The term “blog” (short for “web log”) is just another way to describe an online diary or journal. The journal can be made up of many different forms of media, including writing, images, video clips and pictures taken with a digital camera or the camera inside the newer mobile phones. In its simplest form, the blog might just consist of lots of links to whatever the author finds interesting on the Internet.Blogs can be focused on one specific topic and written by one author who incorporates different ideas, resources and articles into each entry, or a blog can be written by many contributors on a common set of topics, like the popular technology blog Slashdot.

A blog can also express a personal viewpoint, becoming essentially a public diary that documents one person’s daily experience. Some blogs do so entirely through photographs, and these are called photoblogs. The simplest way to think of a blog is as an ongoing documentation that can be viewed by anyone in the world with access to the Internet, and that makes it a powerful tool. That “time factor,” the idea that something can be distributed globally in an instant and with a mere click of the mouse, is part of the attraction of blogs. With an upsurge of video technology, more and more blogging is done by posting videos to websites, further heightening the ability to share direct experience in near-real-time.

One feature of blogs that sets them apart from other forms of information media is the ability of readers to provide immediate feedback by publishing a comment that accompanies the original entry. There is a rapid increase in the number of blog readers who leave comments, which means that more and more people are becoming accustomed to participating in the social discourse that occurs in the “blogosphere.”Also on the rise are the use of tools such as RSS aggregators and XML feeds, which collect and gather information. In an age in which information is so ubiquitous, tools like RSS help to sift through volumes of stories, articles and newsfeeds that might otherwise seem overwhelming. Perhaps it is the desire of those living with so much information to participate in the media’s power of interpretation that has fueled the increase of bloggers. Never before has a medium such as the Internet offered the promise of instant publishing to so many readers.

This article was written by Emmanuel Odeh CEO of Arthur Redwood Co. He is an internet marketer and online entrepreneur and owner of www.hotbizcafe.com

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