A blog (a truncation of \"weblog\")[1] is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries also known as posts. Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order so that the most recent post appears first, at the top of the web page. In the 2000s, blogs were often the work of a single individual, occasionally of a small group, and often covered a single subject or topic. In the 2010s, multi-author blogs (MABs) emerged, featuring the writing of multiple authors and sometimes professionally edited. MABs from newspapers, other media outlets, universities, think tanks, advocacy groups, and similar institutions account for an increasing quantity of blog traffic. The rise of Twitter and other \"microblogging\" systems helps integrate MABs and single-author blogs into the news media. Blog can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.


Journalism
Beats








Many blogs provide commentary on a particular subject or topic, ranging from philosophy, religion, and arts to science, politics, and sports. Others function as more personal online diaries or online brand advertising of a particular individual or company. A typical blog combines text, digital images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (art blogs), photographs (photoblogs), videos (video blogs or vlogs), music (MP3 blogs), and audio (podcasts). In education, blogs can be used as instructional resources; these are referred to as edublogs. Microblogging is another type of blogging, featuring very short posts.

Blog and blogging are now loosely used for content creation and sharing on social media, especially when the content is long-form and one creates and shares content on a regular basis, so one could be maintaining a blog on Facebook or blogging on Instagram. A 2022 estimate suggested that there were over 600 million public blogs out of more than 1.9 billion websites.[4]




Technology

Early blogs were simply manually updated components of common Websites. In 1995, the \"Online Diary\" on the Ty, Inc. Web site was produced and updated manually before any blogging programs were available. Posts were made to appear in reverse chronological order by manually updating text-based HTML code using FTP software in real time several times a day. To users, this offered the appearance of a live diary that contained multiple new entries per day. At the beginning of each new day, new diary entries were manually coded into a new HTML file, and at the start of each month, diary entries were archived into their own folder, which contained a separate HTML page for every day of the month. Then, menus that contained links to the most recent diary entry were updated manually throughout the site. This text-based method of organizing thousands of files served as a springboard to define future blogging styles that were captured by blogging software developed years later.[15]




An early example of a \"diary\" style blog consisting of text and images transmitted wirelessly in real-time from a wearable computer with head-up display, February 22, 1995