BLOGGING
Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function
as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links
to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability
for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part
of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art
(artlog), photographs (photoblog), sketchblog, videos (vlog), music (MP3 blog),
audio (podcasting) are part of a wider network of social media. Micro-blogging
is another type of blogging which consists of blogs with very short posts.Blogging
combined the personal web page with tools to make linking to other pages easier
- specifically permalinks, blogrolls and TrackBacks. This, together with weblog
search engines enabled bloggers to track the threads that connected them to
others with similar interests.As
of December 2007, blog search engine Technorati was tracking more than 112 million
blogs.
Popularity
Recently, researchers have analyzed the dynamics of how blogs become popular.
There are essentially two measures of this: popularity through citations, as
well as popularity through affiliation (i.e. blogroll). The basic conclusion
from studies of the structure of blogs is that while it takes time for a blog
to become popular through blogrolls, permalinks can boost popularity more quickly,
and are perhaps more indicative of popularity and authority than blogrolls,
since they denote that people are actually reading the blog's content and deem
it valuable or noteworthy in specific cases.Recently,
through the mass popularity of sponsored post ventures such as PayPerPost (now
known as Izea) a large number of personal blogs have started writing sponsored
posts for advertisers wanting to boost buzz about new products and services.
It has revolutionised the blogosphere almost in the same way that Google AdSense
did.(1)