One Post Introduction to Blogs

So you may have heard the term "Blog" but don't know what it means. A Blog (shortened form of Web Log) is

"a website where entries are written in chronological order and displayed in reverse chronological order." (Source: Wikipedia entry)

This website is actually a blog. A couple major features of blogs:

• Posts. The main content of blogs are individual "posts" (like this one) about whatever topic is of interest to the author(s). There may be one or more authors of a blog.
  
• General theme. Typically (though not always) there is some overall theme or topic for the blog (e.g., an area of politics, religion, science, technology, or just sharing what's going on in someone's family). One analogy is that Blogs are "printing presses for the masses" where anyone (professional or amateur) can publish whatever content they wish.
• Comments. Most blogs allow comments from others in some form on each post. This allows others (possibly anonymously) to interact with the author on the topic of the post. If you want to try it out, feel free to leave a comment on this post.
  

So what? Blogs are a simple but surprisingly interesting tool. Anyone can generate whatever content they wish (including whatever electronic media they want) and post it on a blog for the world to see. This doesn't mean anyone will actually read it!

In my personal opinion, they are best suited to communicating transient information and fostering discussions on topics of immediate interest. Why? Blogs may be here today and gone tomorrow. Also, only so many posts can be viewed at a time on the "main" page of a blog, so the others must be searched for through the archive. Once there, they are not likely to generate much on-going interest. Another issue is (as engineers put it) a low "signal to noise" ratio. In other words, there are massive numbers of blogs out there, but likely very few that would be of interest to you - and even fewer that offer a significant level of insight on the topic.

I'm currently reading up on educational uses of blogs, so stay tuned for book reviews on the topic. If you have an immediate interest in blogs, feel free to contact me or Neil Torda in the Faculty Center. Setting up a blog is free through various on-line services, so monetary cost is not an issue.