Weblogs have no whole; they are not objects. They are processes, actions, sites of exchange, more like Socrates’ original dialogues must have been than Plato’s written version of them.
Jill Walker, 2006
In form, blogs are simply websites published in a series of entries, with the newest entries on the top of the page. Highlighting what’s new emphasizes the blog’s dynamic nature; the knowledge displayed on it is not static like a website. As Stephen Downes, a long-time educational blogger, asserts, “[b]logging is something defined by format and process, not by content.” A blog-writer, or “blogger,” can react quickly to any situation by simply adding a new entry—-no redesign of information is needed, as with a website. UW Journalism professor Greg Downey writes, “[t]he Weblog is a direct repudiation of this static publishing model [of the website]: organized reverse-chronologically (with the most recent entries on the top of the page, getting older as one scrolls down), it offers an immediate sense of its content as “news”; often incorporating comments and links by readers, it offers up transparent evidence that its content is read, debated, and recycled.”
September 11, 2001 marked a turning point in this format of news; as official channels of news were overwhelmed with questions and could provide no answers, individual bloggers described the scenes in New York and Washington, DC. We’ve seen this phenomenon of immediacy affect the spin on news, as even traditional news sources will cite the “blogosphere” or certain political blog sites such as Daily Kos or Instapundit as indices of American culture at large. But blogs do not index American culture alone; Dave Sifry, founder of Technorati, a popular blog-indexing site, indicates that many languages other than English are used for posting, posts are more frequent in Japan than anywhere else, and the world’s most popular blog is Chinese, at least as of the beginning of May, 2006.
According to Rebecca Blood’s history of blogs, they began to proliferate in the late 1990s as filtering pages for the internet. Individuals would post interesting links to news articles and other sites on the internet and add their own opinions and perspectives on the articles. This kind of site still exists (see Metafilter or Fark), but the journal form of blog has overtaken it in popularity. Most blogs now are creations of individuals and entries are reflections on life (see Dooce), academics (see Bitch PhD, jill/txt, and Confessions of a Community College Dean), or other specific subjects, like games (like Jamie Fristrom's GameDevBlog) and design (The Design Observer). Some blogs are written collectively, and these are often centered on certain subjects, like “news for nerds” (Slashdot) or games (Terra Nova).
To think about blogs in the way they’re currently used, it’s helpful to think about the paradigm of “Web 2.0”. In “Web 1.0” (which, like WWI, was never called that until the second one came along), information was presented by authorities. Websites were put up by people who knew html, or later, Dreamweaver and other software packages. Websites could be updated by their authors, but there was little dialogue between authors and readers about the sites. The new paradigm for the web, “Web 2.0”, is access and reader-provided information. Blog publishing tools such as Blogger are widely available on the internet (see Tools in "how to use blogs"), and reader rankings and tags influence the content we read. Think of amazon.com’s popular feature “the customers who bought this book also bought…” Services such as flickr allow readers to upload their own content (in this case, pictures), and other readers can “tag” this content with relevant labels. Librarything.com allows readers to catalog their books online and see and comment on others’ collections; del.icio.us collects readers’ information on bookmarks through annotations and tags (see how this works).
Their history and ease of access make blogs particularly useful tools in education. Rebecca Blood writes “I strongly believe in the power of weblogs to transform both writers and readers from ‘audience’ to ‘public’ and from ‘consumer’ to ‘creator.’” If we believe in “education 2.0” as a paradigm to allow students to explore and create knowledge on their own, with teachers as coaches and facilitators, blogs provide a useful medium to allow that to happen. With free hosting tools on the internet, teachers can facilitate blogs where ideas can be discussed amongst students and even the internet community at large. The teacher is no longer the sole audience and arbiter of student work. Like any change in teaching methods, it requires a leap of faith, but once teachers get blogs working well in their classes, they rarely want to stop using them.