What Exactly Is A Weblog?

One can validate the cultural acceptance of any given trend by one aspect alone: it’s inclusion in the Oxford English Dictionary. As such, it appears that weblogging truly has become a cultural phenomenon: since March 2003, weblog, weblogging and weblogger have all been included in the OED, while pop starlet Beyonce’s term “Bootylicious” was not added until 2004 (OED). For once, computer geeks have beat hip hop and pop culture to the popularity finish line. The word itself was first coined in 1997 by a weblogger named John Barger, and the shortened form of the word came about in 1999 when a weblogger named Peter Merholz announced that he was going to pronounce web blogs as "wee-blog". This is turn, was shortened to blog (Wikipedia).

A Weblog has been defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “a frequently updated website consisting of personal observations, excerpts from other sources, etc., typically run by a single person, and usually with hyperlinks to other sites; an online journal or diary” (OED).

Essentially, it is a website that is updated frequently with information or personal thoughts. According to Mallory Jensen of the Columbia Journal Review, “In the strictest sense, a blog is someone's online record of the Web sites he or she visits” (Jensen). While this is a useful definition, today blogs offer a lot more variety and complexity than an online record of websites. Their topics can be geared at innumerable subject matters; sometimes they are political, other times they are personal, cultural, business oriented, or even gossip oriented. They can be created by a single author, a few familiar friends, or an even larger group of unacquainted people who share a similar interest. Dave Winer runs The Scripting News, one of the earliest and longest running weblogs. He describes weblogs as “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 [sic] and politics between the people who run weblogs, they point to each other, in all kinds of structures, graphs, loops, etc” (Winer). Essentially, the boundaries of blogs are endless, and more possibilities are being discovered every day.

Weblogs differ from traditional websites because typically, they are formatted in such a way that allows for easy updates. Very often, developed blog software allows a simple form to be filled out with text and basic HTML codes, which then updates the main website. Almost anyone can have a weblog – whether they have any HTML knowledge or not. Furthermore, a traditional website may often stay the same without changing for several months. While a weblog is typically updated often, with new material often generated daily.

In the same manner, they differ from forums or discussions boards, because only the author, or group of authors, are given access to update the weblog. Visitors may often leave comments relating to each update in a separate comment section, but they are not given access to create their own posts.

The attempt to generate a succinct definition of the word weblog is difficult, but perhaps conquered best by Dave Winer in 2001. Winer describes all weblogs as “Personal Web Publishing Communities” (Winer). When you deconstruct the definition, it appears that this, above all, is most fitting. After all, Winer points out that a weblog is personal, it is a part of the World Wide Web, it allows for personal publishing, and by its very nature, it is part of a community of weblogs that are read, shared, and linked too.