Eagle eye view of the WEB LOG phenomenon

    I started writing this article more out of a necessity . The first thing I had to do was find a good topic to write on ! After all one does want to intrigue the readers enough so that they read on till the end. Sitting in front of the screen of my laptop which was the opening portal to the world's largest information center (The Internet), I started browsing various blogs that people actively write into and started wondering what should I come up with. (u know try to be creative..)

 There are so many topics to write about . And trust me , there are articles and posts on topics ranging from organic food to economy to healthcare and medicine to wildlife to warfare techniques to musical instruments to fashion and style to geography to philosophy and mythology to science and technology to sex to art to advertising and marketing to randomness to personal routines to movie reviews to anything and everything you can think of !! And who is writing them ? People from backgrounds (professional, linguistic and cultural) as varied and bizarre as the range of  their topics. 

I could not think of a single topic that I could write on and justify/claim the content's originality (since there are so many of them literally describing, in detail, every bit-n-piece of the topic). After a few back to back moments of awe and  overwhelm  I finally decided to "write a blog article on the blogging phenomenon".

I will only be dealing with the elementary aspects of the big blog industry and my observations on the ones I have seen and read. This article will aim to portray the WHAT WHEN AND HOW part of blog writing . The WHY part is obviously subjective to an author's interest and reasoning. 

According to Wikipedia , BLOG is a portmanteau of 2 words viz. 'WEB' and 'LOG'. 'Web' refers to the Worldwide web and 'log' is basically a list of activities/processes of a certain mechanism/program in reverse chronological order. So blog is a list of 'POSTS' (published articles) arranged in reverse chronology and shared/hosted on the web to be read and seen by everyone. 

The emergence of blogs in the late 90s coincided with the advent of web publishing tools that facilitated the posting of content by non-technical users.Initially they started with single subject, informative and  single authored posts on a blog which again were posted for limited concerned public.The modern blog evolved from the online diary, where people would keep a running account of their personal lives. Most such writers called themselves diarists and journalists. The posts became interactive and people started creating a network of followers and commentators. 

Slowly , the sheer reason of easy accessibility and non-technical maintainance of a web-page for yourself gave way to blog-writing's immense popularity and its getting established as a serious business development tool for online and offline industry.

A generic blog has the following most important parts : 
1. An independent URL.
2. Archive/ List of posts.
3. Latest post .
4. Followers/Subscribers.
5. Name and profile of the blogger . 
6. Summarized text of recent posts.

Many blogs now a days have videos ,animations and an infinite number of CONTENT MANAGEMENT  apps developed by the hobbyist blogger community for their own fun-n-good. 

With these basic content writing and sharing methods, today's bloggers have come up with many creative articles, ideas and way of conveying INFORMATION . Blogging phenomenon is so big , that it has become a part of the media. The top bloggers are now selling off space on their blogs to advertisers.

Blogs are now becoming an integral part of the online Fashion and entertainment commerce. Every big fashion or entertainment media company and celebrity holds a blog . Every company selling online products have a blog which is updated by a few full-time employees of the company dedicated towards working on the blog and social media. 

By 2004, the role of blogs became increasingly mainstream, as political consultants, news services, and candidates began using them as tools for outreach and opinion forming. Many entertainment,political,sports and industry hot shots started  having a regularly updated (and maintained to the core of sanity and diplomacy) blog . And the immense number of followers and subscribers show the outreach this very blogging platform has lived n risen up to. 
And so much so , that some of the mainstream media enterprises have been reporting of shutting down due to bankruptcy and low recovery of cost. Isn't it obvious ! After all, Blogs give you an environmental friendly, low budget (infact negligible compared to what goes into the conventional media platforms) platform to distribute information and create a loyal reader-base. 

However it is not easy to label blogging as a COMPLETELY NEW or even a REINVENTED form of journalism. Reason ? 
Because under this phenomenon lie one of the most personal,funny and at times weird group of individualistic posts by hobbyists who consider blog as a diary writing activity (u knw its just the online version..)! Generally speaking, these posts are fascinating, since they often have serious elements of "Hyde Park corner blather", besides blatant exhibitionism and obvious self-indulgence. 

By the end of  2012 about 140 million blogs were identified. How many of these can one person read ( unless someone pays u for it ...) !! Obviously ,not even 1 % of these can be considered relevant to journalism (unless journalism's definition changes !) . Well but as far as the serious seeker of information will not give up on following and finding new articles and blogs, and as long as the blogging phenomenon doesn't give up its dynamism , the super-cool and ever-enthusiastic developers will keep supplying products like the BLOG FINDER ! 
Type in the words and phrases relevant to what you want, and get the filtered-list of blogs withing seconds. But wait a sec , whats this ?! I searched for "Asynchronous Warfare" (a phrase I thought not so commonly tagged and used on the web , that too in blog search !) and its showing me around 19300 results in 0.2 sec (the boasting part :P ) and that too in half-hazard manner (ranks). Ouuuu, how could one forget the super-duper overtly used and abused method of content management called the SEO. 

Yes bloggers use the seo techniques to increase search ranks. Fairly speaking the SEO methods are used more in blogs than websites, for the simple reason that most of its content is text and html which can be overloaded with tags and hidden links. And the results often are more successfully visible in blogs than in websites.

Conclusion is not on my mind. There's a lot be said and researched. However what the above written words would summarize to can be said in the following way (Quoting Jesse James Garrett): 

 blogs are truly the "pirate radio stations" of the web, by allowing individuals to create "personal platforms. . . to broadcast their perspectives on current events, the media, our culture, and basically anything else that strikes their fancy from the vast sea of raw material available out there on the web. Some are more topic-focused than others, but all are really built around someone's personal interests. Neither a faceless news-gathering organization nor an impersonal clipping service, a quality weblog is distinguished by the voice of its editor, and that editor's connection with his or her audience."