Blogs and vlogs

Blogs, or weblogs, are online diaries where people record their experiences and make comments on different topics with links, text and pictures. Someone maintaining this type of diary is called a blogger.

Vlogs, or videologs, are similar to blogs but involve recording video diary entries and posting them on the world-wide-web.

In most cases, both blogs and vlogs allow people to read and comment on each entry and even hold conversations about topics mentioned in the blog.

Blogs have become very popular in the last few years, with many blogs now used by companies, political parties and journalists to publish commentaries and get feedback on different topics.

Some blogs and bloggers have even become famous through publishing news or opinions that have then been taken up and reported in other media.

The most popular blogs now receive millions of readers each week.

How to blog

Creating a blog is very easy and can take less than five minutes.

All you need to do is to create a free account at a blogging website, such as Blogger , Xanga or MySpace .

You can choose to customise the appearance of your blog by choosing a web page template or, if you know a little about web design, creating your own.

Once your blog has been created, you can publish entries using forms on the site.

In some cases you can even type your blog entries using a mobile phone and SMS them to the site where they will then go live (get published) for millions of internet users to see.

History of blogs

The first recorded online diaries started in 1994, when the world-wide-web allowed people to write and publish web pages about their experiences.

The term ‘weblog’ was invented in 1997, and was shortened to the word ‘blog’ in 1999.

Blogging grew slowly at first. However, once specialised tools were invented to make it easy to keep an online diary, they began to grow in popularity.

Now there are reportedly more than 44 million blogs around the world and over 75,000 new blogs being created by people each day.