What are Weblogs

Weblogs, the best thing since sliced bread, they said. The first thing I did was investigate. Please have a look at this link first. And it certainly seemed that there was a lot goining on on the Weblog front. So I decided to make my own weblog.

What are Weblogs? Weblogs are automated web publishing systems. One might compare them to 1) An online diary. They are usually ordered by date and many weblogs are simply the diaries of savvy Internet users. 2) A Bulletin Board System, or Forum, or Notice board, or Web board. If one uses the basic commands then there is not all that much difference between a weblog and an bulletin board, or so it seems to me at this stage of my experience. There are however many differences between a weblog and a bulletin board system. First of all it is usually one or a few defined users that write to the weblog propper, with other users being allowed only to comment on posts to the same. Many Internet users do use BBS as a diary. Additionally, the way that the posts are arranged is much more complex in the case of a weblog. Instead of having simply a series of posts arranged chronologically (with or without a nested tree of responses) a weblog uses its database more dynamically so that the main authors can set categories of post. 3) Yahoo groups Weblogs share some of the functionality of Yahoo groups in that they are places where members can upload files, share links, and post to a webboard. Weblogs lack the mailing list functionality of Yahoo groups (so much so that even the most famous weblog software, Blogger, uses Yahoo groups as its mailing list). But it is possible to set the email addresses that are to be informed when each of the members post, or perhaps when any of the members post. And presumably one of these "addresses to be informed" could be set to the posting address of a mailing list. 4) The make-a-page-quick services provided by some of the Web page hosting services such as tripod (Angelfire). These services often allow users to make a webpage by entering text, colour specifications and layout instructions into some forms on a web page. A weblog is similar. I am now typing into a form on a web page.

However a weblog is much more complex that the services provided by web providers (at the present time) since it allows the updating, editing, recofiguration, searching, and update announcements mentioned above. In the future perhaps weblogs will come already installed in some of the free, or commercial websites.

Until now I would often use MS Word to write a page of text and then save it to the web. The problem was that such pages were not linked to each other, it was time consuming to edit them, it was impossible to search them, and I could not allow other people access to them. Using a weblog I can allow other people to update my web site. I think that weblogs are good for providing a space for an online community. It is strange however that I am writing here to myself.