Blog

Websites with dated items of content in reverse chronological order, self-published by bloggers. Items – sometimes called posts – may have keyword tags associated with them, are usually available as feeds, and often allow commenting. Traditional websites have pages as their main building blocks, with an address link (URL) for each page, and menus to provide navigation between them. Blogs are websites where the items of content – for example text, photos, video, audio – have URLs plus other ways of identifying them by keywords – known as tags. This means you can search for individuals items on the Net, and also pull items out of their sites and remix them through feeds and aggregation. Blogs are generally designed in journal format, with most recent items at the top of a page, and written in a conversational, personal style, giving the author an authentic voice online. Blogs can offer readers the opportunity to comment on, and link to items. Because blog items can be made available from the site in a stream of content – known as an RSS feed – you can subscribe to them and read them through a newsreader or aggregator. That means you don’t have to visit a blog site to read it – you can pull the content to your desktop or a single website aggregator. Blogs are easy to set up, and update. Their disadvantage is that items can get buried under the growing heap of new content unless the author provides some signposting.