Short Answer:
A blog is a website made up
of journal-like entries arranged newest to oldest. The entries,
called posts, can be commented on by a blog's readership.
The content of a blog can also be subscribed to via its RSS
feed, a constantly-updated stream of information that can be
imported into many different applications.
To quickly comment on a blog post, click on "Comments" at the
bottom of the post. Type in your comment. Under "Choose Your
Identity," select "Other" and fill in your name (or choose
"Anonymous"), then click on "Publish Your Comment" to post it.
Long Answer:
A blog (short for "web
log") is a website consisting of journal-like entries
(called posts) that are arranged in reverse chronological order. Blogs are distinguished by their frequent, usually short, posts,
and by the way they reflect their owner's personality.
Traditional websites
are relatively static, while blogs change all the time. Blogs
exist on every conceivable topic. There are currently upwards of
112
million blogs on the web. Bloggers update their blogs--
there are approximately 1.6 million new posts made per day, or
over 18 per second.
Blogs have become wildly popular because they make it so easy to post content online.
Most blogging sites are free, and they come with built-in
templates that allow you to make a blog without having to deal
with complicated coding and formatting. Blogs have a strong
immediacy-- they can address topics nearly instantaneously.
Sometimes blogs break news even before more traditional media
sources. Blogs are also interactive-- comments allow readers to
interact with each other and with the blogger.
Each
blog creates a constantly-updated stream of content, which is
called an RSS Feed. Think of it as a constant radio
broadcast on a particular channel. Just as you can tune in your
favorite radio station from many different places (your car
stereo, your computer, your clock radio), you can "tune in" to
the stream of content from your favorite blog via several
different applications. And, just as you need a radio tuner to
pull the radio signals out of the air and decipher them, you
need a feed aggregator to decode the RSS feed from
your favorite blog.
In addition to deciphering RSS for you, a feed
aggregator allows you subscribe to content from multiple blogs, and look at it all in one place. There are
several different types of feed aggregators. There are feed
aggregators in the form of software
that you can download onto your computer; feed aggregators that
are web-based; feed aggregators that send
content directly to your e-mail address; and there are also feed
aggregators built into the customizable homepages of your
favorite websites, including My Google, My Yahoo!, and My AOL.
Instead of checking your 10 favorite websites each morning,
you can have all that content sent to one place.
Blogs
aren't the only websites which have RSS feeds that you can subscribe to.
Many non-blog websites are beginning to offer RSS feeds of their
content. For instance, you can receive the latest New York Times Sports headlines,
the local weather, new listings of vintage Fiestaware dishes on eBay,
and the Greenwich
Time headlines, as RSS Feeds. And your feed aggregator lets
you read them all in one place! Feed aggregators alleviate the
bother of browsing from site to site and hunting around for the
content you're interested in.
Start looking for the these little orange buttons as you browse
websites:
They let you know that you can subscribe to a website's new
content, often in many discrete categories. Check the "More Information"
section below for links to various feed aggregators.
