Blogger's Age
http://www.salon.com/blogs/
What's a blog?
A blog, or weblog, is a personal Web site updated frequently with links, commentary and anything else you like. New items go on top and older items flow down the page. Blogs can be political journals and/or personal diaries; they can focus on one narrow subject or range across a universe of topics. The blog form is unique to the Web -- and highly addictive.
How does it work?
Salon Blogs are powered by Radio UserLand, a simple yet versatile software tool that lets you post new items from your Web browser with one click. Radio UserLand automatically builds your site, organizes and archives your posts, and publishes your content -- you don't need to know HTML, FTP, or graphic design. All you need to do is install Radio and begin publishing. You can publish written text, links, photos, documents, and more with just a single click of your mouse.
Radio UserLand also provides other powerful features, including the ability to subscribe to news feeds from Salon, many other publications, and other bloggers.
When you build your blog with Salon, you also become a part of the Salon Blogs community, and your blog will show up on special listings of recently updated and most-read blogs.
The History of Weblogs
My name is Dave Winer and I run the Scripting News weblog, which was one of the earliest and is currently the longest-running weblog on the Internet.
Weblogs are often-updated sites that point to articles elsewhere on the web, often with comments, and to on-site articles. A weblog is kind of a continual tour, with a human guide who you get to know. There are many guides to choose from, each develops an audience, and there's also comraderie and politics between the people who run weblogs, they point to each other, in all kinds of structures, graphs, loops, etc.
Today, there are hundreds of thousands of weblog sites, and the market for tools for managing such sites is growing quickly. My company, UserLand, makes two products for weblogs, Manila, which is a centralized server-based content management system; and Radio UserLand which provides easy and powerful weblogging from the desktop.
Early weblogs
The first weblog was the first website, http://info.cern.ch/, the site built by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN. From this page TBL pointed to all the new sites as they came online. Luckily, the content of this site has been archived at the World Wide Web Consortium. (Thanks to Karl Dubost for the link.)
NCSA's What's New page took the cursor for a while, then Netscape's What's New page was the big blog in the sky in 1993-96. Then all hell broke loose. The Web exploded, and the weblog idea grew along with it.
I did my first weblog in February 1996, as part of the 24 Hours of Democracy website. It helped glue the community together, along with a mail list that was hosted by AOL. In April 1996 I started a news page for Frontier users, which became Scripting News on 4/1/97.
Other early weblogs include Robot Wisdom, Tomalak's Realm and CamWorld.
Personal Web Publishing Communities
Viewed another way, weblogs are Personal Web Publishing Communities. 11/16/01 DW.
News stories about weblogs
3/8/00: E&P. "Slow corporatization of the concept will probably be fine with many of the thousands of independent Webloggers who pioneered the concept. Romenesko says as Weblogging becomes more widespread among corporations, there's likely to be some resentment from the pioneers who see it as an anti-corporate concept."
2/23/00: Wired. "Thanks to new easy-to-use software, the number of weblogs on the Net seems to be growing at an unprecedented rate."
9/7/99: Chicago Tribune. "A Weblog is a Web site that maintains a constantly updated list of links to other sites; those links can deal with any subject or focus on a particular one. Webloggers typically offer pithy, sarcastic commentary about the links."
8/2/99: New York Times. "Summaries of news predate the Internet, of course. But in the digital era, when virtually anyone with Net access can operate an electronic clipping service, the genre has spawned thousands of news hounds -- not to mention the news links on big portal sites like Yahoo and Excite. Yet, largely through grass-roots, word-of-mouse popularity, sites like Romenesko's are catching on with a discerning crowd -- including reporters and editors of many news organizations, who rely on the sites to help filter the welter of information on the Web."
5/28/99: Salon. "Weblogs, typically, are personal Web sites operated by individuals who compile chronological lists of links to stuff that interests them, interspersed with information, editorializing and personal asides. A good weblog is updated often, in a kind of real-time improvisation, with pointers to interesting events, pages, stories and happenings elsewhere on the Web. New stuff piles on top of the page; older stuff sinks to the bottom."
taken from: http://newhome.weblogs.com/historyOfWeblogs
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Weblogs.Com?
It's a Web Application, developed and run by UserLand Software, makers of Manila and Radio UserLand. It was written by Dave Winer, who writes the Scripting News weblog.
Development started in late 1999. The first versions were called Subhonker2 or Weblog Monitor.
The core function of Weblogs.Com is a list of weblogs that have changed in the last three hours. This information is also available in XML.
Whoa! Where did all the features go?
On October 23, 2001 we completely changed how Weblogs.Com works.
The old Weblogs.Com accepted registrations. You'd give it the name of the weblog, its url, and various other bits of information. Then, every hour, it would read all the registered weblogs, and it would list the weblogs that changed in the last hour on the home page and in an XML file.
This was a good way to do it when there were a small number of weblogs. But there are so many now, Weblogs.Com got so slow that it was barely usable.
So now we're refocusing on what it does that's most valuable, and making way for new tools and utilities that build on that.
What's the difference?
The new weblogs.com must be told when your weblog changed. It doesn't automatically check to see if a weblog has changed.
Now here's a key point -- even though Weblogs.Com must be told about changes, if you use a blogging tool or content management system, it can be programmed to tell Weblogs.Com about the change.
In fact, Manila and Radio UserLand both have been programmed to communicate directly with Weblogs.Com. If you run a Manila or Radio site, you don't have to do anything beyond setting a Pref in a web form for your site automatically included in the new network.
How can my weblog participate in Weblogs.Com?
If you're a writer or designer and don't know an XML-RPC message from a hole in the ground, you can ask the developer of your blogging tool to take a look at the specs, or ask questions on the mail list for Weblogs.Com developers. Or you can bookmark this page, and refresh it when you add an item to your site.
If you develop a blogging tool and want to have your users optionally be able to participate in Weblogs.Com, it's easy. Send us a "ping" message through XML-RPC, SOAP or HTTP-POST.
Are these Web Services?
Of course. They are services that run on the Web. They use SOAP and XML-RPC. They are easy to understand and program, and can be accessed from any scripting environment on any operating system. If your weblog ties into Weblogs.Com you can proudly tell your friends that you're participating in the next developer revolution.
What about favorites?
All the static XML files maintained by the old Weblogs.Com will stay where they are but they will not update.
http://static.userland.com/weblogMonitor/changes.xml
http://static.userland.com/weblogMonitor/logs.xml
http://static.userland.com/weblogMonitor/categories.xml
http://static.userland.com/weblogMonitor/favorites.xml
http://static.userland.com/weblogMonitor/changedIcons.xml
What if I have a question that's not answered here?
Please post a message on the mail list for Weblogs.Com.
It tends to be techy and developer oriented, but we want to help people get going with the technology, to help us all find good sources of news and comment on the events of our day.
What in the world is a blogger?
Therefore the question is to blog or not to blog?
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