Web log

A web log (also known as a blog, but see below) is a website that tracks headlines and articles from other websites. They are frequently maintained by volunteers and are typically devoted to a specific audience or topic.

Weblogs are often-updated sites that point to articles elsewhere on the web, often with comments, and to on-site articles. A weblog is kind of a continual tour, with a human guide who you get to know. There are many guides to choose from, each develops an audience, and there's also comraderie and politics between the people who run weblogs, they point to each other, in all kinds of structures, graphs, loops, etc. -- Dave Winer, [1]

Web logs are useful for web-surfers because they often collect numerous web sites with interesting content in an easy to use and constantly updated format.

The format of web logs varies, from simple bullet lists of hyper-links?, to article summaries with user-provided comments and ratings.

Since their introduction, a number of software packages have appeared to allow people to create their own web log.

Blog usually means a personal web log, a type of online diary, or journal? run by special blog software. Blog sites make 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, the popularity of blogs increased dramatically.

Some Example Web logs

• http://kuro5hin.org/
• http://slashdot.org/
• http://wmf.editthispage.com/
• http://www.xplane.com/xblog/
• http://www.blogthis.com/
• http://www.scripting.com/
• http://www.backwash.com/
• http://www.scripting.com/

A summary of Internet Web log activity

• http://blogdex.media.mit.edu/

/Talk