What are Weblogs?

Weblogs are Web pages built by real people, blessedly free of corporate-speak and ubiquitous images of tall-shiny skyscrapers, smiley people gazing intelligently into laptops, or besuited, smarmy business-types shaking hands. Weblogs — logs of the Web, see? — are the where the real action is. They are the creation of individuals, usually musings on national, local or personal events, links to interesting articles, a few lines of comment or discussion collected and presented by one person. While not sounding like much, Weblogs are a milestone in the short history of the Internet.

Part of a blog’s charm is its simplicity. In most cases it’s plain text simply but elegantly laid out. Pages are quick to load. The content is concise and measured. The more you read a blog you like and the closer you feel to its author, the more you will trust their choice and follow the links offered. While for some people the appeal of the more personal blogs is in connecting with others through a kind of virtual diary of one’s thoughts and observations, for others the more straightforward digest of recent news — and the blogger’s interpretation and comment on that news — serves a more prosaic purpose. Above all, it’s free.

Two technologies which have made blogging take off in recent times are the availability of better writing platforms like Userland’s Radio and Blogger.com, and the availability of content as RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds. Radio is a desktop platform which combines a scripting language, web server, object database and a user interface. It lets you write offline and then sync with the actual blog site. Importantly, it also does two additional things which make all the difference. Firstly, it allows you to aggregate and customise news feeds through RSS from different sites (in XML) allowing you to monitor your favourite sites for updates, and then link and comment on them easily. Secondly, it publishes your own content as an RSS feed which allows other sites to pick it up. This content syndication model makes it easier for two-way linking. It also “pushes” information to users’ desktops rather than going out and seeking it.

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