What Is Blogging And How Does It Work

Blogging has grown exponentially since the inception of a blog. For those who are still not initiated, this article will define what is blogging, it will explore a bit of the interesting history of blogging and its evolution so you can understand how it works in the 21st century.

What Is Blogging

Blogging can be defined as authoring and maintaining a blog. It refers to adding content to a blog. The content is added in a form of articles or stories. Each article or a story within a blog is called a post. It can be a short story such as one paragraph or it could be  a lengthy dissertation. As well, today you will find blogs that mainly consist of video entries (vlogs) or images (photo blogs) or audio content (podcast).

History Of Blogging

Blogging is a relatively new online activity. In it’s last breath, the 20th century gifted us with an opportunity and 21st century embraced it with a vengeance. Let me explain.

A blog can be defined as an online journal or a diary. These journals started to pop up in the early 1990′s but only as manually updated components of regular websites. But this practice was not commonplace and it certainly was not for everyone. The blogs were difficult to create and to maintain and required pretty good technical knowledge.

On Dec/17/1997, Jorn Barger “discovered” and/or used the term weblog. Jorn used the term to describe his collection of links from the internet. Paul Merholz subsequently broke the word “weblog” into “we blog” and since, the term “blog” was adopted but the online community. (Source)

Because of the sophisticated technical requirements of the past weblogs or online journals, one can argue that blogging as we know it today did not emerge until 1999 when Pyra labs launched a hosted application called Blogger.com It was easy to use by “untechie” users and it was available for free.

Subsequently, in 2003, Blogger.com was sold to Google. It was after this purchase that the Blogger became hugely popular. People were enamored with it  and basically this led to the blogging revolution. Since then millions, if not over billion of blogs surfaced.

Blogging Evolution

Since 2003 blogging has taken on another form and what was blogging before Google’s Blogger takeover does not even remotely resemble what is blogging today.

New blogging platforms, hosted or non hosted, have emerged. Technological advances made it so simple that anyone can blog. The age and gender makes no difference. Children and their grandparents can become bloggers. All one needs is the desire to be heard online.

Bloggers write about variety of topics and there are all kinds of blogs in the blogosphere. A few examples of types of blogs are listed below.

Personal blogs – blogs are typically very informal about personal issues, likes and dislikes, hobbies opinions, etc. Many of these blogs are written by people who do not have specific goals for their blogs. They just write for the fun of it.

Business blogs – most businesses use to have only a conventional static websites. Given that blogs are so popular many businesses embraced the idea of blogs to reach the masses. They even employ people only to blog.

News blogs – provide current events, news and new information on daily basis

Entertainment, Fan and Celebrity Gossip blogs – are popular entertainment blogs with vast audiences

Niche blogs – niche blogging (specific fragment of a market) is very popular, particularly for bloggers who want to make money blogging. (Niche blogging is covered in a later articles.)

In most instances today’s blogs have become highly social tools designed to build relationships with the readers and they are often used for networking. Blogging has given people an opportunity to make money online and many bloggers have become self made millionaires.

Many people take up blogging because they are bedazzled by the riches of the successful bloggers. These stories are real and despite the gazillions of blogs online it is still possible to make money blogging.

Whether you want to start a blog because you just want to let your creative juices flow, or because you want to promote your business, or because you want to become an online entrepreneur, blogosphere is yours to harness. With consistency and perseverance you will achieve your goals.

Now that you have gained some understanding about what is blogging and have seen how blogging has evolved you can explore the available blogging platforms to choose the one that will suit your purpose and budget. Lastly, if you liked this article and learned a bit please share your thoughts in the comment section and give the article “thumbs up” by hitting the “Like” button below.

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