Time between Xmas and New Year while I was having a nice little time with family and friends to loosen up, surprisingly i received some interesting mails from few of my readers. It’s not that i am a hot shot, people ask me for advice often or i have a huge scale of readers. May be unknowingly i did influence a small number of readers, well i am really happy for that. Anyway let’s get to the point, the interesting mails asking about different questions about blog platforms and blog publishing tools. So i decided to open up a “Blog Basics” section for blog, where i will try to provide articles with most basics of blogging, example- Blog platform choosing, creating/altering designs of blog etc. So this section’s first topic will be “what is weblog actually?”

Literally meaning of Weblog

Literally Weblog (popularly known as Blog) means user generated content laid out like journal in reverse chronological order(means earliest last, latest first). Weblog which is combination of Web and Log, means a persons web based log (i.e. Journal) entry. Since it is user generated content it can be only text, or image or video, or sound or even combination of all together.

Practiced meaning of Weblog

As i mentioned literally weblog imply, online journal entries, does that mean a forum, bulletin board can also be consider as Weblog? i am afraid not, in forum or bulletin boards create running conversations with “threads”. The word  ”threads” can be best described as topical connections between messages, where any member of forum can start a conversation(usually brief rather than detailed). On the other hand in typical blog almost anyone can respond(leave a comment) but not everyone have ability to publish content (Contents are usually broad/detailed on the topic). Another thing is forums are usually limited to registered members only, unlike a blog which is open to everyone.

Now days different blog has different styles and components, but still most blogs have some common elements. A typical blogs contains- A reverse chronological article entries (which usually called as post), every article usually have their own separate page, sorted into categories and comment section, have feed access to summary/full article (ATOM, RSS, RSS 2.0, XML). The biggest difference between a typical website and a blog is, blog update frequently and allow comments(participation of general audiences). Early weblogs were simply manually updated components of common websites. However, the evolution of tools to facilitate the production and maintenance of web articles posted in reverse chronological order made the publishing process feasible to a much larger, less technical population.

A blog can be written by one single person or even a group of people. In common sense blog should be a single person’s entry(if you want to consider blog as literal Journal). but recently their was controversy that multi-authored blog can really be called blog? in my opinion why not?, A journal can be also multi authored, example- Most Science Journal we see are authored by a group of scientists rather then a single geek.

Elements of a true blog

As web technology advancing in lightning speed, the elements of blogs are also changing. But a true blog (some of these may not apply to some types of blog) must have-

• Per topic comment section which is open to all.
• Regularly updated reverse chronological entry(Latest first).
• User friendly, means user can search through articles easily (text search or search by date/month/year).
• Democratic comment policy (means  every comment published, regardless of who left it-unless it is a Spam)
• A blog must be subscribable through feed (may or may not be free).
• If multi-authored, blog entry should contain authors name/screen name.