Definition Nowadays, the word Blog seems to be so popular that users on the internet can’t seem to surf the internet without seeing the word blog (112 Millions of Blog as of Dec.20071). In fact, there’s all different kind of blog from personal blog to food, local news, movie and even corporate blog. The word Blog is abbreviated from the word “web log”. Basically, blog is a type of website usually created and updated by individuals with regular logs of commentary, narration of events, photos and music. Different from a traditional kind of web page and web journals, blog allow viewers to interact with authors and other viewers on the internet. The ability to interact with each other is one of the reason that makes blog so popular. Different kind of blog While many of the blogs focus on a specific area or topic like politics, music or travel, blog doesn’t have to focus on a specific topic. Blogs can be just some random narration of a person’s life or comment like a personal diary. Personal Blog - Personal blog is like an on going personal diary posted on the internet. The blogger usually take pride in updating their blog as if it has become part of their life. Blogs have become more then just a way for people to communicate on the internet. Blogs have become a way for people to express their feeling, life and work of art. Though few personal blog becomes the the mainstream, personal blog usually has a steady viewers mostly by author's friends on the internet. Corporate Blog - A corporate Blog can be either private or for business purpose. Blog can be used internally to enhance the communication and culture from the executive level to the worker, or blog can used externally to promote product, branding and public relationship. One of the best example of the corporate blog is Lenovo's Coporate Blog. Lenovo uses the blog to allows engineer like Yamato to post on the blog about their new technology or products. Sometime lenovo even post the internal impact test of their "Thinkpad" series laptop that users can't usually see in the public. The idea of the lenovo blog is a excellent marketing strategy that allow the company to reach more customers and build a strong public relationship through a new way by blogging. More and more coporate has also learnt that blog could help them promote their company like Google and Facebook. Also see top 15 most popular coporate blog. By Genre- Like mention before, some of the blog focus on a specific kind of topic like politics, local news or food. These kind of blog usually receives a wide attention from the public as some of the blog provide magazine like reading quality to the reader especially like travel and politics blog. One of the most famous blog of this kind is call Engadget. The blog mainly focus on the new technology and products that's in development or would hit the market soon. The blogs in this area has become more and more popular by the public as most of the top 100 blogs belongs in this category.
Blogoshere refers to the collective blog community of all the blogs on the internet. It's a relative new term that's being used, but it has been widely discuss by the media as a form public oppions. Many of the new serach enginges has also been design to search for specifc blogs on the internet. These search engine like Tekkaus helps to promote the online blog community. As blog becomes gains it's attention, more providers try to attract user to use their server. Most of the blog hosts like Blogger, Myspace and Facebook offer the hosting for free. Others hosts like Xanga offers users to pay to gain premium service on their sites. Most of these blog hosts allows users on the internet to setup their own blog site on their server. Some like myspace and blogger are easier to use for begginner user, others like xanga and word press allows users to customize their blog with css and html. Most of these hosts gain their revenue by means of the advertisement on their users blog. Some of the advertisement are smarter then others that the advertisement would be related to the topics the blogger focus on. Some of the blog site like blogger also offers their users a share of the advertisement. That is, blogger can also gain a share of the profit from blogger when viewers on the internet click on the link of the blog. see Top 10 most popular Blog Host Issues While blog becomes a new popular means for people to communicate, it also brought up many different problems and criticism in our society. Employment - people getting fire for their wrong saying is not an uncommon thing. However, in many cases people got fired from their employee because of their entries on the blog deem to be inappropriate. The most famous case is Ellen Simonetti where wrote about her work while she was a Delta airline flight attendant. Though she never mentioned about her employer, she was fired after the management found out about the blog entries she posted online.
Children usage - the age of the blog users has been coming down that if the host doesn't restrict kids usage, more kids could see inappropriate content. One of the blog host, Xanga was fined for one million2 for allowing kids under age of 12 to use xanga to post comments on the internet.
Reference.
1. ^ "Welcome to Technorati". unknown. http://technorati.com/about/. Retrieved on 2008-06-15. 2 , Xanga is fined $1,000,000 by the FTC for violations of COPPA (The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act), the stiffest penalty for a COPPA violation on record. |