Recently, more and more people are talking about Blogs: those who already have one on their site, those who want to change the management software, those who don’t know them, and those who complain about not having time to manage it.
But then, what is a blog? The term was officially coined in December 1997 by Jorn Barger, author of one of the first and best-known blogs, RobotWisdom (www.robotwisdom.com). The term blog is an English neologism, a word composed of “Web” and “Log”, where Log means a diary or a notebook. From Weblog to the abbreviation Blog, the step was then quite simple.
Blogs are included in websites, generally private and non-commercial, and constitute a sort of diary, a notebook, where, at more or less regular intervals, authorized people (usually the owners and managers of the sites themselves or the users who participate in the site’s community, depending on the case) write often informal and quick thoughts, reports, news, reflections, curiosities and everything else that would otherwise be written in a notebook. For this reason, blogs fairly well reflect the personality and interests of the authors or the community in which they are inserted, since the authors are free to write what they want, when they want, in the form they freely choose. Every thought, every message on a blog, is called a “Post” and posts are presented in chronological order, from the most recent to the oldest.
But blogs existed long before Jorn Barger coined the term. According to Jorn Barger himself, the first real blog was the “What’s new” page of Mosaic (the first browser) started in 1993 by Mark Anderssen, who shortly thereafter founded Netscape Inc., the famous software company that produced the homonymous browser. This document is still available online at http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/Docs/old-whats-new/whats-new-0693.html and the archives range from June 1993 to June 1996. On this page are collected, in chronological order, a series of reflections and reports on the technological evolution of the web written by Mark Anderssen himself and constitute, besides being the first example of a blog, an interesting historical document that briefly narrates the evolutions of the internet, written by one of the protagonists.
In Italy the first real blog is the famous Blogorroico (http://www.cavedoni.com/blogorroico/) whose archives already start in July 2000.
From a technological point of view, how do blogs work?
Blogs, on a technical level, are supported by a CMS (Content Management System), software or scripts that allow immediate content management of the site, in a very simple and intuitive way. In most blogs, software distributed for Linux platforms is used with a database, often MySQL, which allows the storage, cataloging, and archiving of all posts.
Blogger (www.blogger.com), created by Pyra Labs, a small American software house, is a practical service that allows, through a registration, to create one’s own blog, define its characteristics, and update it very easily. Most likely, the explosion of blogs was greatly helped by this first service, which allowed many users to easily create their own blog, a public diary on the web.
A very popular software for creating and managing blogs is Manila, created by UserLand (http://manila.userland.com). The software is paid and generally offered together with a CMS, Frontier, which can also function as a web server for one’s own site. With this package, managing the contents of the site and one’s blog becomes extremely simple and direct.
It is also possible to manage one’s site and blogs with PHPNuke. This is obviously an Open Source system based on the combination of Apache web server, MySQL database, and PHP scripts. Moreover, there are versions for Windows, Linux, Mac OS, and other operating systems, which makes this system particularly widespread and well-known.
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