstream, as political consultants, news services and candidates began using them as tools for outreach and opinion formation. Even politicians not actively involved in a campaign such as Tom Watson, a UK Labour Party MP, began to use blogging as a means for creating a bond with constituents and creating a channel for their ideas and opinions. Minnesota Public Radio broadcast a program by Christopher Lydon and Matt Stoller called "The Blogging of the President," which covered the transformation in politics that blogging seemed to presage. The Columbia Journalism Review began regular coverage of blogs and blogging. Anthologies of blog pieces began to reach print, and blogging personalities began appearing on radio and television. In the summer of that year both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions credentialed bloggers, and blogs became a standard part of the publicity arsenal, with mainstream programs, such as Chris Matthews' Hardball, forming their own blogs. Merriam-Webster's Dictionary declared "Blog" as the word of the year in 2004. (Wikinews (http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Blog_declared_Word_of_the_Year)) Political consulting is the business which has grown up around advising and assisting political campaigns, primarily in the United States. ... Thomas Anthony Watson (born 8 January 1967) is a politician in the United Kingdom. ... The Labour Party is a centre-left or social democratic political party in the United Kingdom (see British politics), and one of the United Kingdoms three main political parties. ... A Member of Parliament, or MP, is a representative elected by the voters of an electoral district to a parliament; in the Westminster system, specifically to the lower house. ... Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) is a regional public radio network based in the U.S. state of Minnesota that has been broadcasting since 1967. ... Christopher Lydon born in Boston, Massachusetts, 1940, is an American media personality and author, whose work in radio includes creating The Connection for WBUR. He is a former journalist with the New York Times, former WGBH, Boston, evening news anchor and a candidate for mayor of Boston in 1993. ... Matt Stoller, blogger and media producer best known for The Blogging of the President radio show. ... The Columbia Journalism Review is an American magazine for professional journalists published bimonthly by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism since 1961. ... Featured at the Democratic National Convention are speeches by prominent party figures. ... The Republican National Convention, the presidential nominating convention of the United States Republican Party, is held every four years to determine the partys candidate for the coming Presidential election and the partys platform. ... Chris Matthews Christopher John Matthews (born December 17, 1945) hosts a nightly, hour-long talk show called Hardball with Chris Matthews on the American cable television channel MSNBC. Matthews is a graduate of Holy Cross College, and did graduate work in economics at the University of North Carolina. ... Hardball with Chris Matthews is a talk show on MSNBC hosted by Chris Matthews. ... Merriam-Webster, originally known as the G. & C. Merriam Company of Springfield, Massachusetts, is a United States company that publishes reference books, especially dictionaries that are descendants of Noah Websters An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828). ...

Blogs were some of the driving forces behind the "Rathergate" scandal involving Dan Rather of CBS and some memos used on the show 60 Minutes II. Within 72 hours a coordinated group of bloggers had built a case that they were likely forgeries. The evidence presented eventually created such concern over the issue that CBS was forced to address the situation and make an apology for their inadequate reporting techniques. This is viewed by many bloggers as the point of blogs' acceptance by the mass media as a source of news. It also showed how blogs could keep the pressure on an established news source, forcing defenses and then a retraction of the original story. The Killian documents (often referred to as the CBS documents during the 2004 US presidential campaign) were memos purportedly written by the late Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian. ... Dan Rather, from a telecast in October 2004. ... CBSs first color logo, which debuted in the fall of 1965. ... 60 Minutes is the name of an American magazine-format television news program produced by CBS News. ... Forgery is the process of making or adapting objects or documents (see false document), with the intention to deceive (fraud is the use of objects obtained through forgery). ...

Blogging is also used now to break consumer complaints and vulnerabilities of products, in the way that Usenet and email lists once were. One such example is the vulnerability of Kryptonite 2000 locks. The Kryptonite lock is a brand of lock for securing a bicycle to a pole or other fixture, when the owner wants to leave the bicycle in a public place. ...

Bloggers have also moved over to other media. Atrios, Glenn Reynolds and Markos Moulitsas Zúniga appear on the radio, and Ana Marie Cox, better known as Wonkette, appears on television. Hugh Hewitt is an example of a media personality who has moved in the other direction, adding to his reach in "old media" by being an influential blogger. Dr. Duncan Black, known under his internet publishing pseudonym as Atrios, is the author of the popular liberal weblog Eschaton, which receives an average of over 100,000 hits per day. ... Glenn Reynolds (born August 27, 1960) is Beauchamp Brogan Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee, and is best known as the Internets Instapundit. ... Markos Moulitsas Zúniga (born September 11, 1971), often known by his username Kos, is the founder and main author of Daily Kos, a popular liberal political weblog. ... Ana Marie Cox is an American weblogger based in Washington, DC. She is the former executive editor of Suck. ... Wonkette is both the pen name of Washington, DC-area journalist Ana Marie Cox, the former executive editor of Suck. ... Hugh Hewitt is a United States conservative radio talk show host, author and blogger. ...

In January 2005, Fortune magazine listed Peter Rojas, Xeni Jardin, Ben Trott and Mena Trott, Jonathan Schwartz, Jason Goldman, Robert Scoble, and Jason Calacanis as 8 Bloggers that business people "could not ignore". 2005 : January - February - March - April - May - June - July - August - September - October - November - December- → Deaths in January • 29 Ephraim Kishon • 25 Philip Johnson • 23 Johnny Carson • 22 Parveen Babi • 20 Jan Nowak-Jeziorański • 17 Virginia Mayo • 17 Zhao Ziyang • 15 Ruth Warrick • 14 Rudolph Moshammer Recent deaths Ongoing events • Tsunami relief... Categories: Magazines stubs | Time Warner subsidiaries | Business magazines ... Categories: People stubs | Bloggers | American journalists | Reporters and correspondents | Wikipedians with article ... Ben Trott and Mena G. Trott (born September 1977) are the married co-founders of Six Apart, creators of Movable Type and TypePad. ... Ben Trott and Mena G. Trott (born September 1977) are the married co-founders of Six Apart, creators of Movable Type and TypePad. ... Robert Scoble is a technical evangelist who works for Microsoft and maintains the popular blog, Scobleizer. ...

Blogging and culture

Blogging however, was as much about technology as politics, and the proliferation of tools to run blogs and the communities around them connected blogging with the Open Source movement. Writers such as Larry Lessig and David Weinberger used their blogs to promote not just blogging in specific, but different social models in general. One of the running discussions within journalism and blogging is what "blogging" means for the way news "happens" and is covered. This leads to questions over intellectual property and the role of the mass media in society. Many bloggers differentiate themselves from the mainstream media, while others are members of that media working through a different channel. The open source movement is an offshoot of the free software movement that advocates open-source software as an alternative label for free software, primarily on pragmatic rather than philosophical grounds. ... Lawrence Lessig Lawrence Lessig (born June 3, 1961) is a professor of law at Stanford Law School and founder of its Center for Internet and Society. ... David Weinberger is a technologist and commentator, probably best known as co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto (originally a website, and eventually a book). ... In law, particularly in common law jurisdictions, intellectual property or IP refers to a legal entitlement which sometimes attaches to the expressed form of an idea or of other intangible subject matter. ... Mass media is the term used to denote, as a class, that section of the media specifically conceived and designed to reach a very large audience (typically at least as large as the whole population of a nation state). ... Mass media is the term used to denote, as a class, that section of the media specifically conceived and designed to reach a very large audience (typically at least as large as the whole population of a nation state). ...

Many bloggers have large agendas, and see blogging as part of Open Source Politics, or the ability of people to participate more directly in politics, helping to frame the debate (See George Lakoff). Whereas institutions see blogging as a means of "getting around the filter" and pushing message directly to the public. Open source politics is a term used to describe a political process that uses Internet technologies such as blogs and email to provide for a rapid feedback mechanism between political organizations and their supporters. ... George P. Lakoff is a professor of linguistics (in particular, cognitive linguistics) at the University of California, Berkeley where he has taught since 1972. ... Message in its most general meaning is the object of communication. ...

Creating and publishing weblogs

Since their introduction, a number of software packages have appeared to allow people to create their own weblog. Blog hosting sites and Web services to provide editing via the Web have proliferated. Common examples include GreatestJournal, Pitas, Blogger, LiveJournal and Xanga. A software package is a special method for the distribution and installation of software on computer systems. ... GreatestJournal is a weblog site allowing Internet users to keep an online journal or diary. ... One might be looking for peta. ... Blogger logo Blogger, a coined word created by Pyra Labs, is a service that provides Web-based tools used by individuals to publish to the Web. ... LiveJournal (often abbreviated LJ) is the name of a weblog site allowing Internet users to keep an online journal or diary. ... Screenshot of Xanga. ...

Many more advanced bloggers prefer to generate their blogs by using server-side software tools such as Nucleus CMS, Movable Type, bBlog, WordPress, b2evolution, boastMachine and Serendipity to publish on their own Web site or a third party site, or to host a group of blogs for a company or school. Such programs provide greater flexibility and power, but require more knowledge. If they provide a Web interface for editing, server-based systems make it easy for travelers to create and edit text; many travelers like to produce their travelblogs from Internet cafes while they travel around the globe. Nucleus CMS is an open-source content management system written in PHP, with a MySQL backend. ... Movable Type, or MT, is a proprietary weblog publishing system owned by California Corporation Six Apart. ... The title given to this article is incorrect due to technical limitations. ... WordPress is a web publishing system (a. ... b2evolution is a multi-lingual, multi-user, multi-blog publishing system written in PHP and backed by a MySQL database. ... Overview boastMachine is a robust web-publishing application (a. ... Serendipity is a PHP based weblog system. ... A school is most commonly a place designated for learning. ... An Internet cafe or cybercafe is a place where one can use a computer with Internet access for a fee, usually per hour or minute; sometimes one can have unmetered access with a pass for a day or month, etc. ...

In addition, some people program their own blogs from scratch by using PHP, CGI, or other server side software. While these are much more difficult to create, they add a maximum potential for creativity. PHP logo PHP is a widely used open-source programming language primarily for server-side applications and developing dynamic web content, and more recently, other software. ... Common Gateway Interface (CGI) is an important World Wide Web technology that enables a client web browser to request data from a program executed on the Web server. ... One can define creativity as a tool to develop innovation. ...

Two features which are common to blogging are "blogrolls" and "commenting" or "feedback."

A blogroll is a list of other blogs that are linked separately from any article. This is one means by which a blogger creates a context for his blog, by listing other blogs that are similar to his/her own, or blogs the blogger thinks may be of relevance to users. It is also used as measure of the number of citations a blog has, and is used to rank "blog authority" in a manner similar to the way that Google uses hard coded HTML linking to create "page rank." Still another use of the "blogroll" is reciprocal linking: bloggers agree to link to each other, or link to another blog in hopes of getting a link in return. A blogroll is a collection of links to other weblogs that are found on most weblogs. ... Google, Inc. ... In computing, HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a markup language designed for the creation of web pages and other information viewable in a browser. ...

Another central, and sometimes controversial, aspect of blogging is the use of a feedback comment systems. A comment system allows users to post their own comments on an article or "thread." Some blogs do not have comments, or have a closed commenting system which requires approval from those running the blog. For other bloggers, including several very prominent ones, comments are the crucial feature which distinguishes a "true" blog from other kinds of blogs. Commenting can either be built into the software, or added by using a service such as HaloScan. If a blog has regular commenters, this is referred to as the blog's community. HaloScan provides a free, easy to use commenting and trackback system for weblogs and websites, allowing visitors to leave instant feedback. ...

Tools such as Ecto (http://www.kung-foo.tv/ecto/) and w.bloggar (http://wbloggar.com/) allow users to maintain their Web hosted blog without the need to be online while composing or editing posts. Enhancements to weblog technology continue to be developed, such as the TrackBack feature introduced by Movable Type in 2002 and subsequently adopted by other software companies (e.g., Userland (http://backend.userland.com/trackback)) to enable automatic notification between websites of related content—such as a post on a particular topic or one which responds to a post on another blog [5] (http://www.movabletype.org/trackback/beginners/). bBlog has gone as far as implementing threaded trackbacks on comments, and comments on trackbacks. TrackBack is a system implemented by many blogging tools, including Movable Type and WordPress, that allows a blogger to see who has seen the original post and has written another entry concerning it. ... Movable Type, or MT, is a proprietary weblog publishing system owned by California Corporation Six Apart. ... The title given to this article is incorrect due to technical limitations. ...

Blogs with features such as TrackBack are credited with complicating search engine page ranking techniques [6] (http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/33366.html) [7] (http://www.sixapart.com/log/2003/10/its_all_about_c.shtml). Integrating these into search engines has proven to be a challenge, and has been used to deliberately "push" page rankings. However, as one Google executive remarked, it is the search engine's job to find the ways that a website represents a "vote" for another website. This page is about Google Inc. ...

Web hosting companies and online publications also provide blog creation tools, such as Salon (http://www.salon.com/blogs), Tripod (http://www.tripod.com/), Bravenet (http://www.bravenet.com/) and America Online (http://hometown.aol.com/), which calls its subscriber blogs "journals."

Types of weblogs

Personal

Often, the word blog is used to describe an online diary or journal, such as LiveJournal. The weblog format of an online diary makes it possible for users without much experience to create, format, and post entries with ease. People write their day-to-day experiences, complaints, poems, prose, illicit thoughts and more, often allowing others to contribute, fulfilling to a certain extent Tim Berners-Lee's original view of the World Wide Web as a collaborative medium. In 2001, mainstream awareness of online diaries began to increase dramatically. A diary is a book for writing discrete entries arranged by date. ... A journal (through French from late Latin diurnalis, daily) is a daily record of events or business. ... LiveJournal (often abbreviated LJ) is the name of a weblog site allowing Internet users to keep an online journal or diary. ... A diary is a book for writing discrete entries arranged by date. ... Bust of Homer, one of the earliest European poets, in the British Museum Poetry (ancient Greek: ποιεω (poieo) = I create) is an art form in which human language is used for its aesthetic qualities in addition to, or instead of, its notional and semantic content. ... Prose is writing distinguished from poetry by its greater variety of rhythm and its closer resemblance to the patterns of everyday speech. ... Sir Tim Berners-Lee Sir Tim (Timothy John) Berners-Lee, KBE (TimBL or TBL) (b. ... Graphic representation of the world wide web around Wikipedia The World Wide Web (WWW, or simply Web) is an information space in which the items of interest, referred to as resources, are identified by global identifiers called Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI). ... 2001 is a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

Online diaries are integrated into the daily lives of many teenagers and college students, with communications between friends playing out over their blogs. Even fights may be posted in the diaries, with not-so-veiled insults of each other easily readable by all their friends, enemies, and complete strangers. The Abduction of Psyche by William-Adolphe Bouguereau Adolescence is the transitional stage of development between childhood and full adulthood, representing the period of time during which a person is biologically adult but emotionally not at full maturity. ...

Thoughtful

Where a personal weblog is primarily concerned with daily life and events, and many topical weblogs focus on some technical topic, weblogs in the "thoughtful" category present an individual's (or a small group's) thoughts on whatever subject comes to hand; not necessarily the latest computer technology or the latest political scandal, but typically less contingent and more philosophical subjects. Thoughtful weblogs of course blur into personal weblogs on one side and topical or political ones on the other, but are distinct enough to constitute a category of their own. The tower of a personal computer (specifically a Power Mac G5). ... Philosophy (from a combination of the Greek words philos meaning love and sophia meaning wisdom), as a practice, aims at some kind of understanding, knowledge or wisdom about fundamental matters such as reality, knowledge, meaning, value, being and truth. ...

FriendBlog

A FriendBlog is a distributed networked journal on the web, composed of short, frequently updated posts written by friends connected through their similar interests. The author allows his FriendBlog to connect to other FriendBlogs, belonging to friends and acquaintances. This creates a "chain" of blogs. www.jointheweb.com is an example of a FriendBlog.

Topical

Topical blogs focus on a specific niche, often a technical one. An example is Google Blog (http://www.google.com/googleblog/), covering nothing but Google news. Another example is a soldier blog. Many blogs now allow categories, which means a general blog can be reshuffled to become a topical blog at the user's need. Soldier blogs are blogs written by soldiers. ...

News

Many weblogs provide a news digest on a certain topic e.g. "Internet in China" (http://china-netinvestor.blogspot.com/), "Baseball" (http://baseballnews.blogspot.com/), or "Music" (http://djmonstermo.blogspot.com/) with short abstracts/summaries and links to interesting articles in the press.

Collaborative (also collective or group)

Many weblogs are written by more than one person about a specific topic. Collaborative weblogs can be open to everyone or limited to a group of people. MetaFilter is an example of this type of weblog. Metafilters main page MetaFilter, known as MeFi to its members, is a community weblog whose purpose is to share and discuss interesting links. ...

Slashdot, whose status as a blog has been debated, nevertheless has a team of editors who approve and post links to technology news stories throughout the day. Although Slashdot does not refer to itself as a weblog, it shares some characteristics with weblogs. Slashdot (frequently abbreviated online as /.) is a popular website, primarily consisting of short summaries of stories on other websites with links to the stories, and provisions for readers to comment on the story. ...

A new form of blog involves cooperation between bloggers and traditional media sources, allowing for topics discussed on the air to find legs on the Web, and vice-versa. The first and most prominent example of this form is Lone Star Times (http://www.lonestartimes.com), which is affiliated with Houston talk-radio station KSEV. KSEV is a talk station at 700 on the AM radio dial and is available throughout the Houston, Texas area. ...

Political

Another common kind of blog is a political blog. Often an individual will link to articles from news web sites and post their own comments as well. Many of these blogs comment on whatever interests the author. Some of them are more specialized. One subspecies is the watch blog, a blog which sets out to criticize what the author considers systematic errors or bias in an online newspaper or news site — or perhaps even by a more popular blogger.

Political blogs attracted attention because of their use by two political candidates in 2003: Howard Dean and Wesley Clark. Both gained political buzz on the Internet, and particularly among bloggers, before they were taken seriously by the establishment media as candidates. Joe Trippi, Dean's campaign manager, made the internet a particular focus of the campaign. Both candidates stumbled in the end, but were, at one time or another, thought of as front runners for the Democratic Nomination. Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean Howard Brush Dean III, M.D. (born November 17, 1948) is a prominent American Democratic politician, currently serving as chairman of the Democratic National Committee. ... Wesley Kanne Clark (born December 23, 1944) is a retired four-star general in the U.S. Army. ... Joe Trippi is a long-time Democratic campaign operative, serving most recently as campaign manager for presidential candidate Howard Dean. ...

In 2004, the Democrats took political blogging a major step forward by creating Blog Swarm (http://blogswarm.org) to coordinate the hypertext links of progressive blogs. This allowed one blog to drive traffic by harnessing the power of a full blog array. In computer programming, an array, also known as a vector or list, is one of the simplest data structures. ...

Legal

Blogs that discuss law and legal affairs are often referred to as blawgs.

Directory

Directory weblogs are useful for web-surfers because they often collect numerous web sites with interesting content in an easy to use and constantly updated format. News-related weblogs can fall into this category or the previous one (political blogs).

Corporate

Increasingly, employees of corporations are posting official or semi-official blogs about their work. The employers however, do not always appreciate the endeavor. In January 2005 Joe Gordon was fired from Waterstone's bookshop in Edinburgh, Scotland, because he referred to his boss as an "asshole in sandals." In 2004 Ellen Simonetti, a Delta Air Lines flight attendant, was fired for posing in uniform on her blog. Perhaps the most famous case of all occurred when "Troutgirl" Joyce Park was fired (http://troutgirl.com/blog/index.php?/archives/46_Shitcanned.html) from Friendster because she discussed the rationale behind the website's technology conversion from J2EE to PHP on her blog. 2005 : January - February - March - April - May - June - July - August - September - October - November - December- → Deaths in January • 29 Ephraim Kishon • 25 Philip Johnson • 23 Johnny Carson • 22 Parveen Babi • 20 Jan Nowak-Jeziorański • 17 Virginia Mayo • 17 Zhao Ziyang • 15 Ruth Warrick • 14 Rudolph Moshammer Recent deaths Ongoing events • Tsunami relief... Gower Street branch Waterstones is a United Kingdom based chain of bookshops. ... Edinburgh viewed from Arthurs Seat. ... Scotland (Alba in Scottish Gaelic) is a country or nation and former independent kingdom of northwest Europe, and one of the four constituent parts of the United Kingdom. ... 2004 is a leap year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Delta Air Lines ( NYSE: DAL) is a major U.S. airline headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, operating a large domestic and international network that spans North America, South America, Europe, and Asia. ... Friendster Logo Friendster is a social networking website. ... Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition or J2EE is a Standard (albeit with no ISO or ECMA standard) for developing distributed Multi-tier architecture applications, based on modular components running on an application server. ... PHP logo PHP is a widely used open-source programming language primarily for server-side applications and developing dynamic web content, and more recently, other software. ...

Other employers have reacted differently. For instance, when Power Line bloggers were attacked by a Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist, one of the bloggers' employers came to his defense (http://powerlineblog.com/archives/2005_01.php#009119). Power Line is a conservative blog run by three lawyers, John H. Hinderaker (Hindrocket), Scott W. Johnson (The Big Trunk) and Paul Mirengoff (Deacon). Power Line covers political and social issues relevant to modern Americans. ... The Star Tribune is the largest newspaper in Minnesota and is published seven days each week in an edition for the Minneapolis-St. ...

With the rise in popularity of blogs in 2004 senior management caught on to the trend and by January 2005 several types of organizations, including universities, had started using blogs to communicate with their stakeholders. Many believe this corporate takeover of a tool that was used primarily by Internet enthusiasts will lead to a decrease in the popularity of the medium. Others believe that the use of blogs by organizations will add new voices and vitality to the medium. At any rate, there is little evidence that the growth rate of the blogosphere has slowed.

In 2005 the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) published a guide to blog anonymously and safely (http://www.eff.org/Privacy/Anonymity/blog-anonymously.php) about work or anything else. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is a non-profit advocacy and legal organization with the stated purpose of being dedicated to preserving first amendment rights in the context of todays digital age. ...

Advice

Many weblogs provide expert advice, such as Microsoft technical knowledge (GaryDev (http://blog.advisor.com/blog/garydev.nsf)) or fiction publishing for women (Four Chicks and a Book (http://www.codexwriters.com/4chicks/)). The Three Graces, here in a painting by Sandro Botticelli, were the goddesses of charm, beauty, nature, human creativity and fertility in Greek mythology. ... Publishing is the activity of putting information in the public arena. ...

Religious

Some blogs discuss religious topics. Blogs like Rabbinical Authority Consortium of HACKers (http://rachack.blogspot.com) or Rabbi Gil Student (http://hirhurim.blogspot.com)'s blog act as defenders of their religion and also as news sources and forums for debate. Religious blogs also show the public's points of view on various controversies both in religion and in politics, economics, and life in general.

Formats

Some weblogs specialise in particular forms of presentation, such as images (see web comics), or videos (see videoblog), or on a particular theme, and acronyms have been developed for some of these, such as moblogs (for "mobile" blog). Web comics are comics that are available on the web. ... Videoblogs is a variant of weblogs using video as their main content, often with additional text as in a standard weblog. ... Moblog is a portmanteau of mobile and weblog. ...

Audio

One of the types of blog that has undergone rapid expansion since the year 2000 is the MP3 blog, which make audio files available to the user. MP3 blogs are normally targeted at highly specialized musical genres, such as late 60s soul music or early 90s hip-hop or even the latest stuff in electronic dance music genres like grime. However, personal audioblogs are also on the rise (See also Podcasting). 2000 is a leap year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ... An MP3 blog is a type of weblog in which the creator makes music files, normally in the MP3 format, available for download. ... Musical genres are categories which contain music which share a certain style or which have certain elements in common. ... For other uses, see Soul music (disambiguation). ... Hip hop is a cultural movement that began among urban African American and Latino youth in New York City and has since spread around the world. ... Grime is musical offshoot of the early 21st century UK Garage scene that developed in Londons East End between 2002-2004. ... Podcasting is a way of publishing sound files to the Internet, allowing users to subscribe to a feed and receive new audio files automatically. ...

Photography

The increasing ubiquity of digital cameras and broadband connections has made it ever easier to post and share photos on the web. Bloggers have adapted their software to facilitate the publishing of photos, creating what is called a photoblog. Photo sharing sites like Buzznet (http://www.buzznet.com) and Flickr have integrated the typical photo gallery service with photo sharing, blogging and syndication to create a new kind of social software. A digital camera, as opposed to a film or video camera, uses an electronic sensor to transform images (or video) into electronic data. ... Broadband Internet access, often shortened to broadband Internet or just broadband is a high data-transmission rate Internet connection. ... A photography blog, picture log or simply a photoblog, is a web application which contains periodic posts containing user-taken photographs on a common webpage. ... Photo sharing is a term given to a crop of mid-2000s websites which provide means to publish a collection of digital photos online in a centralized and organized fashion. ... Flickr is a digital photo sharing website and web services suite. ... Social software applications allow people to interact in virtual reality, connecting or collaborating by use of a computer network. ...

Video

In January 2005 the first VloggerCon (http://vloggercon.blogspot.com) was held, catering for a new breed of bloggers, the video blogger. A vlog, or videoblog, is a blog where video is included in blog posts. This is also known as videoblogging. Vlog, videoblogging, or more recently vog means to include video in a blog. ...

Common terms

Blogging, like any hobby, has developed something of a specialised vocabulary. The following is an attempt to explain a few of the more common phrases and words, including etymologies when not obvious. A vocabulary is a set of words known to a person or other entity, or that are part of a specific language. ... Etymology is the study of the origins of words. ...

Audioblog

A blog where the posts consist mainly of voice recordings sent by mobile phone, sometimes with some short text message added for metadata purposes. (cf. podcasting)

Blog feed

The XML-based file in which the blog hosting software places a machine-readable version of the blog so that it may be "syndicated" for further distribution on the web. Formats such as RSS and Atom are used to structure the XML file.

Blogfoo

Statements written with an air of generality while obviously pointed at a specific person or group of people.

Blog hopping

to follow links from one blog entry to another, with related side-trips to various articles, sites, discussion forums, and more.

Blogorrhoea

A portmanteau of "blog" and "logorrhoea", meaning excessive and/or incoherent talkativeness in a weblog.

Blogroll

A list of blogs. Usually a blogger features a list of his favorite blogs in the sidebar of his blog. These lists can be made dynamic using services like BlogRolling (http://www.blogrolling.com).

Blog site

The web location (URL) of a blog, which may be either a dedicated domain, a sub-domain, or embedded within a web site.

Blogsite

Sometimes confused with a simple blog or blog site, but a blogsite is a web site which combines blog feeds from a variety of sources, as well as non-blog sources, and adds significant value over the raw blog feeds.

Blogsnob

A person who refuses to respond to comments on their blog from people outside their circle of friends.

Moblog

A portmanteau of "mobile" and "blog". A blog featuring posts sent mainly by mobile phone, using SMS or MMS messages. They are often photoblogs.

Permalink

Permanent link. The unique URL of a single post. Use this when you want to link to a post somewhere.

Ping

The alert in the TrackBack system that notifies the original poster of a blog post when someone else writes an entry concerning the original post.

TrackBack

A system that allows a blogger to see who has seen the original post and has written another entry concerning it. The system works by sending a 'ping' between the blogs, and therefore providing the alert.

An MP3 blog is a type of weblog in which the creator makes music files, normally in the MP3 format, available for download. ... Metadata can refer to a number of things: Metadata (computing) Metadata (corporation) This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ... cf. ... Podcasting is a way of publishing sound files to the Internet, allowing users to subscribe to a feed and receive new audio files automatically. ... A blog feed is an XML-based file in which the blog hosting software for a blog site places a machine-readable version of the blog so that it may be syndicated for further distribution on the web. ... Blog hopping is to follow links from one blog entry to another, with related side-trips to various articles, sites, discussion forums and more. ... A portmanteau (plural: Portmanteaux or portmanteaux) is a word that is formed by combining two words. ... Logorrhoea (US logorrhea) (Greek λογορροια, logorrhoia, word-flux) is defined as an excessive flow of words and, when used medically, refers to incoherent talkativeness that occurs in certain kinds of mental illness, such as mania. ... A blogroll is a collection of links to other weblogs that are found on most weblogs. ... A blogsite (one word) is a website with a web application that integrates content from multiple sources, such as weblogs, syndicated blog feeds, discussion forums, FAQs, etc. ... A Uniform Resource Locator, URL (either pronounced as earl (IPA: [ɜː˞l]; SAMPA: [3:`l]) or spelled out), or Web address, is a standardized address for some resource (such as a document or image) on the Internet (or elsewhere). ... A blogsite (one word) is a website with a web application that integrates content from multiple sources, such as weblogs, syndicated blog feeds, discussion forums, FAQs, etc. ... This article is about a type of web application. ... A blogsite (one word) is a website with a web application that integrates content from multiple sources, such as weblogs, syndicated blog feeds, discussion forums, FAQs, etc. ... A blogsite (one word) is a website with a web application that integrates content from multiple sources, such as weblogs, syndicated blog feeds, discussion forums, FAQs, etc. ... Moblog is a portmanteau of mobile and weblog. ... A portmanteau (plural: Portmanteaux or portmanteaux) is a word that is formed by combining two words. ... A received SMS being announced on a Nokia phone. ... Multimedia Messaging System (MMS) is the logical evolution of the Short Message Service SMS, a text-only messaging system for mobile networks. ... A permalink (a portmanteau made by contracting the phrase permanent link) is a type of URL designed to refer to a specific information item (often a news story or weblog item) and to remain unchanged permanently, or at least for a lengthy period of time to prevent linkrot. ... TrackBack is a system implemented by many blogging tools, including Movable Type and WordPress, that allows a blogger to see who has seen the original post and has written another entry concerning it. ...

See also

• Autocasting
• BlogRoots
• Blogstream
• Commonplace: a historical precedent for the weblog
• Google bomb
• News aggregator
• Persian weblogs
• Podcasting

Autocasting is an automated form of podcasting that allows bloggers and blog readers generate audio versions of text blogs from RSS feeds. ... BlogRoots is a weblog support site that grew from the book We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs (Paul Bausch, Matthew Haughey, Meg Hourihan, authors. ... Blogstream is a play on the term mainstream that references the alternative news and information network growing up around weblogs and user driven content mechanisms. ... During the Renaissance (especially in England), commonplaces (or commonplace books) were for some people a popular way to compile knowledge, usually done by writing information into books. ... A Google bomb or Google wash is an attempt to influence the ranking of a given site in results returned by the Google search engine. ... A news aggregator (also known as feed reader or feed aggregator) is a software application or remotely hosted service that collects content from disparate news sources, allowing the user a single place of consumption and alerting the user of content updates. ... Blogging has opened a new horizon for self-expression in the traditionally mute Iranian society where individualism was less respected. ... Podcasting is a way of publishing sound files to the Internet, allowing users to subscribe to a feed and receive new audio files automatically. ...

External links

• The Blogger Manifesto (or, Do Weblogs Make the Internet Better or Worse?) (http://www.periodicdiversions.com/archives/2003/09/16/the_blogger_manifesto_or_do_weblogs_make_the_internet_better_or_worse.html)
• Blog Primer (http://www.dvorak.org/blog/primer/blogprimer1.htm) — Understanding and Reading a Blog for Beginners by John C. Dvorak
• BlogTree.com (http://www.blogtree.com/) — Site that attempts to map blog genealogy.
• Committee to Protect Bloggers (http://committeetoprotectbloggers.blogspot.com/)
• A Compendium (http://www.lights.com/weblogs/tools.html) of Weblog tools
• Dan Gillmor's We The Media. Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People (http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/wemedia/book/) (2004, full text online) sees blogs as paradigmatic of a new form of journalism in the digital age.
• A FAQ on Blogs (http://www.andreas.com/faq-blog.html) by Andreas Ramos
• A glossary of blogging terms (http://www.samizdata.net/blog/glossary.html)
• Guardian: special report - weblogs (http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/weblogs/)
• MeatballWiki's (http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?WebLog) very comprehensive article on Weblogs (particularly about their history).
• The Online Coalition letter to the FEC (http://www.onlinecoalition.com/)
• Open Directory Project: Weblog Search Engines (http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/On_the_Web/Weblogs/Search_Engines/)
• Weblog service providing: Identification of functional requirements and evaluation of existing weblog services in German and English languages (http://westner.levrang.de/cms/front_content.php?idcatart=30&lang=1&client=1), master dissertation by Markus K. Westner
• Weblogs: A History and Perspective (http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html) by Rebecca Blood (2000).
• "Web of Influence" (http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=2707) — by Daniel W. Drezner, Henry Farrell from Foreign Policy Magazine (http://www.foreignpolicy.com)
• Why I Hate Weblogs! (http://mama.indstate.edu/users/bones/WhyIHateWebLogs.html) — Sarcastic opinion article exploring the phenomenon (warning: harsh language).
• "Why your Movable Type blog must die" (http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/2/2/171117/8823) (humorous article)