There are many different types of blogs, differing not only in the type of content, but also in the way that content is delivered or written.
Personal blogs
The personal blog, an ongoing diary or commentary by an individual, is the traditional, most common blog. Personal bloggers usually take pride in their blog posts, even if their blog is never read by anyone but them. Blogs often become more than a way to just communicate; they become a way to reflect on life or works of art. Blogging can have a sentimental quality. Few personal blogs rise to fame and the mainstream, but some personal blogs quickly garner an extensive following. A type of personal blog is referred to as "microblogging," which is extremely detailed blogging as it seeks to capture a moment in time. Sites, such as
Twitter, allow bloggers to share thoughts and feelings instantaneously with friends and family and is much faster than e-mailing or writing. This form of social media lends to an online generation already too busy to keep in touch
Corporate blogs
A blog can be private, as in most cases, or it can be for business purposes. Blogs, either used internally to enhance the communication and culture in a corporation or externally for mmarketing, branding, or public relations, purposes are called corporate blogs,
Question blogging
is a type of blog that answers questions. Questions can be submitted in the form of a submittal form, or through email or other means such as telephone or VOIP. Qlogs can be used to display shownotes from podcasts or the means of conveying information through the internet. Many question logs use syndication such as RSS as a means of conveying answers to questions.
By media type
A blog comprising videos is called a vlog, one comprising links is called a linklog, a site containing a portfolio of sketches is called a sketchblog, or one comprising photos is called a photoblog. Blogs with shorter posts and mixed media types are called tumbleblogs. Blogs that are written on typewriters and then scanned are called typecast or typecast blogs; see typecasting
(blogging)A rare type of blog hosted on the Gopher Protocol is known as a Phlog.
By device
Blogs can also be defined by which type of device is used to compose it. A blog written by a mobile device like a mobile phone or PDA could be called a moblog. One early blog was Wearable Wireless Webcam, an online shared diary of a person's personal life combining text, video, and pictures transmitted live from a wearable computer and Eye Tap device to a web site. This practice of semi-automated blogging with live video together with text was referred to a sousveillance.. Such journals have been used as evidence in legal matters.[citation needed]
By genre.
Some blogs focus on a particular subject, such as
political blogs,
travel blogs, house blogs,
fashion blogs,
project blogs,
education blogs,
niche blogs,
classical music blogs, quizzing blogs and legal blogs (often referred to as a blawgs) or
dreamlogs. While not a legitimate type of blog, one used for the sole purpose of spamming is known as a
Splog.
Community and cataloging
The
BlogosphereThe collective community of all blogs is known as the blogosphere. Since all blogs are on the internet by definition, they may be seen as interconnected and socially networked, through
blogrolls, comments,
linkbacks (refbacks, trackbacks or pingbacks) and
backlinks. Discussions "in the blogosphere" have been used by the media as a gauge of public opinion on various issues. A collection of local blogs is sometimes referred to as a bloghood.
Blog search enginesSeveral blog search engines are used to search blog contents, such as
Bloglines,
BlogScope, and
Technorati. Technorati, which is among the most popular blog search engines, provides current information on both popular searches and
tags used to categorize blog postings. Research community is working on going beyond simple keyword search, by inventing new ways to navigate through huge amounts of information present in the
blogosphere, as demonstrated by projects like
BlogScope.[
citation needed]
Blogging communities and directories
Several
online communities exist that connect people to blogs and bloggers to other bloggers, including BlogCatalog,
MyBlogLog, and
YULBlog, a combination online and offline community for people with blogs based in
Montreal.
Blogging and
advertisingIt is common for blogs to feature advertisements either to financially benefit the blogger or to promote the blogger's favorite causes. The popularity of blogs has also given rise to
"fake blogs" in which a company will create a fictional blog as a marketing tool to promote a product.
Popularity
Researchers have analyzed the dynamics of how blogs become popular. There are essentially two measures of this: popularity through citations, as well as popularity through affiliation (i.e.
blogroll). The basic conclusion from studies of the structure of blogs is that while it takes time for a blog to become popular through blogrolls,
permalinks can boost popularity more quickly, and are perhaps more indicative of popularity and authority than blogrolls, since they denote that people are actually reading the blog's content and deem it valuable or noteworthy in specific cases
The
blogdex project was launched by researchers in the
MIT Media Lab to crawl the Web and gather data from thousands of blogs in order to investigate their social properties. It gathered this information for over 4 years, and autonomously tracked the most contagious information spreading in the blog community, ranking it by recency and popularity. It can therefore be considered the first instantiation of a
memetracker. The project is no longer active, but a similar function is now served by
tailrank.com.
Blogs are given rankings by
Technorati based on the number of incoming links and
Alexa Internet based on the Web hits of Alexa Toolbar users. In August 2006, Technorati found that the most linked-to blog on the internet was that of Chinese actress
Xu Jinglei.
[13] Chinese media
Xinhua reported that this blog received more than 50 million page views, claiming it to be the most popular blog in the world. Technorati rated
Boing Boing to be the most-read group-written blog.
Gartner forecasts that blogging will peak in 2007, leveling off when the number of writers who maintain a personal Web site reaches 100 million. Gartner analysts expect that the novelty value of the medium will wear off as most people who are interested in the phenomenon have checked it out, and new bloggers will offset the number of writers who abandon their creation out of boredom. The firm estimates that there are more than 200 million former bloggers who have ceased posting to their online diaries, creating an exponential rise in the amount of "dotsam" and "netsam" — that is to say, unwanted objects on the Web (analogous to flotsam and jetsam).
Blurring with the mass media
Many bloggers, particularly those engaged in
participatory journalism, differentiate themselves from the
mainstream media, while others are members of that media working through a different channel. Some institutions see blogging as a means of "getting around the filter" and pushing
messages directly to the public. Some critics worry that bloggers respect neither
copyright nor the role of the
mass media in presenting society with credible news. Bloggers and other contributors to
user-generated content are behind
Time magazine naming their 2006
person of the year as "you".
Many mainstream journalists, meanwhile, write their own blogs — well over 300, according to CyberJournalist.net's J-blog list. The first known use of a blog on a news site was in August 1998, when
Jonathan Dube of The
Charlotte Observer published one chronicling Hurricane Bonnie.
Some bloggers have moved over to other media. The following bloggers (and others) have appeared on radio and television:
Duncan Black (known widely by his pseudonym, Atrios),
Glenn Reynolds (
Instapundit),
Markos Moulitsas Zúniga (
Daily Kos),
Alex Steffen (
Worldchanging) and
Ana Marie Cox (
Wonkette). In counterpoint,
Hugh Hewitt exemplifies a mass-media personality who has moved in the other direction, adding to his reach in "old media" by being an influential blogger. Equally many established authors, for example
Mitzi Szereto have started using Blogs to not only update fans on their current works but also to expand into new areas of writing.
Blogs have also had an influence on
minority languages, bringing together scattered speakers and learners; this is particularly so with blogs in
Gaelic languages. Minority language publishing (which may lack economic feasibility) can find its audience through inexpensive blogging.
There are many examples of bloggers who have published books based on their blogs, e.g.,
Salam Pax,
Ellen Simonetti,
Jessica Cutler,
ScrappleFace. Blog-based books have been given the name
blook. A prize for the best blog-based book was initiated in 2005, the
Lulu Blooker Prize. However, success has been elusive offline, with many of these books not selling as well as their blogs. Only blogger
Tucker Max cracked the
New York Times Bestseller List.
argest environmental portals.
Early blogs were simply manually updated components of common
Web sites. However, the evolution of tools to facilitate the production and maintenance of Web articles posted in reverse chronological order made the publishing process feasible to a much larger, less technical, population. Ultimately, this resulted in the distinct class of online publishing that produces blogs we recognize today. For instance, the use of some sort of browser-based software is now a typical aspect of "blogging". Blogs can be hosted by dedicated
blog hosting services, or they can be run using
blog software, or on regular
web hosting services.
Rise in popularity
After a slow start, blogging rapidly gained in popularity. Blog usage spread during 1999 and the years following, being further popularized by the near-simultaneous arrival of the first hosted blog tools:
Open Diary launched in October 1998, soon growing to thousands of online diaries. Open Diary innovated the reader comment, becoming the first blog community where readers could add comments to other writers' blog entries.
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