What is a Blog?

A blog is an online periodical publication. Instead of a daily newspaper, an hourly news broadcast, a weekly television series, or a monthly magazine, a blog is published on the web.

It helps to look at blogs, read the content, and see how they're organized. The examples shown here are all blogs created by students who took “Blogging for Fun and Profit.”  A blog can be about any topic you want, as these examples show. The topics here include public transportation, associations, nonprofits, teaching, and small business, and you can find blogs on almost any topic that people are interested in following.

The term blog comes from a combination of web and log, which got combined into the term “blog.” Blogs are a type of website, and all websites need to be available on the Internet at all times. As a result, blogs are almost always "hosted" by a service that provides blogging software and the Internet connection as a combined service. Later in the book, I'll give you a list of popular blogging services for both free and paid hosting so you'll know where to start your blog. 

All websites, including blogs, are “hosted” on a computer with 24-hour access to the Internet. All text, photos, and other data are located on the computer where the blog is hosted. Blogs include web publishing, design, and layout tools, all of which are used with a standard web browser and don't require any programming knowledge or software on a computer. 

Websites, including blogs, display information in a web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc..). The software that manages the formatting and appearance of websites is called HTML, for Hypertext Markup Language. HTML includes instructions that web browsers interpret to display web pages. Other types of websites can be created with design tools or HTML and can be as simple as a single page or as complicated as a site like Amazon.com. 

Blogs also include a built-in database to keep track of information in a chronological format. Like a ship captain's journal, a blog is a journal that includes information created by one or more authors. That information doesn't just have to be text; it can be any content displayed or used on the web, including photos, graphics, video, and audio. With a database, a blog is a website where the content can be indexed and searched. As a result, a blog is an extremely versatile type of website that's powerful yet easy to manage and use.