From the perspective of Jeffrey Cole of the Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California, these new tools are nothing short of revolutionary in that they “let anyone distribute their ideas potentially to tens of millions of people. It’s totally reversed the whole history of mass communications” (opinion cited in Kornblum, 2006, n.p.). In fact, in December 2006, the editorial staff of Time magazine named “you” as its “person of the year.” The magazine recognized that the collective efforts of millions of individuals were fast reshaping the Internet and the way we live our lives.
As of 2007, we are still likely in the early stages of the development of what will become Web 2.0. However, blogging is certainly at the forefront of Web 2.0 technologies. In a nutshell, a blog can be differentiated from a website in that it is a web vehicle that is easier to create and update, typically by simply typing into a preprogrammed interface. From a definitional perspective, a blog refers to an online journal that can be updated regularly, with entries typically displayed in chronological order.
While blogs now encompass not only text but video and audio as well, it is generally accepted that if the individual posts, items, or articles cannot be linked to separately via a permalink (rather then just linking to the whole site), then the site in question is not a blog. Blogs are also commonly referred to as a weblog or web log, with blog used as the short form of these terms. Blog is also a verb, meaning to write an article on such an online journal.
November 9, 2009 at 4:25 pm |
[...] of a poet. Where is the lad of twenty who has written as well to-day–nay, where is the mature person of forty? There was a wind of poetry abroad in 1830, blowing over the barricades of Paris, [...]