Characteristics of a Blog

Blogs range from being some of the most influential websites on the internet – good examples are the Huffington Post, which is an online newspaper, written by a team of professional journalists, which is worth millions, and is influential in business and politics; and  star blogger Darren Rowse’s Problogger, which is an essential read for all those interested in earning a living from blogging.

Other blogs are low level.  Personal blogs may only have ten or twelve followers.  Others use blogs to play around with ideas, such as my daughter’s experimental writing on invisible friends, which has some very weird stories.

In simple terms it is a piece of software which allows you to write an online diary on a website. Your last entry, called a post, is displayed on the front page, home page, of the site.

The significance of the blog is that it is dynamic.  That is that it can handle be updated and it allows the visitor to communicate through the comment section attached to each individual post.

The other significant characteristics of today’s blogs are:

• a blog has some form of navigation, usually menus
• a blog’s layout contains a header, footer and content.  Usually there is at least one sidebar running beside the content.
• categories of posts
• that readers can access the archives, previous posts
• that a post can contain text and images, (and often video and other media)
• that posts can contain links to other posts, both within blog and to the entire web
• should contain a contact page and form
• should contain an about page

In today’s world a blog may contain many other elements, such as a display of recent posts, a plugin that automatically sends a new post details to Twitter or Facebook,  image galleries and the ability to turn the post into an easy to print document.

But let’s face it when you set up a website you are trying to communicate with the billions of web users throughout the world.  You are hoping that lots of them will come and visit, interact, take action or buy from you.

A blog, with a lot of work, is a very effective way of reaching out and communicate with a sizeable audience from these billions.  You may want them to just to come and read your personal thoughts; you may want to inform people; you may want to tell them about your campaign; you may want to attract potential customers to your services or business; you may want to sell them something.

In all these cases you are communicating and in most cases you are trying to get the visitor to take some form of action, even if it is only to click a link to read another post on your site.

Blog Basics: What is a blog?
Blog Basics: The Components of a Blog

Wikipedia:  Defining a blog

WordPress: Introduction to blogging?

Problogger: What is a blog?

Image: Flikr @digitalrob70

Well what do you think?  Are I right? or do you disagree?

Are you thinking of starting a blog?  Then tell me.  If you’ve started a blog?  Tell me about and build another useful backlink.