Netsurfing: What’s in a blog?
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
By Zainub Razvi
Blogs have come a long way from their humble beginnings in 1997 when blogging pioneer Jorn Barger first began to maintain a log of his daily surfing routine. Little did he know that less than a decade later, Time magazine would honour bloggers and their contributions by naming ‘you’ as their 2006 Person of the Year.
The rise of blogs in Pakistan as an alternative new media has been slower as compared to the rest of the world, where blogging has been at the forefront pretty much ever since Google bought the Evan William’s brainchild Blogger.com in 2003. But even this slow rise to prominence is noteworthy for a country where the internet penetration and literacy levels are not something to be proud of.
To borrow from the tagline of the recently organised ‘National Bloggers Conference’ in Karachi that was hosted by the Sindh government’s IT department, blogging in Pakistan has evolved from ‘past time to prime time’. While Pakistan’s growing blogosphere continues to present a kaleidoscope of the complex and contradictory developments within the country, many of the non-bloggers outside Pakistani blogosphere still aren’t completely sure of what blogs are anyway.
Casual discussions with many students reveal, for instance, that while they can relate to what a blog is, they aren’t as clear on what distinguishes them from other websites. Maira Khan, an International Relations student at the University of Karachi, for instance, admitted that while she had heard of the term blog, the only difference she could spot between a blog and regular website was user comments. Other people thought blogs weren’t really different from the rest of the Web at all. Hina Mujeeb, a Mass Communications major, for instance, described a blog as “an interactive forum on the net like many others”.
Others tended to differentiate on the basis of the format. Zurfishan Saleem of the Sheikh Zayd Islamic Centre, for instance, pointed out that “a blog appears more like a personal diary, whereas a website is something more formal and official”. Another student, Maryam Mehboob, believed that, “Blogs as compared to other sites tends to be less traditional and more casual. While websites are usually dedicated for a collective cause, blogs are a personal statement reflecting the individuality of the person owning it.”
The truth is that the line between blogs and other websites is fast blurring. Ever since blogs have emerged as a platform for citizen journalism, it has become rather confusing for the average internet user to distinguish a blog from other news websites, especially if blogs are designed in a way to look like one. While many blogs are designed to resemble a web journal, more and more are being modelled to look like a regular website. A case in point is The Huffington Post blog which seems more or less completely identical to any regular news website, when it is in fact an aggregate political blog featuring opinion columns as blog posts from a myriad group of columnists.
Many other websites have at the same time embraced the impact of blogs by accommodating many of the features associated with a blog. The Guardian newspaper’s website for instance, now gives readers the options to “comment” on a news piece using a small form at the bottom of the page. Admittedly, the comments policy here tends to be far stricter than on other blogs, including even Guardian’s own blogs, where people are given a much more free hand in voicing their opinions. Other websites have incorporated RSS feeds and social bookmarking widgets that were first popularised by blogs.
The overriding point of difference between blogs and the rest of the cyber world, however, seems to be the structural format of blogs. Blogs, at least the popular ones, tend to be dynamic websites; their content is updated very frequently, sometimes several times within a single day. The updates are arranged in a reverse chronological order. The rest of the web tends to be more static. A business company’s website, for instance, may not be updated for several days, perhaps even months.
Additionally, these updates are database-driven, meaning that the content one enters into the blog is stored in a database, which can later be distributed as a ‘data feed’. RSS or Really Simple Syndication is the feed that most blogs employ. With RSS, content can be viewed through any RSS reader or aggregator on another website or on a computer or portable device. Again, the lines between blogs and other types of websites are blurring as more business owners choose to build their site with content management systems similar to RSS.
But those who do purposely make their blogs “look like blogs” tend to follow a similar content layout arrangement. A blogroll or a list comprising the blogger’s favorite blogs is usually placed on the left- or right-hand sidebar, which usually also contains to the blog’s achieve, its RSS feed and other blogging widgets, which are tiny add-ons that give added functionality to blogs.
Another difference can be traced down to ownership. A majority of blogs tend to be owned by individuals or groups of individuals with a common interest, but here too, the concept of corporate blogging is fast emerging. Almost all online news websites have their separate blogs within their larger websites and now even private enterprises and businesses have their own blogs, such as Google’s Gmail Blog.
The bottom line seems to be that with the growing Web 2.0 trends it’s much harder now to implicitly demarcate a blog from the rest of the World Wide Web. Whether it is in layout, style, content or comments, blogs and the rest of the World Wide Web seem to be merging and gaining more and more from each other.
Blogs have come a long way from their humble beginnings in 1997 when blogging pioneer Jorn Barger first began to maintain a log of his daily surfing routine. Little did he know that less than a decade later, Time magazine would honour bloggers and their contributions by naming ‘you’ as their 2006 Person of the Year.
The rise of blogs in Pakistan as an alternative new media has been slower as compared to the rest of the world, where blogging has been at the forefront pretty much ever since Google bought the Evan William’s brainchild Blogger.com in 2003. But even this slow rise to prominence is noteworthy for a country where the internet penetration and literacy levels are not something to be proud of.
To borrow from the tagline of the recently organised ‘National Bloggers Conference’ in Karachi that was hosted by the Sindh government’s IT department, blogging in Pakistan has evolved from ‘past time to prime time’. While Pakistan’s growing blogosphere continues to present a kaleidoscope of the complex and contradictory developments within the country, many of the non-bloggers outside Pakistani blogosphere still aren’t completely sure of what blogs are anyway.
Casual discussions with many students reveal, for instance, that while they can relate to what a blog is, they aren’t as clear on what distinguishes them from other websites. Maira Khan, an International Relations student at the University of Karachi, for instance, admitted that while she had heard of the term blog, the only difference she could spot between a blog and regular website was user comments. Other people thought blogs weren’t really different from the rest of the Web at all. Hina Mujeeb, a Mass Communications major, for instance, described a blog as “an interactive forum on the net like many others”.
Others tended to differentiate on the basis of the format. Zurfishan Saleem of the Sheikh Zayd Islamic Centre, for instance, pointed out that “a blog appears more like a personal diary, whereas a website is something more formal and official”. Another student, Maryam Mehboob, believed that, “Blogs as compared to other sites tends to be less traditional and more casual. While websites are usually dedicated for a collective cause, blogs are a personal statement reflecting the individuality of the person owning it.”
The truth is that the line between blogs and other websites is fast blurring. Ever since blogs have emerged as a platform for citizen journalism, it has become rather confusing for the average internet user to distinguish a blog from other news websites, especially if blogs are designed in a way to look like one. While many blogs are designed to resemble a web journal, more and more are being modelled to look like a regular website. A case in point is The Huffington Post blog which seems more or less completely identical to any regular news website, when it is in fact an aggregate political blog featuring opinion columns as blog posts from a myriad group of columnists.
Many other websites have at the same time embraced the impact of blogs by accommodating many of the features associated with a blog. The Guardian newspaper’s website for instance, now gives readers the options to “comment” on a news piece using a small form at the bottom of the page. Admittedly, the comments policy here tends to be far stricter than on other blogs, including even Guardian’s own blogs, where people are given a much more free hand in voicing their opinions. Other websites have incorporated RSS feeds and social bookmarking widgets that were first popularised by blogs.
The overriding point of difference between blogs and the rest of the cyber world, however, seems to be the structural format of blogs. Blogs, at least the popular ones, tend to be dynamic websites; their content is updated very frequently, sometimes several times within a single day. The updates are arranged in a reverse chronological order. The rest of the web tends to be more static. A business company’s website, for instance, may not be updated for several days, perhaps even months.
Additionally, these updates are database-driven, meaning that the content one enters into the blog is stored in a database, which can later be distributed as a ‘data feed’. RSS or Really Simple Syndication is the feed that most blogs employ. With RSS, content can be viewed through any RSS reader or aggregator on another website or on a computer or portable device. Again, the lines between blogs and other types of websites are blurring as more business owners choose to build their site with content management systems similar to RSS.
But those who do purposely make their blogs “look like blogs” tend to follow a similar content layout arrangement. A blogroll or a list comprising the blogger’s favorite blogs is usually placed on the left- or right-hand sidebar, which usually also contains to the blog’s achieve, its RSS feed and other blogging widgets, which are tiny add-ons that give added functionality to blogs.
Another difference can be traced down to ownership. A majority of blogs tend to be owned by individuals or groups of individuals with a common interest, but here too, the concept of corporate blogging is fast emerging. Almost all online news websites have their separate blogs within their larger websites and now even private enterprises and businesses have their own blogs, such as Google’s Gmail Blog.
The bottom line seems to be that with the growing Web 2.0 trends it’s much harder now to implicitly demarcate a blog from the rest of the World Wide Web. Whether it is in layout, style, content or comments, blogs and the rest of the World Wide Web seem to be merging and gaining more and more from each other.
Labels: Blogs
posted @ 1:45 PM,
1 Comments:
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At June 30, 2009 at 2:06 AM,
said...
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I pray Maryam Mehboob burns in Hell forever, ameen.
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