subject: What is a blog? [print this page] Just what are blogs, anyway? Just what are blogs, anyway?
What is blogging all about? Why do so many people make blog work central to their lives?
Everybody knows that our world is constantly bombarded by supercharged particles - usually known as "cosmic rays" - from outer space. What you may not have thought about is that over recent years, you have been subjected to a new kind of onslaught: the B word barrage.
The B word barrage emanates from that part of the cosmos known as the blogosphere and rains down onstrafes earth at the rate of a few million hits a day. Somewhere in subconscious, you are aware of this barrage, but you have become so used to it you hardly notice it any more, unless you live in the macrocosm of the internet.
Technorati, an internet search engine that has searched for and indexed blogs since 2002, had indexed more than 133 million of them as of December 2009.
That tell you something? Even allowing for bloggers with a number of blogs, dozens of millions of earthlings are expending (eons of) time, (almost surely a great deal of) energy and (wallets full) money on blogging: that means constantly pumping in new text, audio, video and graphic content. Every day.
And they are doing so because hundreds of millions of earthlings are poring over those posts, poring over the messages being conveyed in all that text, audio, video and graphic content. Daily.
So how do we explain this madness? What is a blog exactly, why do so many people seem so intent on starting a blog?
I define blogging thus: It is an opportunity for expressing yourself in any manner you choose on any issue you feel like carrying on about, through a variety of media (text, audio, video, graphics), using a technically user-friendly agency that is easy to set up and has the potential to reach out to every single intelligent being on this planet or any other planet with intelligent beings. Blogging also allows you to get evaluations from your readers, viewers and listeners and do what you want with it: ignore it, delete it or stoke it and set off a frenzy of two-sided or potentially unlimited multi-sided communication.
And there is an added allure: you can make money if you are a blogger. Quite a bit of money, if you are one with a heavy barrage strike rate.
My explanation may or may not strike a chord in you. As someone recently stricken with the blogging virus, I am admittedly biased. Thus, my definition is not the be all or the end all of anything.
You can go over some more formal definitions of what exactly is a blog, what is blogging and what bloggers are all about at http://theblogginguniverse.com/blog/what-is-a-blog/.
