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Essay on Web Blogs
A blog is often a mixture of what is happening in a person's life and what is happening on the Web, a kind of hybrid diary/guide site, although there are as many unique types of blogs as there are people.
People maintained blogs long before the term was coined, but the trend gained momentum with the introduction of automated published systems, most notably Blogger at blogger.com. Thousands of people use services such as Blogger to simplify and accelerate the publishing process.
Blogs are alternatively called web logs or weblogs. However, "blog" seems less likely to cause confusion, as "web log" can also mean a server's log files.
(http://www.marketingterms.com/dictionary/blog/)
Blogs are one of the stranger forms of web publishing. The name is an in-joke abbreviation of "Weblogs" but much less misleading, since a log suggests some kind of organized record of the things that happen on a website, and the whole point of a blog is that it is the disorganized record of the voyaging of an intelligent mind. A blog is a webpage, something like a public commonplace book, which is added to each day. There is also in many of them a certain newsy aspect, so that they record significant as well as merely interesting events. If there is any log they resemble, it is the captain's log on a voyage of discovery; and more than anywhere else they preserve the idea of the web as something with raggedy edges and strange attachments, rather than a homogenized circle of programming.
What really distinguishes a blog from a normal home page, though, is that it is made by someone who likes reading, and expects their visitors to do so. It is customary to put a list of books being read to one side, along with recently watched music and films. These lists link to Amazon.com; one reason for doing this is the Amazon "associates" program, which pays people who direct others to buy a book on Amazon's website....
