What Is A Weblog?

Weblog is an abbreviation for "Web log". An even shorter -- and more common -- abbreviation is "blog". Think of a blog as an on-line diary where someone with a point of view and a desire to share it makes "postings" to his or her weblog on a regular basis. Some do their "blogging" weekly, some do it daily, some do it hourly -- or even more often. A person who has an active blog is called a "blogger". The process of converting a web site to a web site with a blog in it is called "bloggerizing". Welcome to my bloggerized web site. See BlogOn 2005 for a view of the future of blogging.

What does it mean to subscribe to a weblog?

Subscribing to a weblog is similar to subscribing to news alerts. When something changes at a blog you enjoy -- when the blogger writes something new -- you may want to know about it. The weblog is a new kind of publishing. There are millions of blogs. Technorati is a site that tracks many of them. When a blogger publishes something, a table of contents, called a "feed", of all their recent postings is created. This table of contents is usually placed on the blogger's web site. The name of the table of contents file is typically http://whateverWebsite.com/weblog/rss.xml. Unfortunately, the techies who invented all this decided to call the table of contents of a blog the rss.xml file. I think a better name would have been Webtoc -- the weblog table of contents. You can usually find the address of the "Webtoc" or feed at an icon like this ===> If you would prefer to take an easier approach, you can just click here and subscribe to my weblog and get a short email when I write something new. I do not make email addresses to anyone nor spam with you with other information. See my privacy policy and related things here.

How does a person actually read a weblog?

Weblogs are read using a weblog reader (technically called an RSS reader or RSS aggregator). The analogy is that to read web pages you use a browser and to read a weblog you use a weblog reader. In many cases you can also use a web browser for weblog writing and reading. Eventually, blogging will be completely integrated with the web.

Where do you get a weblog reader?

Just like there were numerous web browsers back in the mid 1990's, there are numerous weblog readers. I use the Opera browser which has a very nice built-in RSS feature. When you click on someone's orange XML icon Opera will ask you if you want to subscribe. It keeps all your blogs under an RSS tab in the browser. Last I looked there were over one hundred different blog readers/aggregators available. See "blogspace" for a list of some of the more popular ones. If you use Outlook, a popular new blog reader is Newsgator.

What software is used to create blogs?

The most popular software tools for bloggers is develped by Six Apart. They have a standalone version called Movable Type (which I use) and also a hosted version called Typepad.

blogger.com
bloglet.com
blogrolling.com
Weblog definitions
Subscribe to my weblog