What Is Blogging?
Everyone has a right to their opinion, and now (for better or worse) it is easier than ever to express those opinions on the internet. “Blogging” is a term that combines “web” and “log” and is the act of updating a website with information, commentary, graphics, or events. There are many uses for blogs and they generally fall into one or two the following categories: personal, corporate, and entertainment.
Blogging: A History
Justin Hall is recognized as one of the earliest bloggers for beginning a personal blog in 1994 while still a student at Swarthmore College. Dave Winer of Scripting News is considered one of the oldest and longest bloggers, along with Wearable Wireless Webcam, an online diary of a person’s life combining text, video, and pictures. Before the popularity of WordPress, blogs were manually updated to standard HTML websites without content management systems to simplify the process. Now, blogging has evolved to include such systems to facilitate the production and maintenance of blog entries in chronological order. This has also made it easier to customize blogs with the simultaneous rise of “theme blogs” that design and publish themes, personal and professional alike, to enhance a blog’s overall atmosphere.
Bruce Ableson launched Open Diary in October of 1999. It was a website that introduced reader “commenting” on writer’s blog entries. One year later, Brad Fitzpatrick started LiveJournal.com (my first personal blog site!), building off the innovations of Open Diary. Andrew Smales later launched Diaryland, a personal blogging community, followed by Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan who co-authored blogger.com (purchased by Google in February 2003).
The same way mp3 downloading caused grief in the music industry, the sharp rise in popularity of blogging caused problems for other forms of journalism. In 2009, the American journalism industry had declined so dramatically newspaper corporations filed for bankruptcy. President Obama himself acknowledged the emergence of internet blogging:
“if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding.”
But clearly blogs are not all bad—just those with a political agenda. Those tend to get tricky.
The Blogosphere
The collective community of all blogs is called the blogosphere. Blogs are connected in this blogosphere through social network websites. A researcher can gain a fair deal of information by observing the blogosphere and noting emerging trends. Popular topics in blogs are often reflective of what’s happening in reality, in society, in culture. Because many blog writers have the option of sharing under a veil of anonymity, the blogosphere is full of raw, uncensored commentary that is valuable for someone trying to find many viewpoints of current events.
Common Types of Blogs
There are terms to further break down the blogosphere and gain better understanding of the way different blogs function.
- Personal blogs. Even I had one when I was 10 on a website called “LiveJournal.” It was my earliest form of written expression and a foundation for what later inspired me to pursue writing as a career. Personal blogs are diaries or commentary by individuals, and are the most common form of blog. Some blogs are private, drawing only one or two invited friends to read. Others are sources of income, so public and popular that with ads and sponsors writers are able to pay their bills for simply being opinionated. Websites that fall into this category are: LiveJournal, Twitter. Because free speech is really free on the internet, personal blogs can be very inspiring…or completely repulsive. Mine was of the former variety.
- Corporate and organizational blogs. Businesses will use blogs to communicate with consumers and create stronger communication through marketing or branding. Many magazine and written publications such as Vogue have an online presence in their corporate blogs. They appeal to a younger generation this way and render sales and corporate culture more accessible and attractive. These types of blogs can be strictly informative of what is happening in the company, or more relaxed, offering those within the corporation a chance to express their personal opinions with each other (like: Vogue).
- Just as there are genres of music, movies, and books, there are blog genres. Political, travel, fashion, project, education, music, dreams, art, music…The list goes on. The genre a blog falls into will often dictate what kind of content is frequently posted on the blog. For “travelogs,” pictures of fascinating and foreign places will be shared with people across the world. In art blogs, daily sketches and full works of art are offered to fans of artists (Like: Loish). Fans of Inception get a kick out of “dreamlogs,” where people keep an account of what their minds create in their hours of sleep. These forms of blogs are generally more public than personal blogs and attract wider audiences and more sponsors.
Why?
So why blog? Isn’t it much safer to write in a physical journal for personal blogs, create a scrapbook for photos, publish newsletters for corporations? Yes, but it is much harder to reach people globally this way, and they do not invite commentary from followers.
Some of the top reasons will people turn to blogging are:
1. Self-Expression. That’s a given, right? People want to be able to say what’s on their mind even if no one is listening. People want to meet others who share the same thoughts, and the internet makes that possible. It may be easier for someone to write for a million people online than to stand up and speak in front of a few dozen.
2. Money. It is rare for someone to make a real profit on their blogs unless they are a public figure or personality, but it’s possible with Google AdSense, a service that places ads on websites and rewards bloggers for the amount of traffic they bring in. It’s a small business, essentially, that can be both fun and rewarding.
3. To get ahead. If you are a writer, musician, photographer, or something along those lines, building a following online makes you more appealing to employers. To successfully build a brand and reputation running a blog is an accomplishment, and good experience marketing yourself.
4. To remember. In the case of personal blogs, sometimes you just want to write things down because you know that 1) the internet never forgets and 2) someday you will. Fifty years from now I may not remember what happened on this exact day, but I can always look through my blog’s archives and pull up an old blog entry and revisit the past. A picture says a thousand words, a blog says that and then some.
Successful Bloggers
VLOG. Jenna Marbles. She’s quirky, she’s goofy, and she happens to be really pretty, too. This is a formula for success when creating a vlog, or video blog, for the YouTube audience. She makes videos covering just about anything and everything that’s not 100% appropriate. She received her bachelors and masters degree in psychology, worked as a Go-Go dancer, and after one of her vlogs went viral was plucked from obscurity and placed among the ranks of money making people in Los Angeles. She is now making quite a bit of cash to make her videos. What can we learn from her? It doesn’t take hundreds of dollars worth of equipment to make a good blog. She uses a cheap camera, cheap lighting, and basically sits in front of her laptop and talks to people. Brilliant.
VLOG. Kinglsey. Foul mouthed, witty, sarcastic, Kingsley is the master of entertainment and can be found derisively commenting on anything pop culture related. His specialties are music and movies, and he does not hold back his brutally honest opinions. People relate to him because, like Jenna, he’s just funny and flamboyant. He has a personality that continues to attract people to his blogs.
SKETCHBLOG. Loish. One of my favorite artists has a sketchblog that she updates occasionally with progress pieces of her major works of art. It’s inspirational and insightful because she uses this blog to explain how she completes the artistic process. We see a work of art go from beginning to end, from sketch to color, and it’s a beautiful conclusion when it’s all done.
