Blogs

Definition

A blog is a website or part of a website which are normally maintained by an individual user. It is considered an on-line journal where people can post entries about their personal interestsor hobbies.


http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=blog


Normal websites contain information which can only be viewed by visitors whereas with a blog people can create their own posts and people can comment and express their own view on a topic.


People use blogs for a number of different reasons for example as a way to express a view point or to view and comment on another viewpoint by adding to their ideas or to begin a debate on the topic being spoken about. Many people also read blogs purely because they find the writer interesting. Blogs are also used as a teaching aid. By creating a blog you find an easy way to express yourself and many people find this very useful.

Advantages to blogs:

• a way of receiving good feedback
• people can build a profile showing a talent to be recognised
• knowledge can be shared
• people are better informed which could possibly lead to a better society in the future
• blogs help larger companies to build a strong relationship with their customer or user to get feedback

Disadvantages to blogs

•  A lot of people find it hard to express themselves through blogs making it boring to read. They sometimes aren't compelling enough for people to read.
• Only people with time, have time to write blogs. The fact they have time normally means they have nothing interesting to say.
• Very time consuming. People often start a blog but not have time to regularly update.
• People may find information on blogs offensive

http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2004/nt_2004_08_23_blogging.htm

News Stories

A woman starts a blog and soon she made around 150 dollars a day.


Making money through a blog


Several police men over the country have be found to be creating blogs for their police dogs. They claim that people would want to know about the job of their dogs and why they are used although to other officers it has been seen as wasting time and money.


Blogs For Dogs Story




It is said that the reason most celebrity gossip spreads is due to blogs. Rumours that Tiger Woods had cheated on his wife Elin Nordegren with many women only began to spread rapidly when it was posted on blogs and social networking sites such as Facebook.


How Gossip Spreads




Comments on blog are often very useful for the writer and the person viewing. It allows information to be shared easily and debates caused by comments lead to an increase of knowledge. Also if someone has posted a short story on a blog they can easily get feedback on their work and what to edit and what is good within their story. Most opinions are often constructive and well thought out. 


http://gigaom.com/collaboration/are-blog-comments-worth-it/

Twitter

As well as blogger, Twitter is considered as a micro blog.
'Twitter is a social networking and micro blogging service, owned and operated by Twitter Inc., that enables its users to send and read other users' messages called tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author's profile page. Tweets are publicly visible by default, however senders can restrict message delivery to their friends list. Users may subscribe to other author tweets—this is known as following and subscribers are known as followers.'

Twitter was orginally meant to be a blog type service from a phone so you can send tweets by text message.

Twitter unfortunatly can locate you when you send out a post as it tells people were you are in the world.
A guy set up a website which listed who was out and where they lived. If a post stated something like 'going food shopping' this man would locate you and post it onto a seperate website to help buglars.

Tweets are obviously a much shorter version of a blog as on blogger there is not a character limit (which is the amount of letters and spaces allowed in one post) whereas on Twitter you are only allowed up to 140 characters. Posts on blogger therefore can be a lot more detailed filled with much more information. Twitter is also been seen to be causing a lot of problems in the world today especially with sport personalities and politicians.

Nick Clegg was a victim of Twitter when newspapers attacked him. This soon became the third most talked about topic in the world when posts were placed on twitter named 'nick cleggs fault.'

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/22/nickcleggsfault-british-p_n_547923.html

Also Kevin Pieterson, after being dropped from his cricket team sent out foul languaged posts on Twitter exclaiming what had happened. he received a fine of about £2,500.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/cricket/2010/09/07/twitter-rants-earn-kevin-pietersen-and-dimi-mascarenhas-heavy-fines-115875-22543230/

TWITTER, LIKE MOST BLOGS IS FREE!

As the posts are shorter they are seen as pointless to most people.

You don't have to connect to the Internet to receive 'tweets' you can have them sent directly to a mobile phone via text message,

Responses to posts can be either public or private.
Most people who 'tweet' don't expect a comment after unlike blogger.
Barack Obama posted his running for president on twitter

http://www.nytimes.com/indexes/2009/01/15/technology/circuitsemail/index.html?8cir&emc=cir#continue

At the moment the 5 most popular user of Twitter are:
1. Lady Gaga with 6,298,717 followers, 147,761 following, 466 tweets
2. Britney Spears with 5,930,234 followers, 418,640 following, 440 tweets
3. Ashton Kutcher 5,779,978 followers, 604 following, 6,241 tweets
4. Barack Obama 5,401,547 followers, 714,733 following, 912 tweets
5. Justin Bieber 5,239,994 followers, 84,033 following, 5,004 tweets
They are all major celebrities in the 21st Century being on of the reasons Twitter is so popular today.

Tumblr

• founded in 2007
• a lot like blogger where posts can contain information such as videos, links and pictures.
• In my opinion tumblr is a lot easier to find people you know to follow because one of the first things it asks you when signing up is to enter your email address so they can search your contacts who may also have a tumblr account.
• when posting a blog on tumblr you can select the type of blog you wish to post so your blog can be of a certain type. This differs to blogger as there is only one post button where you can do everything in one place. I believe tumblr is better because it shows new users clearly what the service provides and what you can do on this blogging site.

debate as to whether blogger is better than tumblr

http://andyhorst.blogspot.com/2009/05/blogger-vs-tumblr.html