What does “blog” stand for and where did the word come from? Well, it’s not an acronym, rather it’s an abbreviation of the term “web log” – an online journal. That’s still what many people think of as a traditional blog, an online account of life usually written via a blogging service such as Blogger or Livejournal. Early blogs tended to be personal and were often of interest only to one’s friends.

Things have moved on a lot since then. Today we have corporate blogs, subject based blogs such as this one, news blogs, celebrity blogs, blogs that are presented like magazines, social networks, micro-blogging – any number of variations.

How do we decide what is and what isn’t a blog? There’s no simple way, however I suggest that blogs tend to have at least some of the following features:

• Platform
  Most blogs use a dedicated publishing platform such as WordPress or Blogger.

• Timeline
  Most blogs follow a timeline, either internal or external

• Interactive
  Comments and reader interaction are the lifeblood of blogs

• Voice
  Writing style in blogs tends to be informal and personal

Those headings cover a lot of ground and I’ll be discussing each of them in more depth over the following few days. They aren’t unique to blogs of course, however I reckon that the more of those points a site can tick the more likely it is to be labelled as a blog.

Next: Blogging Platforms