Just what is a blog?

I'm finding out that not everyone knows what a blog is. I'm getting that quizzical look from a few. Here's an overview taken from andreas.com:

Origin of the word Blog
If a diary on the website is a log entry on a website, then it is a web log. This was shortened to weblog, which soon became blog.

There's also the verb, as in "he was blogging all morning."

How do I pronounce blog?
Blog rhymes with "dog" or "blob". It's one word. It's not pronounced "bee-log."

What is the blog community?
A subculture has sprung up around blogging. Groups of people maintain blogs and cite each other in their blogs. They even visit each other.

Why is there all this talk about blogs?
Blogs have been around since 1999 (four years now) but up to now, they have been a subculture.
In February 2003, Google bought Pyra, which makes blogger.com, and that created attention because whatever Google does is significant.
Blogs finally passed the tipping point from subculture into the mainstream.

Why are blogs important in journalism?
Using blogs, ideas are brought up on blogs, discussed further by others on their blogs, and distributed to yet more blogs. This is somewhat like a publicly-available email discussion. Blogs makes it possible to carry out a conversation in public, with hundreds of thousands of readers.

This is no small thing. A few blogs have led the media on several items:

University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds (at instapundit.com) and Washington DC columnist Joshua Marshall's Talking Points Memo, (an insider's newsletter on politics in Washington DC at talkingpointsmemo.com) were among the first to notice Trent Lott's racist comments during Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday bash. They used their highly-visible blogs to spread the news. US Senate Majority Leader Lott was forced to resign.

During the preparations for the US invasion of Iraq, Salam Pax, an Iraqi teenager, maintained a blog. He reported remarkable details about daily life in Baghdad. His blog was read by hundreds of thousands of people and distributed further by email to many more. It was carefully read by military intelligence services. See http://dear_raed.blogspot.com

Dan Gillmor, a business journalist for the San Jose Mercury News, covers conferences and high tech issues around the world, which he updates at his blog http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/column/dangillmor

These blogs are also the top blogs. They are averaging about one to two million readers per month. This is larger than most magazines, and easily in the range of the top twenty US newspapers. The top blogs are a major established form of news media.


And there you have it.