Today if you do not know what a blog is, you are thought to be ‘missing something’. The world today is forcing us to be technology dependant. Either we are on our cellphone talking or sending an SMS. Or we are in front of our computer sending an email or checking on the latest news. A blog or blogging has become equally as important to our daily lives.

A blog (a term derived from web log) is an online compilation of articles or entries (often called posts), typically appearing in reverse chronological order as you scroll down the page. A blog can be part of a website, or it can be its own website. What makes a blog special is the powerful publishing software at its foundation. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its chosen topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an imperative part of many blogs.

An example of a blog is The Rand Today (www.therandtoday.com). This is a blog focussing on topics involving finance and business in South Africa. The authors of The Rand Today are passionate about business and finance and whenever they come across news or a topic they would like to share with the rest of the world they post it on The Rand Today blog. A visitor to The Rand Today will be able to see the latest post that was written by the authors of the blog at the top of the page then as they scroll down the posts get older and older. A visitor can then click on the headline of the post they want to read more about and then they are taken to a new page displaying the full contents of the post. As mentioned earlier, the feature of a visitor being able to write and leave their own comment about a post is what has made blogs and blogging popular.

Blogs were originally meant to be online diaries where people could post their daily thoughts and share those thoughts with families and friends. Instead of the traditional writing in your diary every night before you go to bed, people could now write those thoughts on a blog. But then blogs has since evolved from just being personal online diaries to marketing platforms used by companies to get word out about their new products and services, or to ask customers to comment about them. Or publishers such as The Rand Today have used blogs to get news and topics out for the world to know about and comment on.

Gone are the days when someone would say something and ask people to write letters to respond to their message. Now that announcement can be put on a blog and comments about that announcement can be made straight away. The ability for everyone to leave their comments creates a ‘community’ amongst those commenting as they get to argue or agree with different people on a topic that interests them or that they feel they have a say on.

One can blog about almost anything they feel they have a say on. There are blogs on news, parenting, sport, Japanese recipes, shoe shopping, basically anything you can think of, you can be sure there is someone out there blogging about it. People today are spending a lot of time reading blogs on the internet and leaving their comments where applicable. Gone are the days of looking for a topic and you only finding it on major websites. Now with blogs, anyone can write up about that topic and post it on the internet through a blog. The technology to blog is easily available, for free and is easy to use. You do not need to be an IT expert to blog!