Blogs: History and Basics

As christened by Jorn Barger with its name in December 1997, Web Logs, originally were link-driven, opinion sites. At the beginning of the year 1999, a Web Log was published by Cameron Barret on Camworld. It composed of a list accumulated by Jesse James Garrett, Infosoft editor, of web pages resembling the theme of his own site. From then on, communities of readers were gathered and almost everybody wanted a ride at the bandwagon.

Blog is a condensed term for Web Logs. This refers to web sites that have a regular maintenance of information that are chronologically arranged. Most started out personal online diaries and soon evolved into money making tools providing commentary on a specific niche or a whole range of topics.

Typically, blogs are textual with links to other sites or blogs, but as time with its technological advancements grow, the materials contained have included images, videos, audios and other media related to the subject at hand.

In general, blogs have these page elements in common, these are:

• The main area that contains regularly updated content or articles arranged in sequence, newest on top. Individually, the content are called posts which may contain not only interesting articles to reads but may also include videos, graphics and audio. Now, there are video blogs with which every post, as its name indicates, is composed of a video.

• A comment field, where viewers or readers can leave messages. Commenting can be set at a limitation to avoid spamming. The blogger may choose to have anyone comment, or only a group/groups of people to have access to this feature. Anti-spamming features are also readily available, provided by blog hosts.

• An archive of older articles is often organized into timeframes or is clustered into various categories.

• A blogroll or a list of links to related blog sites. This area may also contain links of other blogs that the blogger finds interesting, even if they're niche are totally unrelated. This is common feature but not necessary. This element may be considered more of a socializing tool than that boosting SEO as, realistically, it does not result to a very large amount of traffic, unless the sites included in the roll are popular.

• One or more of the following: RDF files, Atom, or RSS. To boost page rank, these files are primarily submitted to feed burner and pinging sites that enhances your blog's chances to getting crawled by spiders or search engine robots.