Blog

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Types of weblogs

Personal

Often, the word blog is used to describe an online diary or journal, such as LiveJournal. The weblog format of an online diary makes it possible for users without much experience to create, format, and post entries with ease. People write their day-to-day experiences, complaints, poems, prose, illicit thoughts and more, often allowing others to contribute, fulfilling to a certain extent Tim Berners-Lee's original view of the World Wide Web as a collaborative medium. In 2001, mainstream awareness of online diaries began to increase dramatically.

Related Topics:
Diary - Journal - LiveJournal - Poems - Prose - Tim Berners-Lee - World Wide Web - 2001

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Online diaries are integrated into the daily lives of many teenagers and college students, with communications between friends playing out over their blogs. Even fights may be posted in the diaries, with not-so-veiled insults of each other easily readable by all their friends, enemies, and complete strangers.

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Personal opinions on experiences and hobbies are very common in the blog world. Blogs have given the opportunity for people to express their views to a mass audience. What may have been created to be used among a few friends may be viewed by the internet-using public.

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FriendBlog

A FriendBlog is a distributed networked journal on the web, composed of short, frequently updated posts written by friends connected through their similar interests. The author allows his FriendBlog to connect to other FriendBlogs, belonging to friends and acquaintances. This creates a "chain" of blogs.

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Topical

Topical blogs focus on a specific niche, often a technical one. An example is Google Blog, covering nothing but news about Google. Another example is a soldier blog. Many blogs now allow categories, which means a general blog can be reshuffled to become a topical blog at the user's need. Topical blogs can also cover local information.

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Health

Blogs written as personal accounts of living with a specific health issue, sharing information about the experience with others who have an interest in that health issue and providing mutual support.

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Literary

Given the obvious focus on words, it is not surprising that the Grub Street tradition has continued on the internet with daily commentary emanating from literary blogs (or litblog).

Related Topics:
Grub Street - Litblog

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Travel

Famous explorers wrote their journeys down on paper. These days, modern travelers have used blogs as a way to share their stories and photos, even while they are traveling around the world.

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Research

An increasing number of scholars and students blog their research notes, combining the traditional scholar's private notebook with public discussion. A related genre is the anonymous professor's blog, where the various issues related to academia may be freely discussed.

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Issues

Issues blogs focus on activism, debate and current events. Daily KOS was one of the first of these.

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News

Many weblogs provide a news digest on a certain topic, with short abstracts/summaries and links to interesting articles in the press.

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Political

Another common kind of blog is a political blog. Often an individual will link to articles from news web sites and post their own comments as well. Many of these blogs comment on whatever interests the author. Some of them are more specialized. One subspecies is the watch blog, a blog which sets out to criticize what the author considers systematic errors or bias in an online newspaper or news site—or perhaps even by a more popular blogger.

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Political blogs attracted attention because of their use by two political candidates in 2003: Howard Dean and Wesley Clark. Both gained political buzz on the Internet, and particularly among bloggers, before they were taken seriously by the establishment media as candidates. Joe Trippi, Dean's campaign manager, made the Internet a particular focus of the campaign. Both candidates stumbled in the end, but were, at one time or another, thought of as front runners for the Democratic Nomination.

Related Topics:
Howard Dean - Wesley Clark - Joe Trippi

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Legal

Blogs by lawyers or law students, or which discuss law and legal affairs are often referred to as blawgs. By extension, the creator of such a blog is a blawger, sometimes spelled blawgger (variant, rare).

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The coining of the term blawg is generally attributed by blawgers to Denise Howell of Bag and Baggage. See Jeff Rosen Gets All Mixed Up on Blawgs, Blogging and Other Things by law blogger Dennis Kennedy (criticizing Jeff Rosen for limiting the definition of blawg to law-student blogs, and for failing to credit Denise).

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Some blawgs are narrow and deal with a focused and/or technical area of law. Others, like the Volokh Conspiracy, deal with whatever topic the blawgers wish to discuss.

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Media

Some blogs serve as media watchdogs, reporting on falsehoods or inconsistencies that are presented as facts in the mass media. Many media blogs are focused exclusively on one newspaper or television network.

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Religious

Some blogs discuss religious topics. Religious blogs show the public's points of view on various controversies both in religion and in politics, economics, and life in general.

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Collaborative (also collective or group)

Many weblogs are written by more than one person about a specific topic. Collaborative weblogs can be open to everyone or limited to a group of people. MetaFilter is an example of this type of weblog.

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Slashdot, whose status as a blog has been debated, nevertheless has a team of editors who approve and post links to technology news stories throughout the day. Although Slashdot does not refer to itself as a weblog, it shares some characteristics with weblogs.

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A new form of blog represents a fusion of bloggers and traditional media sources, allowing for topics covered in the traditional media, both print and broadcast, to be fleshed out on the web. One prominent early example of this sort of blog is the Dallas Morning News editor's blog.

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Eclectic

From the Slashdot style blog comes eclectic blogs, which tend to focus on specific niches. Such sites contain articles and stories from other blogs and news sources on the web. There are often few articles actually written by the authors of these blogs and instead the blogs themselves tend to function as passageways for readers to find the actual source of the article or original posting.

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Medical

Some blogs are geared towards health and medicine. Medical blogs generally fall into 2 categories. One type is a blog written by a health care professional (such as a physician) about his or her life experiences or other personal thoughts. A more recent but (so far) unique trend is the blog that deals with actual patient cases. This latter blog allows other physicians to submit cases to the blog. Physicians can then offer comments or help with the case. Although not yet tested, this format could theoretically increase patient care by allowing the primary doctor to get feedback by other experts in the field. As of yet, only a pulmonary roundtable exists, dealing with cases related to the lung. It is unclear whether other medical fields will arise in this new blog format.

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Partner (collaboration on multi-section documents)

A partner blog site has a parallel web page or wiki page. Consider the possible similarities between a blog site and a multi-section web document. Blogs are generally thought of as a collection of periodic postings organized by reverse date, each posting its own topic that does not necessarily directly relate to the last. An essay or any large document is also a collection of headings or sub-topics but organized by sequence so that each sub-topic follows from the last to form a coherent whole.

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At the blog site, readers can use the comments link to discuss each section. The author or authors of both sites having the passwords to both would keep these two parallel, building on the feedback and re-weaving it into the section of the web page essay and re-editing the original blog posting. Revisions to the web page would come after consensus formed in the posting at the blog site. The web page provides a streamlined printout or reading without the distractions of the comment and date data. The comments section of the blog provides a way to track, remember and negotiate each heading section of the document. The web page also provides more secure control of the developing document than with a wiki, but slows down the evolution of the more comprehensive document. A troika partnership of web, wiki and web page is also viable. This has a wide range of uses for group editing of policy statements, manuals, and grant and curriculum development.

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Educational

There are many educational applications of blogs. Students can use weblogs as records of their learning and teachers can use weblogs as records of what they taught. For example, a teacher can blog a course, recording day-by-day what was taught, including links to Internet resources, and specifying what homework students are required to carry out. This application has many advantages: (1) a student can quickly catch-up if they miss a class; (2) the teacher can use the blog as a course plan; and (3) the blog serves as an accurate summary of the course that prospective students or new teachers can refer to.

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There are other educational applications of blogs. Students can blog an educational excursion, recording day-by-day (or hour by hour) where they went, what they saw and what they learned - including photographs, audio or video. The collaborative features of blogs can be used to permit several students to contribute to the blog.

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Directory

Directory weblogs are useful for web-surfers because they often collect numerous web sites with interesting content in an easy to use and constantly updated format. News-related weblogs can fall into this category or the previous one (political blogs).

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Don?t confuse these with weblog directories, such as BlogWise.

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These provide a more structured collection of weblog links, and will often offer novel services and interesting views of the data within the directory. These can be a good source of like-minded bloggers, or bloggers situated near you.

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Forums/Other CMS systems

Technically, a forum can sometimes be regarded as a weblog, but in reality, a distinction is drawn between the two. Many types of existing software, that pre-date blogging are in effect a type of "blog" software, but the rise of blogging came about due to easy to use blogging software for the masses. If for example, forum software is used for the purposes of creating and publishing a online journal, or list, then it would be regarded as a weblog. The distinction between a blog and a forum is best decided by the creator of the said item, as they are aware of its purpose.

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Business

Entrepreneurial

A number of entrepreneurs are establishing blogs to promote their businesses. Often business blogs act as a showcase for entrepreneurs to provide a window into the behind-the-scenes goings on at their business, presenting a more personal "face" to the public rather than a cold corporate persona. In some cases the blog itself is the core of the business bringing in revenue from advertising, selling products or information.

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Corporate

Increasingly, employees of corporations are posting official or semi-official blogs about their work. The employers however, do not always appreciate the endeavor. In January 2005 Joe Gordon was fired from Waterstone's bookshop in Edinburgh, Scotland, because he referred to his boss as an "asshole in sandals." In 2004 Ellen Simonetti, a Delta Air Lines flight attendant, was fired for posing in uniform on her blog. David Corby was fired from Wells Fargo in 2002 after he complained about a department policy forcing employees to wear american flag pins to show support for the victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks. He described the event as fascist. Perhaps the most famous case of all occurred when "Troutgirl" Joyce Park was fired from Friendster because she discussed the rationale behind the website's technology conversion from J2EE to PHP on her blog.

Related Topics:
January 2005 - Waterstone's - Edinburgh - Scotland - 2004 - Delta Air Lines - Wells Fargo - 2002 - September 11, 2001 attacks - Fascist - Friendster - J2EE - PHP

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Other employers have reacted differently. For instance, when Power Line bloggers were attacked by a Star Tribune columnist, one of the bloggers' employers came to his defense.

Related Topics:
Power Line - Star Tribune

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With the rise in popularity of blogs in 2004 senior management caught on to the trend and by January 2005 several types of organizations, including universities, had started using blogs to communicate with their stakeholders. Some believe this corporate takeover of a tool that was used primarily by Internet enthusiasts will lead to a decrease in the popularity of the medium. Others believe that the use of blogs by organizations will add new voices and vitality to the medium. At any rate, there is little evidence that the growth rate of the blogosphere has slowed. A prime example of senior management blogging is GM's Fastlane blog http://fastlane.gmblogs.com/, edited, among others, by GM vice chairman Bob Lutz.

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In 2005 the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) published the guide How to Blog Safely (About Work or Anything Else).

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Busiplogs

Business spam blogs (busiplogs), a term coined by LS Blogs, are blogs that are specifically written

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in order to promote a product/service or business. They have no value, or information of interest, to anyone other than their owner. They are specifically designed to only promote their business.

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Usually the quality of the blog is low, and often the content is drawn from third party sites.

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Small Business

Many small business people are far ahead of the corporate curve in using blogs to promote their businesses.

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Advice

Many weblogs provide expert advice.

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Many small businesses are also using blogs to offer advice and better connect with their clients. These blogs are particularly prevalent in the real estate industry where agents typically have a great deal of flexibility in marketing themselves.

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Another type of small online business using blogs are independent software development firms.

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Formats

Some weblogs specialize in particular forms of presentation, such as images (see web comics), or videos (see videoblog), or on a particular theme, and portmanteaus have been coined for some of these, such as moblogs (for "mobile" blog).

Related Topics:
Web comics - Videoblog - Portmanteaus - Moblog

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Audio

One of the types of blog that has undergone rapid expansion since the year 2000 is the MP3 blog, which make audio files available to the user. MP3 blogs are normally targeted at highly specialized musical genres, such as late 60s soul music or early 90s hip-hop or even the latest stuff in electronic dance music genres like grime. However, personal audioblogs are also on the rise (See also Podcasting).

Related Topics:
2000 - MP3 blog - Musical genre - Soul music - Hip-hop - Grime - Podcasting

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Photography

The increasing ubiquity of digital cameras and broadband connections has made it ever easier to post and share photos on the web. Bloggers have adapted their software to facilitate the publishing of photos, creating what is called a photoblog. Photo sharing sites like Flickr have integrated the typical photo gallery service with photo sharing, blogging and syndication to create a new kind of social software.

Related Topics:
Digital camera - Broadband connections - Photoblog - Photo sharing - Flickr - Social software

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Video

In January 2005 the first VloggerCon was held, catering to a new breed of bloggers, the video blogger. A vlog, or videoblog, is a weblog which uses video as its primary presentation format. Vlog posts are usually accompanied by text, image and additional metadata to provide a context or overview for the video.

Related Topics:
VloggerCon - Vlog - Video - Metadata

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