dowco.com News: What is a Blog?
Ron Cuthbert

Blog comes from the phrase "web log" and is simply a website in which items are posted on a regular basis and displayed in reverse chronological order.  Blogs often focus on a particular subject, such as food, politics or local news. A typical blog combines text, images, links to other blogs, web pages and other related media.

Since its appearance in 1995, blogging has emerged as a popular means of communication affecting public opinion and mass media around the world.

The term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger in December 1997. The short form, "blog," was coined by Peter Merholz. He broke the word weblog into the phrase "we blog" in the sidebar of his weblog in April or May of 1999.  "Blog" was accepted as a noun (weblog shortened) and as a verb ("to blog" ,meaning "to edit one's weblog or to post to one's weblog").  As of March 2003, the Oxford English Dictionary included the terms weblog, weblogging and weblogger in their dictionary.

After a slow start, blogging rapidly gained in popularity: the site Xanga (one of the largest blog hosting companies), launched in 1996, had only 100 diaries by 1997, and over 50 Million as of December 2005.

A blog is much like a journal except it is generally intended to be read by others.  Blogs are frequently updated and normally represent the personality of the author or reflect the purpose of the Web site that hosts the blog. The essential characteristics of the blog is its informal, dynamic, journalistic form.  The format of blogs range from one-liners that the author adds every few hours to relatively long, well thought out arguments for or against a topic of interest.