Blogs

A blog is short for weblog. I’m not going to go into too much depth here, as there’s plenty out there on blogs already. Basically a weblog is a website with entries arranged in reverse chronological order: as each entry or post is made, the previous ones get pushed down a bit on the page so the most recent is always front and center. You’re reading one right now. Blogs used to be a personal record of one’s Internet surfing. The job of the blogger (the one who authors blogs) was to sift through the massive, growing amount of information “out there” and pull the relevant, important, or interesting to the forefront. And blogging hasn’t really changed much. Now there tends to be more commentary, as here, but we’re still sifting through information and trying to reproduce it in a digestible form.

For more information, check out an exhaustive history of blogs at rebecca’s pocket, an entry in Wikipedia, or a timeline from the New York Magazine.