Who’s doing it?
Although online journals have been around longer than the term
“blog,” they gained momentum with the introduction of services
that allow users to publish blogs easily, without needing to code
HTML. Today, thousands of people use services including Blog-
ger and Moveable Type to simplify, automate, and accelerate the
online publishing process.
Blogs are showing up in venues ranging from entertainment and
commerce to news and politics. Many blogs are the musings of
a single author; others focus on a particular topic and feature the
voices of several authors. There are group blogs, family blogs,
community blogs, and corporate blogs. WarBlogs (a product of
the Iraq war), LibLogs (library blogs), and EduBlogs (targeting
education) are just some of the emerging types of blogs. In edu-
cational settings, faculty are using blogs to express their opin-
ions, to promote dialogue in the discipline, and as an instructional
tool, and students are increasingly using blogs both as personal
commentaries and as a required part of certain courses.