Obviously, she's reading this blog, so she's at least vaguely aware, but it's true that the term blog gets used a lot to mean similar, but subtly different things. I thought I'd take a shot at answering the question here.
It's a technology:
When I worked for the uninitiated, their conflation of the technology with the trend was the hardest part to get around. At its most basic, a blog is some code on a server that makes it easy to publish chronologically ordered articles on a web site.
Generally there are a couple of screens for writing, editing, and managing the "posts", and it's all set up so that you don't have to know an <i> tag from an <em> tag to do anything.
A user writes a post or two, publishes them, and sends a link to friends. When the friend shows up to the main blog page, they see a list of all posts from most recent to oldest. Clicking on any post's title takes you to a "permalink", which is a fancy way of saying "a page with just one post on it". Generally, comments about a post live on the post's permalink page.
It's important to separate the tech from the phenomenon, because you could use blogging software to publish stuff that wouldn't really qualify as a blog. Anything it makes sense to publish in chronological order will do. Daily sports results would work fine, but they wouldn't set CNN on its ear as Bloggers have.
It's a phenomenon:
Any jackass can publish anything. Look at me for instance.
It's important to note that "anyone" includes Fortune 500 companies as well as schizophrenics and hobos. Who publishes and why has a distinct impact on the blog's reach and content. The fact that anyone can publish means a lot of people have, so there's a wide variety of blogs out there. However, most of them, certainly the ones you hear about, have fallen into a few categories ....
Friends and family blogs, like this one, are good for people who are far from loved ones, are crap at writing letters, but want to keep folks apprised of what's up in their lives. Basically it's stuff I want people I know to hear from me.
Diary blogs are about people's cats and are narcissistic in the extreme. No one cares about your cat! Focusing on the fact that your readers (if they exist) are people, not the ether, should turn a diary blog into a friends and family blog.
Corporate blogs, are a mixed bag. Sometimes a CEO is blathering on about whatever comes to mind. Other times, a blog is part of a larger web-site and deals with specific issues. An example of the latter would be any of a number of Consumer Reports' blogs (e.g.: http://blogs.consumerreports.org/electronics/)
Pro Blogs are sites that started as blogs and became proper publications. Imagine a broadsheet turned into a proper paper and you've got the idea. Blogs like engadget and gizmodo are examples.
They have no non-blog presence, like CR does, but they command a big audience. They're what all the fuss is about when people talk about blogging. They are also what aspiring bloggers are aiming to be when they start their puny little humor blogs. Ahem.
A lot of new publications recently have taken this form simply because blogging software is easy to come by and convenient to use.
RSS
RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication and is confusing to most people.
It is basically a way for a user to find out when there are new posts on a blog you like. It's a bit more involved on the publisher's side because RSS is a format you can use to package up all your content so it can be used and displayed elsewhere. This "atomization" of content has had a lot of impact on the Web because, by providing a standard, RSS has made it easy for one site to seamlessly integrate content from other places on the Web.
From the user's end, you usually see images like this:
. When you click on them (this one's inert, but try at the bottom of the main page), your browser or some other program like your blog reader, or sometimes Outlook or another email program (I understand) will help you pull updates about a blog into a spot where it's convenient for you to read up on them.Twitter?
Twitter started as a "micro-blogging" platform, which meant you had to keep your posts to 140 characters or less. Twitter's too much to get into here, because functionality not found on most blogs altered the way people interact with it so it's no longer just a micro-blogging tool.
Posts
2 comments:
So, I ask an innocent (technophobe-esque) question, and suddenly you've got a topic? What of me? Do I get a blog credit? Are there assists like in hoops? Could royalties be a possibility? Do I even get told it's been put up? Nope, I'm just left to find it like all the other slobs wandering through blogland.
Fair enough. I wasn't sure if you wanted the world at large (which is a VERY optimistic estimate of who reads this blog) to be aware of your ignorance on this topic.
But you do ... Janet, my sister, in Scotland.
As for royalties, you're welcome to fully 90% of what I make from this blog. The other 10% is already committed to the very promising research being conducted by the Principality of Erewhon on the topics of cold-fusion and unicorn preservation.
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