With the advent of the internet, publishing ‘one-to-many’ became infinitely easier. Anyone with a computer and internet connection could publish their own material allowing anyone else with the necessary equipment to read it. In the early days of the internet, this was limited to those with the money to spend on the equipment and the knowledge to set it up. As electronics prices dropped, the number of people able to publish increased, yet there was still no easy way to quickly create webpages and frequently update them without dealing with files and downloading programs onto the computer. Finally, blogs appeared.
A mainstream social activity where people tend to share their thoughts with an exposure to an outer world to know about it is Blogging. Weblogs, or "blogs,” are frequently updated webpages with a series of archived posts, typically in reverse-chronological order.
Blog posts are usually textual, but they may contain photos or other multimedia content or textual content. Most blogs provide hypertext links to other Internet sites, and many allow for audience comments Blogs vary widely in nature and content, but as they have grown in popularity they have been increasingly portrayed as online diaries or personal journals, often of the most confessional sort. Blogs have emerged from a humble beginning to become a highly networked mass of online knowledge and communication. All kinds of research, from searching for the best price of the latest mobile phone, to more rigorous forms, are conducted through the blog medium. The mechanisms that provide the possibility for blogs to link to each other provide possibilities for collaboration and knowledge sharing in a fast, public and convenient manner.
Technically Blogs are web sites that contain frequently updated ‘posts’ with the most recent entry at the top of the page and the previous ones displayed reverse-chronologically. The type of information contained within a blog varies greatly from individual to individual. Authors of blogs (known as bloggers) can describe day-to-day observations in their lives, or more specific topics of interest to them, such as web design or cycling. Since blogs are web sites, they are controlled and navigated using hyperlinks, and posts typically incorporate hyperlinks to other blogs or news sources, together with related comments and discussions.
When blogs start linking to each other and commenting on what has been said, huge, distributed discussions can erupt that include many different bloggers, and concern varied topics. The features of blogging that make it stand out as a unique medium also allow it to be seen as a step in the mass ‘amateurisation’ of publishing (Coates 2003a). Before the age of the internet it was theoretically possible for everyone to publish material that was accessible to anyone who could read and afford a newspaper. However, the decision to publish was at the discretion of an editor and it largely depended on literacy skills, social class and luck whether your contribution was selected from the thousands of others sent to the newspaper or magazine.
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