What is a blog?
If you have read my previous article titled a little history about blog and blogging, you would remember I promised to write on the definition of blog myself, instead of merely providing a link to any site that has good definition on it and the reason being that a lot has changed about how people blog and how blogs are perceived.
However, I latter decided that it will help our understanding of what blog is if we take a look at how blog has been defined by other top site.
Today, We shall be looking at the reason why some of the definitions on blog does not necessary hold.
Now, let take a look at just two of such definitions:
1) A mere tool that makes web publishing easy.
Like most people out there I didn’t know what a blog actually was, I used to think of a blog as the host or tool used in creating or putting up a post (website). For instance, if you used Blogger or LiveJournal as your host, or you use a Movable Type Software like Wordpress then I called that a blog.
But how wrong I was.
Like you already know blogs represent a social phenomenon, therefore it keeps evolving, just as things are general changing on the internet.
Gone are the days when you just have to settle for the words “blogspot” or “wordpress” or any other application as part of your URL. Rather you could choose to register any domain name of your choice and have your blog hosted under it or as another page on your main website.
Today, some of these web publishing applications are getting more sophisticated and is changing the way people blog and this is likely to continue as long as there are continuous improvement on these applications.
Many are already using some of these applications to publish complex and sophisticated websites.
For instance, in many parts of the world we have individuals, companies and business that have incorporated blogs to their site. Just take a look at entrepreneur.com.
With this, we now have companies that uses blogs to communicate and relate with their customers, stake holders, prospects and at times with their staffs.
There are other companies, business and organizations even individual site whose main site is a blog. They simply had the blog customized as their main site.
For examples – internetmarketingnigeria, fyiscreening, landreport, itsupportjournal.
Just take a look at those sites, if you are not told that they are all blogs that have been customized, you might never get to know.
The number one reason I love this approach is how easy and convenience publishing content could be.
2) A personal online journal or diary that is updated frequently.
With definitions such as this people tend to think of a blog as online journal where they could share anything that is of interest to them and their readers. Such as their opinions, passion, hobbies, …personal events.
But this is just one way to use a blog
It would as well go for business purpose as I earlier mention. “business blog”.
As time went by and I got to understand more about blogs, I soon came to another kind of conclusion, guess what it was this time …that blogs were actually not different from normal websites.
But, I was still wrong …Why???
Because, unlike a normal website (which takes you through stress -coding), blog is a living entity and is ever changing with the rhythm of its community.
There is so much advantage that comes with a blog that I can not possible cover in this article.
You see, am very sorry if am making the whole thing look complex. However the truth is, if you get it wrong at this point, you will end up limiting what you could be doing with your blog.
This is why I have taking the time to write this.
Finally, you don’t have to wait to be a web designer or an expert at PHP or CSS. That is not the reason why am sharing this with you. You just have to get started but bear in mind that your blog is only going to become what you want it to be.
This is just the beginning!