Problogger Diary

Maintaining a diary was something many parents advocated to their school going children. It served two purposes: improve language skills and handwriting. The beneficial side effect was that it was a record of one’s daily activities as a child—something that was interesting to read in later years. Now…

Diaries are seen as intimate friends by those who maintain them. The private accounts, the writer’s intimate thoughts and ideas which are detailed in diaries offer a glimpse into the person’s true nature. This makes diaries interesting reading and probably the most famous of such an account is the one by Anne Frank which chronicles her and her family’s life under the Nazi rule during World War II, and which was ultimately published. Tragic accounts aside, the content of a diary—no matter how mundane from the writer’s perspective—can be interesting to people in a different place and time.

1. What Is A Blog?

A Web Log (or just “blog”) is the broad term applied to the online variant of the personal diary. Unlike diaries, blogs are intended to be public. Thanks to the ease with which blogs can be put online,
people who have anything to say have eagerly jumped on the blogging bandwagon, making blogs a powerful social networking tool, and when combined with the power of the Internet, transcends
geographical borders. Putting one’s thoughts and ideas online makes it easier to find like minded people to collaborate with.

2. The Uses Of Blogs.
People blog for many reasons—some use it truly as an online diary, detailing their lives. The mundane-ness of a blog entry is what endears it to the readers—events that offer a slice of life of a citizen in one country can be interesting to people in another. Furthermore, the relative anonymity that the Net offers allows even introverts to open up. Some blog to convey a message to the world, especially when other channels are not available, or when revealing information through the usual channels would prove detrimental to their existence, as in the case of Chinese bloggers.

Some use blogs to convey a message in a more informal manner than is possible through usual mass media channels, as in the case of politicians who use their blogs to reach out to their constituencies or organisations who reveal information about themselves that does not make it to mass media channels—like the internal working environment—which could be of interest to prospective employees. Information put up in a blog is seen as more sincere since it is shorn of all the trappings of a mass media presentation. This helps build a rapport with the targeted audience, which would probably explain why organisations encourage their employees to blog (with strict limits on what can be put online, of course).

3. Types of Blogs.
The word “blog” give the impression that the account is textual in nature, probably due to the association with the diary. But on the Net, it is commonplace to see blogs with pictures (why type in a thousand words when a picture will do?) called photo blogs. Video blogs are a step further from Photoblogs (why put up a thousand pictures when a video will do?). Audio blogs incorporate audio
clips (why type out a long message when it can be recorded and played back?). All of the above are similar in the aspect that they are the expression of personal opinion of a single entity, what dif-
fers is the medium of communication. Moblogging which is the latest trend in this field of activity refers to reading and posting to blogs via a mobile phone.

4. Blog Statistics.
There are no confirmed and updated figures with regard to the number of blogs in the blogosphere. Like most initial efforts at diary writing, blogs too are abandoned as quickly as they are created. And, as this chapter advocates, many sign up to blogs because they would like to try out the features of the platform first hand before committing to it. Any figure put up will be wrong if only active blogs were to be considered—of course, defining an “active” blog is a subjective matter again.
The most recent available statistics state “The blogosphere is doubling in size every 6 months. It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago. On average, a new weblog is created every
second of every day”, and a blog search engine claims to index 5.5 crore blogs.

Some Esoteric-sounding Jargon.

• Blog, Blogging, Blogger: “To blog” means to write a entry into the blog. The person doing the blogging is called a blogger.
• Blogospher: The World of blogs and bloggers, a subset of the WWW.
• Post: A blog refers to the entire site, and every entry in the blog is also called a post. “To post” means to write a post to the blog.
• Vblog: Short for Video blogs. The post is usually in the form of a video clip, also called a Screencast.
• Blogroll:Bloggers include links to other blogs they regularly visit, in their blog. This is the Blogroll. Linking between blogs is seen as an important part of creating a popular blog.
• Podcast/Audiocast: A blog where the post is an audio file that can be listened to.
• Trackback: When a blog is quoted and linked to by another blog, it becomes a trackback to the former blog. Trackbacks are an indication of a blogs popularity and authority.
• Permalink: A Blog page can contain many posts. A Permalink refers to the unique URL that points to a particular post. Having a permalink allows direct access to a post, rather than a page.
• API: Short for Application Programming Interface. The “interface” offers clues to what this refers to: it is a set of routines with which two programs can interact.
• RSS: Short for Really Simple Syndication. This offers a way for the creator of an article to distribute it to a large audience. The creator of the article generates an RSS feed, which is a document created in XML. People desirous of being informed need to subscribe to the RSS feed, which can be read using specialised applications called feedreaders. ATOM is another syndication format like RSS.
• Bookmarking: It is difficult to remember all the URLs you visited. A bookmark makes this exercise easier by storing the URL as a link. All browsers have a bookmarking feature, which can be used to track your favourite sites. Bookmarking sites allow you to keep your favourites list online so that it is accessible from any place. An example of such site is del.icio.us.
• Community Editing: This refers to a process where the relevance of a news item is decided by the masses, rather than a single authority. For example, visitors to Digg.com can read news submitted by other visitors and rate them. News items receiving a higher rating are automatically propelled higher up the list, eventually ending up on the home page.
• Social Networking: Simply put, making new acquaintances and keeping in touch with existing ones.
• CMS: Short for Content Management System. There are a class of applications which ease the management of dynamic sites. “Dynamic” sites are those which have a high frequency of updating. For example, a Web site containing a bulletin board where many people come and interact would need to display the latest message typed in. Without a CMS managing this, it would be impossible for a Web administrator to make modifications to the webpage code everytime someone adds a message. Blogging software are a type of CMS.
• Pinging: In the context of blogs, pinging means informing a server that tracks blogs about changes to a blog. Blog tracking sites like weblogs.com, technorati.com, etc., update their listings every time a ping is received, so visitors to such sites can have access to the freshest blog posts.

Posted by Problogger Diary at Tuesday, March 24, 2009