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  Objectives Homework     Overview What is Weblog The history Related Technologies Types of Blogs Weblog glossary Home Work

Objectives

Can answer questios like: What is a Blog? How it comes? What will it be? Why it is a success?

Gain some basic knowledges about Blog related technologies, such as RSS, ATOM, Semantic Web, Trackback....

Get ready for further research on Blog as well as practical implementation

Overview

We met Blog in the first week. What have we done? Applying for a personal Blog by registering to a Blog Host, 203.19 in our case; Writing several posts and comments on the blog and maybe change the appearance of the blog. Since we will spend a whole week on this topic, we will study more about related Technologies. First of all:

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What is Weblog

There are many answers to this question, to name a few:

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia A weblog or blog is a web-based publication consisting primarily of periodic articles (normally, but not always, in reverse chronological order). Although most early blogs were manually updated, tools to facilitate the updating and maintenance of such sites made them accessible to a much larger and less technical population. The use of some sort of browser-based software is now a typical aspect of "blogging."

From Dave Winer of Harvard, Technologically what is a Blog?

A weblog is a hierarchy of text, images, media objects and data, arranged chronologically, that can be viewed in an HTML browser.

From RadioDocs

A weblog is just a web site organized by time.

I say 'just' because the hype around weblogs makes them both more and less than they are. Weblogs do not represent something brand new in human communication. Diaries closely resemble weblogs and be traced back as far as ancient Greece.

On the other hand, weblogs are not just a vehicle for navel-gazing by their authors ... unless authors are especially fond of such. It is permitted, just generaly ignored by readers. Too much lint is involved.

The difficulty of giving a precise definition for Blog lies in the fact that Blog is a mixture of technologies(still in gradual evolution) that brought about three fundamental changes to the existing World Wide Web.

1. From Readable to Writable
2. From Pull to Push
3. Form one-way link to two-way reference

All Blog-related technologies can classified according to the there changes.

1. From Readable to Writable
Before Blog, from the viewpoint of a common Web user, the Web is Build(Written) and Updated by some professionals who expert in Web Wide Web. Web is just a tremendous information resources which can be refered to. After Blog, Web becomes writable for general users, they can easily build their own blogs, wirte Posts and Comments on other posts. Helped by some technlogies, such as CSS, XML which separate the content of the Web from the presentation of Web, the writing of the Web focus on the content. The threshold for creating a nice Web site is dramatically lowered.

2. From Pull to Push
With this Push mechanism, a user can subscribe to some Web sites he or she is interested and regularly receive page-updates pushed by those Web sites. Obviously, it is not reasonable to always push the whole web page. There must be some syndication and briefing technologies. VSS or ATOM can be be classified as this kind of technology. The brief updates are also called Blog feed. User use RSS Aggregator to receive the Blog feeds.

3. From one-way link to two-way reference
"one-way" means the following nature of traditional World Wide Web: Page A includes a hyper-text link which points to page B, while page B knows nothing about this reference. Track Back and Ping Backused to build a backward link from page B to page A. Page B could be a comment on Page A. Page B resides on a separate Host. This is also called remote commenting.

The "backward" informing mechanism of Track Back leads to another exciting application, Content Aggregation:using TrackBack technology to aggregate content distributed around intotopic-based repositories. At first, a central repository about aspecific topic is created. After content authors finish writing a postsabout that topic, they can use TrackBack to ping this centralrepository and automatically create a pointer that points the posts.Anyone who is interested by this topic can come to the centralrepository to find pointers to such related posts.

These three fundamental changes caused by Blog also answer another question: why is Blog a success? It is not diffcult to image a sophasicated cooperation platform build on this pushed, writable and double-way World Wide Web.

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The History

Note that the following are copied from Wikipedia.

Precursors

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Electronic communities existed before internetworking, but generally had some quality to them. For example the AP wire was, in effect, similar to a large chat room where there were "wire fights" and electronic conversations.

Another pre-digital electronic community, Amateur (or "ham") radio, allowed individuals who set up their own broadcast equipment to communicate with others directly.

Ham radio also had logs called "glogs" that were personal diaries made using wearable computers in the early 1980s.
Before blogging became popular, digital communities took many forms, including Usenet, email lists and bulletin boards.

In the 1990s Internet forum software, such as WebX, created running conversations with threads. The term "thread", in reference to consecutive messages on one specific topic of discussion, comes from email lists and Usenet as well, and "to post" from electronic bulletin boards, borrowing usage directly from their corkboard predecessors. Many of the terms from weblogging were created in these earlier media.

Diarists kept journals on the Web: most called themselves online diarists, journalists, journallers, or journalers. A few called themselves escribitionists. The Open Pages webring contained members of the online-journal community. The first famous journaller was probably Justin Hall.

Other forms of journals kept online also existed. A notable example was game programmer John Carmack's widely read journal, published via the finger protocol.

Websites, including both corporate sites and personal homepages, had and still often have "What's New" or "News" sections, often on the index page and sorted by date.

Blogging begins

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Blogging combined the personal web page with tools to make linking to other pages easier, specifically blogrolls and TrackBacks, as well as comments and afterthoughts. This way, instead of a few people being in control of threads on a forum, or anyone able to start threads on a list, there was a moderating effect that was the personality of the weblog's owner.

Justin Hall, who began eleven years of personal blogging in 1994 while a student at Swarthmore College, is generally recognized as one of the earliest bloggers.

The term "weblog" may have been coined by Jorn Barger in December 1997. The shorter version, "blog", was coined by Peter Merholz, who, in April or May of 1999, broke the word weblog into the phrase "we blog" in the sidebar of his weblog. This was interpreted as a short form of the noun and also as a verb to blog, meaning "to edit one's weblog or a post to one's weblog".

The site Open Diary, while not using the term blog until recently, launched in 1998, had over 2000 diaries by 1999, and near 400 000 as of September 2005.

Blog usage spread during 1999, with the word being further popularized by the near-simultaneous arrival of the first hosted weblog tools: Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan's company Pyra Labs launched Blogger (which was purchased by Google in February 2003) and Paul Kedrosky's GrokSoup. As of March 2003, the Oxford English Dictionary included the terms weblog, weblogging and weblogger in their dictionary.

One of the pioneers of the tools that make blogging more than merely websites that scroll is Dave Winer. One of his most important contributions was the creation of servers which weblogs would ping to show that they had been updated. Blog reading utilities use the aggregated update data to show a user when their favorite blogs have new posts.

Blogging's rise to influence

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Among the first established political blogs with U.S.-wide audiences were Andrew Sullivan's AndrewSullivan.com, Ron Gunzburger's Politics1.com, Jerome Armstrong's MyDD.com, and Markos Moulitsas Z¨²niga's DailyKos -- all of which launched widely read blogs in 2001-02.

The first blog-driven political controversy was probably the fall of U.S. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, who had remarked, at a party honoring U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond, that Thurmond's leadership abilities may have made him a good President. Since Thurmond had spent much of his early political career sympathetic to white supremacists, Lott's statements were conveyed in the media to be racist. In the aftermath, bloggers such as Josh Marshall strove to demonstrate that his remarks were not an isolated misstatement, by finding evidence including quotes from other previous speeches of Lott's which were taken to be racist. Their efforts kept the story alive in the press until a critical mass of disapproval forced Lott to resign his position as Senate Majority Leader.

By this point blogging was enough of a phenomenon that how-to manuals had begun to appear, primarily focusing on using the tools, or creating content. But the importance of a blog as a way of building an electronic community had also been written on, as had the potential for blogs as a means of publicizing other projects.

Established schools of journalism began researching the blogging phenomenon, and noting the differences between current practice of journalism and blogging.

Since 2003, blogs have gained increasing notice and coverage for their role in breaking, shaping, or spinning news stories. One of the most significant events was the sudden emergence of an interest in the Iraq war, which saw both left-wing and right-wing bloggers taking measured and passionate points of view that did not reflect the traditional left-right divide.

The blogs which gathered news on Iraq, both left and right, exploded in popularity. The use of blogs by established politicians and political candidates¡ªparticularly Howard Dean and Wesley Clark¡ªto express opinions on the war and other issues of the day, cemented their role as a news source. Meanwhile, the increasing number of experts who blogged, such as Daniel Drezner and J. Bradford DeLong, gave blogs a built-in source of in-depth analysis.

The Iraq war was the first "blog war" in another way: Iraqi bloggers gained wide readership, and one, Salam Pax, published a book of his blog. Blogs were also created by soldiers serving in the Iraq war. Such "milblogs" gave readers a new perspective on the realities of war, as well as often offering differing viewpoints from those of official news sources.

Blogs were often used to draw attention to obscure news sources, for example posting links to the traffic cameras in Madrid as a huge anti-terrorism demonstration filled the streets in the wake of the March 11 attacks.

Bloggers would often provide nearly-instant commentary on televised events, which became a secondary meaning of the word "blogging", such as "I am blogging Rice's testimony," i.e., "I am posting my reactions to Rice's testimony to my blog as I watch it" (such real-time commentary is also known as "liveblogging").

By the end of 2003 top rated blogs Instapundit, Daily Kos, and Atrios were receiving over 75,000 unique visitors per day.

Blogging goes mainstream

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In 2004, the role of blogs became increasingly mainstream, as political consultants, news services and candidates began using them as tools for outreach and opinion formation. Even politicians not actively involved in a campaign such as Tom Watson, a UK Labour Party MP, began to use blogging as a means for creating a bond with constituents and creating a channel for their ideas and opinions.

Minnesota Public Radio broadcast a program by Christopher Lydon and Matt Stoller called "The Blogging of the President", which covered the transformation in politics that blogging seemed to presage.

The Columbia Journalism Review began regular coverage of blogs and blogging. Anthologies of blog pieces began to reach print, and blogging personalities began appearing on radio and television.

In the summer of that year both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions credentialed bloggers, and blogs became a standard part of the publicity arsenal, with mainstream programs, such as Chris Matthews' Hardball, forming their own blogs. Merriam-Webster's Dictionary declared "blog" as the word of the year in 2004. (Wikinews)

Blogs were some of the driving forces behind the "Rathergate" scandal involving Dan Rather of CBS and memos used on the show 60 Minutes II. Within 72 hours a group of conservative bloggers had built a case that they were likely forgeries. The evidence presented eventually created such concern over the issue that CBS was forced to address the situation and make an apology for their inadequate reporting techniques.

Two months later, Dan Rather announced that he would step down from the CBS anchor chair. This is viewed by many bloggers as the advent of blogs' acceptance by the mass media as a source of news. It also showed how blogs could keep the pressure on an established news source, forcing defenses and then a retraction of the original story.

Blogging is also used now to break consumer complaints and vulnerabilities of products, in the way that Usenet and email lists once were. One such example is accusations about vulnerability of Kryptonite 2000 locks.

Bloggers have also moved over to other media. Duncan Black (a.k.a. Atrios), Glenn Reynolds, Markos Moulitsas Z¨²niga (a.k.a. Kos), Ana Marie Cox (a.k.a. Wonkette), and others have appeared on radio and/or television. Hugh Hewitt is an example of a media personality who has moved in the other direction, adding to his reach in "old media" by being an influential blogger.

In the United Kingdom, The Guardian newspaper launched a redesign in September 2005, which included a daily digest of blogs on page 2.

In January 2005, Fortune magazine listed Peter Rojas, Xeni Jardin, Ben Trott and Mena Trott, Jonathan Schwartz, Jason Goldman, Robert Scoble, and Jason Calacanis as eight bloggers that business people "could not ignore."

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Related Technologies

Blog has given birth to a lot new words and expressions, to name a few:
Blog host, Blogger, permalink, Trackback, some are borrowed, , such as RSS, ATOM, Content Management System which got popular after being adopted by Blog. Behind each word, there is a technology. Some of them are closely related, while others are not.

In this week, carrying forward the emphasis on practical experiences of this course, we are going to learn those technologies that are hidden behind the Buttons, Links or Blanks of the User interface of B2evolution(The Blog software on 203.19), some of them may have been overlooked by you. These Buttons, Links or Blanks are also typical in other Blog Software.

The following Picture should be familiar to you.

Figure 1

Another familar picture if you have written a post

Figure 2

All technologies we are going to introduce are in Red Bold.

Post Entry and Comment

The meanings are all literally understandable. Post, Entry can be found on forum. Comment is just like a Re_post of a forum. All Posts and Entries shown on the Blog are generated in dynamic. The contents are normally stored in a Database. The display is defined by a Skin, which consists of several facility program and a CSS file. In the case of B2evloution, using the Custom Skin as the example, the related files include:

custom.css
_profile.php
_calendar.php
_categories.php - This is the template that displays the (recursive) list of (sub)categories
_linkblog.php
_archives.php - This is the template that displays the links to the archives for a blog
_lastcomments.php - This is the template that displays the last comments for a blog
_main.php - This is the main template. It displays the blog.
_bloglist.php
_feedback.php - This is the template that displays the feedback for a post
_arcdir.php

The file names of these PHP programs tell us that together they decide the layout of Figure1.

Calendar and Categroies

For users to retrieve posts more easily, Posts should be well organized. Almost all Blog software privide a Calendar. Posts are generally chronologically arranged. User can easily locate the posts written on specific date. That is also why it is call a log or a diary.
Posts can also be Categroized. Users with appropriate authorities can define the categories. Post can be accessed by categories.

permalink(Permanent Link)

A permalink (a portmanteau made by contracting the phrase "permanent link") is a type of URL designed to refer to a specific information item (often a news story or weblog item) and to remain unchanged permanently, or at least for a lengthy period of time to prevent link rot.

The term was coined by Scott Banister and Matt Kerner in 1995, though the first implementation wasn't until March 2000 by Blogger co-founder Paul Bausch.

Permanence in links is desirable when content items are likely to be linked to from, or cited by, a source outside the originating organisation, and are desirable even within organisations when the complexity of websites grows to more than a modest number of pages.

In particular, the growth of extensive commercial websites built on database-backed content management systems necessitated deliberate policies with regard to URL design and link permanence.

In the case of static HTML pages, for example for a blog, there are no links to entries of themselves but to the page with the latest entries. If the author posts many entries, this can mean that a specific entry is only accessible for several days, if that. In that case, web users who have previously stored a URL which referred to a specific story, discover after some time that it has become invalid.

The same happens in professional websites which have migrated from internal URL schemes based on the directories in which static html data was stored to all-dynamic storage, where all the pages served are generated on the fly by a database backend content management system.

Similarly, stories are sometimes given meaningless "magic cookie" names, and the (seemingly arbitrary) number used to generate these is often an internal database identifier integer. As articles are moved, deleted, and new articles created, the unique correspondence between articles and these database identifiers are lost, and again links can no longer be trusted to refer to the correct article after some time has passed.

With the increasing acceptance of web sources including online books and online journals in academic writing, permalinks are needed to ensure the quoted URL refers to the exact source and not a modified or updated version.

Permalinks typically consist of a string of characters which represent the date and time of posting, and some (system dependent) identifier (which includes a base URL, and often identifies the author, subscriber, or department which initially authored the item). Crucially, if an item is changed, renamed, or moved, its permalink remains unaltered. If an item is deleted altogether, its permalink cannot be reused.

Permalinks have subsequently been exploited for a number of innovations, including link tracing and link trackback in weblogs, and referring to specific weblog entries in RSS or Atom syndication streams.

Permalinks are supported in most modern weblogging and content syndicaton software systems, including Movable Type, LiveJournal, MediaWiki and Blogger.

Trackback and Trackback URL;Pingback

Trackback and Pingback are quite the same. They have the same intension: To provide a methord for a referer to inform the refered the reference. The one-way link is changed to a two-way reference.

Suppose, on the Web, page A refer to page B. By "refer", we mean page A includes a link to page B or Page A mentioned Page B. After finish writing page A, the author of A can choose to send a Trackback to the Trackback URL of Page B. The server which hosts Page B will generate a link that points to Page A on Page B. Trackback are more close to Blog then Pingback. Pingback aims to provide a general backword reference.

For Pingback, the message send to page B is call a "Ping". Some weblog software, like WordPress, support automatic pingbacks where all the links in a published page can be pinged when the page is published.
Technical details can be found at Trackback and Pingback.

One point must be remember, in order for Trackback and Pingback to work well, the two server involved, the one that hosts Page A and the one which hosts PageB must be Trackback or PingBack enabled.

For example, in Figure 3, which is the upper part of Figure 1

Figure 3

Because I saw the "Great Firewall" at Corante .after I write the post, I sent a Trackback to the Trackback URL:http://www.corante.com/cgi-bin/mt/backtar.cgi/1616. see Figure 2, the trackback URL blank. Then, on "Corante" a backward link is created automatically, as shown in Figure 4

Figure 4
Interesting? After you understand this operational mechanism of Trackback, it is not difficult to figure out how a content aggregation repository is created. Such as Austin Bloggers (http://www.austinbloggers.org/).

RSS and ATOM (From pull to push)

In stead of one Standard, there are altogether 4 standards(see Figure 5, near the bottom of Figure 1) and they are supposed to do the same!

Figure 5

The Computer society has not even reach an agreement on What RSS stands for. Just follow the link of "What is RSS", you will find more. A more detailed explanation is from WikiPedia

RSS is a family of XML file formats for Web syndication used by (amongst other things) news websites and weblogs. The abbreviation is used to refer to the following standards:

Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91)
RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 and 1.0)
Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)

The technology behind RSS allows Internet users to subscribe to websites that have provided RSS feeds; these are typically sites that change or add content regularly. To use this technology, site owners create or obtain specialized software (such as a content management system) which, in the machine-readable XML format, presents new articles in a list, giving a line or two of each article and a link to the full article or post. Unlike subscriptions to pulp-based newspapers and magazines, most RSS subscriptions are free.

The RSS formats provide web content or summaries of web content together with links to the full versions of the content, and other meta-data. This information is delivered as an XML file called RSS feed, webfeed, RSS stream, or RSS channel. In addition to facilitating syndication, RSS allows a website's frequent readers to track updates on the site using an aggregator.

Usage
RSS is widely used by the weblog community to share the latest entries' headlines or their full text, and even attached multimedia files. In mid 2000, use of RSS spread to many major news organizations, including Reuters, CNN, and the BBC, until under various usage agreements, providers allow other websites to incorporate their "syndicated" headline or headline-and-short-summary feeds. RSS is now used for many purposes, including marketing, bug-reports, or any other activity involving periodic updates or publications.

A program known as a feed reader or aggregator can check RSS-enabled webpages on behalf of a user and display any updated articles that it finds. It is now common to find RSS feeds on major Web sites, as well as many smaller ones.

Client-side readers and aggregators are typically constructed as standalone programs or extensions to existing programs like web browsers. Such programs are available for various operating systems. .

Web-based feed readers and news aggregators require no software installation and make the user's "feeds" available on any computer with Web access. Some aggregators syndicate (combine) RSS feeds into new feeds, e.g. take all football related items from several sports feeds and provide a new football feed. There are also search engines for content published via RSS feeds like Feedster, Blogdigger or Plazoo.

On Web pages, RSS feeds are typically linked to with an orange rectangle () optionally with the letters XML () or RSS ( or ).

History
Before RSS, several similar formats already existed for syndication, but none achieved widespread popularity or are still in common use today, as most were envisioned to work only with a single service. For example, in 1997 Microsoft created Channel Definition Format for the Active Channel feature of Internet Explorer 4.0. Another was created by Dave Winer of UserLand Software. He had designed his own XML syndication format for use on his Scripting News weblog, which was also introduced in 1997

RDF Site Summary, the first version of RSS, was created by Dan Libby of Netscape in March 1999 for use on the My Netscape portal. This version became known as RSS 0.9. In July 1999 Libby produced a prototype tentatively named RSS 0.91 (RSS standing for Rich Site Summary), that simplified the format and incorporated parts of Winer's scriptingNews format. This they considered an interim measure, with Libby suggesting an RSS 1.0-like format through the so-called Futures Document.

Soon afterwards, Netscape lost interest in RSS/XML, leaving the format without an owner, just as it was becoming widely used. A working group and mailing list, RSS-DEV, was set up by various users and XML world notables to continue its development. At the same time, Winer unilaterally posted a modified version of the RSS 0.91 specification to the Userland website, since it was already in use in their products. Since neither side had any official claim on the name or the format, arguments raged whenever either side claimed RSS as its own, creating what became known as the RSS fork.

The RSS-DEV group went on to produce RSS 1.0 in December 2000. Like RSS 0.9 (but not 0.91) this was based on the RDF specifications, but was more modular, with many of the terms coming from standard metadata vocabularies such as Dublin Core.

Nineteen days later, Winer released RSS 0.92, a minor and supposedly compatible set of changes to RSS 0.91. In April 2002, he published a draft of RSS 0.93 which was almost identical to 0.92. A draft RSS 0.94 surfaced in August, reverting the changes made in 0.93, and adding a type attribute to the description element.

In September 2002, Winer released a final successor to RSS 0.92, known as RSS 2.0 and emphasizing "Really Simple Syndication" as the meaning of the three-letter abbreviation. The RSS 2.0 spec allowed people to add extension elements using XML namespaces. In 2003, Winer and Userland Software assigned ownership of the RSS 2.0 specification to his then workplace, Harvard's Berkman Center for the Internet & Society.

Winer was criticized for unilaterally creating a new format and raising the version number. In response, RSS 1.0 coauthor Aaron Swartz published RSS 3.0, a non-XML textual format. The format was possibly intended as a parody and only a few implementations were ever made.

In January 2005, Sean B. Palmer and Christopher Schmidt produced a preliminary draft of RSS 1.1. It was intended as a bugfix for 1.0, removing little-used features, simplifying the syntax and improving the specification based on the more recent RDF specifications. As of July 2005, RSS 1.1 had amounted to little more than an academic exercise.

In August 2005, Jonathan Avidan launched his own project to create an "RSS 3", though apparently without backing from anyone in the RSS industry, and the project failed to take off. Sean B. Palmer and Morbus Iff, claiming to be acting on behalf of Aaron Swartz, sent a cease-and-desist notice for abuse of the RSS 3 name.

Incompatibilities
As noted above, there are several different versions of RSS, falling into two major branches. The RDF, or RSS 1.* branch includes the following versions:

RSS 0.90 was the original Netscape RSS version. This RSS was called RDF Site Summary, but was based on an early working draft of the RDF standard, and was not compatible with the final RDF Recommendation.
RSS 1.0 and 1.1 are an open format by the "RSS-DEV Working Group", again standing for RDF Site Summary. RSS 1.0 is an RDF format like RSS 0.90, but not fully compatible with it, since 1.0 is based on the final RDF 1.0 Recommendation.
The RSS 2.* branch (initially UserLand, now Harvard) includes the following versions:

RSS 0.91 is the simplified RSS version released by Netscape, and also the version number of the simplified version championed by Dave Winer from Userland Software. The Netscape version was now called Rich Site Summary, this was no longer an RDF format, but was relatively easy to use. It remains the most common RSS variant.
RSS 0.92 through 0.94 are expansions of the RSS 0.91 format, which are mostly compatible with each other and with Winer's version of RSS 0.91, but are not compatible with RSS 0.90. In all Userland RSS 0.9x specifications, RSS was no longer an acronym.
RSS 2.0.1 has the internal version number 2.0. RSS 2.0.1 was proclaimed to be "frozen", but still updated shortly after release without changing the version number. RSS now stood for Really Simple Syndication. The major change in this version is an explicit extension mechanism using XML Namespaces.
For the most part, later versions in each branch are backward-compatible with earlier versions (aside from non-conformant RDF syntax in 0.90), and both versions include properly documented extension mechanisms using XML Namespaces, either directly (in the 2.* branch) or through RDF (in the 1.* branch). Most syndication software supports both branches. Mark Pilgrim's article "The Myth of RSS Compatibility" discusses RSS version compatibility in more detail.

The extension mechanisms make it possible for each branch to track innovations in the other. For example, the RSS 2.* branch was the first to support enclosures, making it the current leading choice for podcasting, and as of mid-2005 is the format supported for that use by iTunes and other podcasting software; however, an enclosure extension is now available for the RSS 1.* branch, mod_enclosure. Likewise, the RSS 2.* core specification does not support providing full-text in addition to a synopsis, but the RSS 1.* markup can be (and often is) used as an extension. There are also several common outside extension packages available, include a new proposal from Microsoft for use in Internet Explorer 7.

The most serious compatibility problem is with HTML markup. Userland's RSS reader¡ªgenerally considered as the reference implementation¡ªdid not originally filter out HTML markup from feeds. As a result, publishers began placing HTML markup into the titles and descriptions of items in their RSS feeds. This behaviour has become widely expected of readers, to the point of becoming a de facto standard, though there is still some inconsistency in how software handles this markup, particularly in titles. The RSS 2.0 specification was later updated to include examples of entity-encoded HTML, however all prior plain text usages remain valid.

Atom
In reaction to perceived deficiencies in both RSS branches (and because RSS 2.0 is frozen with the intention that future work be done under a different name), a third group started a new syndication specification, Atom, in June 2003, and their work was later adopted by Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

The relative benefits of Atom and the two RSS branches are currently a subject of heated debate within the Web-syndication community. Supporters claim that Atom improves on both RSS branches by relying more heavily on standard XML features, by supporting autodiscovery, and by specifying a payload container that can handle many different kinds of content unambiguously. Opponents claim that Atom unnecessarily introduces a third branch of syndication specifications, further confusing the marketplace.

 

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Types of Blogs

News and Politics
When discussed in the news, the term blog is often understood to refer to a political blog. Political blogs may take a number of forms. Often an individual will link to articles from news web sites and post their own comments as well. Others focus on long essays about current political topics. Most news, activism, and issue-based weblogs follow the same format.

Of note is the recent trend of political candidates to incorporate blogging into their campaigns. Lower level politicians may do their own blogging, while more prominent candidates, such as presidential candidates, will leave the blogging to their campaign staff.

Personal
In common speech, the term blog is often used to describe an online diary or journal, such as LiveJournal. The weblog format of an online diary makes it possible for users without much experience to create, format, and post entries with ease. People write their day-to-day experiences, complaints, poems, prose, illicit thoughts and more, often allowing others to contribute, fulfilling to a certain extent Tim Berners-Lee's original view of the World Wide Web as a collaborative medium. In 2001, mainstream awareness of online diaries began to increase dramatically.

Online diaries are integrated into the daily lives of many teenagers and college students, with communications between friends playing out over their blogs. Even fights may be posted in the diaries, with not-so-veiled insults of each other easily readable by all their friends, enemies, and complete strangers. Xanga is a very popular portal for blogs of this type.

Personal opinions on experiences and hobbies are very common in the blog world. Blogs have given the opportunity for people to express their views to a mass audience. What may have been created to be used among a few friends may be viewed by the internet-using public.

Topical
Topical blogs focus on a specific niche, often a technical one. An example is Google Blog, covering nothing but news about Google. Another example is a soldier blog. Many blogs now allow categories, which means a general blog can be reshuffled to become a topical blog at the user's need. Topical blogs can also cover local information.

Health
Blogs written as personal accounts of living with a specific health issue, sharing information about the experience with others who have an interest in that health issue and providing mutual support. A major category of health blogs are medical blogs, which themselves generally fall into two categories. One type is a blog written by a health care professional about his or her work experiences, medical news or other personal thoughts. A more recent trend is a blog that deals with actual patient cases. This latter blog allows other physicians to submit cases to the web site. Physicians can then offer comments or help with the case. Although still in its infancy, this format could theoretically improve patient care by allowing the primary doctor to get feedback by other experts in the field. When writing about patient cases, health care professionals must protect their patients' confidentially as mandated by HIPAA.

Literary
Given the obvious focus on words, it is not surprising that the Grub Street tradition has continued on the internet with daily commentary emanating from literary blogs (or litblog).

Travel
Famous explorers wrote their journeys down on paper. These days, modern travelers have used blogs as a way to share their stories and photos, even while they are traveling around the world.

Research
An increasing number of scholars and students blog their research notes, combining the traditional scholar's private notebook with public discussion. A related genre is the anonymous professor's blog, where the various issues related to academia may be freely discussed.

Legal
Blogs by lawyers or law students, or which discuss law and legal affairs are often referred to as blawgs. By extension, the creator of such a blog is a blawger, sometimes spelled blawgger (variant, rare).

The coining of the term blawg is generally attributed by blawgers to Denise Howell of Bag and Baggage. See Jeff Rosen Gets All Mixed Up on Blawgs, Blogging and Other Things by law blogger Dennis Kennedy (criticizing Jeff Rosen for limiting the definition of blawg to law-student blogs, and for failing to credit Denise).

Some blawgs are narrow and deal with a focused and/or technical area of law.

Others, like the Volokh Conspiracy, deal with whatever topic the blawgers wish to discuss.

Media
Some blogs serve as media watchdogs, reporting on falsehoods or inconsistencies that are presented as facts in the mass media. Many media blogs are focused exclusively on one newspaper or television network.

Religious
Some blogs discuss religious topics. Religious blogs show the public's points of view on various controversies both in religion and in politics, economics, and life in general.

Collaborative (also collective or group)
Many weblogs are written by more than one person about a specific topic. Collaborative weblogs can be open to everyone or limited to a group of people. MetaFilter is an example of this type of weblog.

Slashdot, whose status as a blog has been debated, nevertheless has a team of editors who approve and post links to technology news stories throughout the day. Although Slashdot does not refer to itself as a weblog, it shares some characteristics with weblogs.

Indymedia is an early (1999) example of a collaborative blog (although the term blog wasn't in circulation yet) that was created to cover a specific event (the WTO in Seattle), but has since spread around the world.

A new form of blog represents a fusion of bloggers and traditional media sources, allowing for topics covered in the traditional media, both print and broadcast, to be fleshed out on the web. One prominent early example of this sort of blog is the Dallas Morning News editor's blog.

Eclectic
From the Slashdot style blog comes eclectic blogs, which tend to focus on specific niches. Such sites contain articles and stories from other blogs and news sources on the web. There are often few articles actually written by the authors of these blogs and instead the blogs themselves tend to function as passageways for readers to find the actual source of the article or original posting.

Educational
Blogs have been used for several educational applications. Students can use weblogs as records of their learning and teachers can use weblogs as records of what they taught. For example, a teacher can blog a course, recording day-by-day what was taught, including links to Internet resources, and specifying what homework students are required to carry out. This application has many advantages: (1) a student can quickly catch-up if they miss a class; (2) the teacher can use the blog as a course plan; and (3) the blog serves as an accurate summary of the course that prospective students or new teachers can refer to.

There are other educational applications of blogs. Students can blog an educational excursion, recording day-by-day (or hour by hour) where they went, what they saw and what they learned - including photographs, audio or video. The collaborative features of blogs can be used to permit several students to contribute to the blog.

Directory
Directory weblogs are useful for web-surfers because they often collect numerous web sites with interesting content in an easy to use and constantly updated format. News-related weblogs can fall into this category or be political blogs.

Directory weblogs should not be confused these with weblog directories, such as BlogWise.

These provide a more structured collection of weblog links, and will often offer novel services and interesting views of the data within the directory. These can be a good source of like-minded bloggers, or bloggers situated near you.

Forums/Other CMS systems
An internet forum can sometimes be regarded as a weblog, though usually there is a distinction between the two; the most obvious difference is that in a forum any user can post a new topic of discussion, while in a blog only one or a handful of site owners can do so. However, if forum software is used for the purposes of publishing, for example, an online journal, it could be regarded as a weblog. The distinction between blogs and forums is sometimes gray in real life, and sites such as Slashdot, Indymedia and Daily Kos can all be said to combine elements of the two.

Business

Entrepreneurial
A number of entrepreneurs are establishing blogs to promote their businesses. Often business blogs act as a showcase for entrepreneurs to provide a window into the behind-the-scenes goings on at their business, presenting a more personal "face" to the public rather than a cold corporate persona. In some cases the blog itself is the core of the business bringing in revenue from advertising, selling products or information.

Corporate
Increasingly, employees of corporations are posting official or semi-official blogs about their work. The employers however, do not always appreciate the endeavor. In January 2005 Joe Gordon was fired from Waterstone's bookshop in Edinburgh, Scotland, because he referred to his boss as an "asshole in sandals." In 2004 Ellen Simonetti, a Delta Air Lines flight attendant, was fired for posing in uniform on her blog. David Corby was fired from Wells Fargo in 2002 after he complained about a department policy forcing employees to wear American flag pins to show support for the victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks. He described the event as fascist. Perhaps the most famous case of all occurred when "Troutgirl" Joyce Park was fired from Friendster because she discussed the rationale behind the website's technology conversion from J2EE to PHP on her blog.

Other employers have reacted differently. For instance, when Power Line bloggers were attacked by a Star Tribune columnist, one of the bloggers' employers came to his defense.

With the rise in popularity of blogs in 2004 senior management caught on to the trend and by January 2005 several types of organizations, including universities, had started using blogs to communicate with their stakeholders. Some believe this corporate takeover of a tool that was used primarily by Internet enthusiasts will lead to a decrease in the popularity of the medium. Others believe that the use of blogs by organizations will add new voices and vitality to the medium. At any rate, there is little evidence that the growth rate of the blogosphere has slowed. A prime example of senior management blogging is GM's Fastlane blog [10], edited, among others, by GM vice chairman Bob Lutz.

In 2005 the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) published the guide How to Blog Safely (About Work or Anything Else).

Busiplogs
Business spam blogs (busiplogs), a term coined by LS Blogs, are blogs that are specifically written in order to promote a product/service or business. They have no value, or information of interest, to anyone other than their owner. They are specifically designed to only promote their business. Usually the quality of the blog is low, and often the content is drawn from third party sites.

Advice
Many weblogs provide expert advice.

Many small businesses are also using blogs to offer advice and better connect with their clients. These blogs are particularly prevalent in the real estate industry where agents typically have a great deal of flexibility in marketing themselves.

Another type of small online business using blogs are independent software development firms.

Personification Blogging
That act of blogging for a non-human being or object. An example would be writing a blog for your dog.

 

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Weblog Glossry

Semantic Web
The Semantic Web is a project that intends to create a universal medium for information exchange by giving meaning (semantics), in a manner understandable by machines, to the content of documents on the Web. Currently under the direction of the Web's creator, Tim Berners-Lee of the World Wide Web Consortium, the Semantic Web extends the World Wide Web through the use of standards, markup languages and related processing tools.

RDF
Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a family of specifications for a metadata model that is often implemented as an application of XML. The RDF family of specifications is maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

The RDF metadata model is based upon the idea of making statements about resources in the form of a subject-predicate-object expression, called a triple in RDF terminology. The subject is the resource, the "thing" being described. The predicate is a trait or aspect about that resource, and often expresses a relationship between the subject and the object. The object is the object of the relationship or value of that trait.

This mechanism for describing resources is a major component in what is proposed by the W3C's Semantic Web activity: an evolutionary stage of the World Wide Web in which automated software can store, exchange, and utilize metadata about the vast resources of the Web, in turn enabling users to deal with those resources with greater efficiency and certainty. RDF's simple data model and ability to model disparate, abstract concepts has also led to its increasing use in knowledge management applications unrelated to Semantic Web activity.

XML-RPC(Remote Procedure Call)
is a remote procedure call protocol encoded in XML. It is a very simple protocol, defining only a handful of data types and commands, and the entire description can be printed on two pages of paper. This is in stark contrast to most RPC systems, where the standards documents often run into the thousands of pages and require considerable software support in order to be used.

FOAF
(Friend of a Friend) is a project for machine-readable modelling of homepage-like content and social networks founded by Libby Miller and Dan Brickley. The heart of the project is its specification which defines some terms that can be used in statements you can make about someone, such as name, gender and various online attributes. To make linking possible, one includes uniquely identifiable properties of ones friends (such as SHA1 checksums of their E-Mail addresses, a Jabber ID, or a URI to the homepage or weblog of the person).

MetaWeblog API (MWA)
is a standard client-server application programming interface for weblog (blog) publishing. It is built on XML-RPC. MetaWeblog API was designed to address limitations of Blogger API.

Web syndication
is a form of syndication in which a section of a website is made available for other sites to use. This could be simply by licensing the content so other people can use it, but more commonly these days web syndication refers to making Web feeds available from a site so other people can display an updating list of content from it (for example one's latest forum postings, etc.). This originated with news and blog sites but is increasingly used to syndicate any information.

Wiki
A wiki . according to Ward Cunningham) is a group of Web pages that allows users to add content, as on an Internet forum, but also allows others (often completely unrestricted) to edit the content. The term wiki also refers to the collaborative software (wiki engine) used to create such a website (see wiki software). In essence, the wiki is a vast simplification of the process of creating HTML pages, and thus is a very effective way to exchange information through collaborative effort. Wiki is sometimes interpreted as the acronym for 'what I know, is', which describes the knowledge contribution, storage and exchange up to some point.

Blog feed
The XML-based file in which the blog hosting software places a machine-readable version of the blog so that it may be "syndicated" for further distribution on the web. Formats such as RSS and Atom are used to structure the XML file.

Blog hopping
to follow links from one blog entry to another, with related side-trips to various articles, sites, discussion forums, and more.

Blogroll
A list of blogs. Usually a blogger features a list of his favorite blogs in the sidebar of his blog. These lists can be made dynamic using services like BlogRolling.

Blogsnob
A person who refuses to respond to comments on their blog from people outside their circle of friends.
Dark Blog
A non-public blog (e.g. behind a firewall)

Troll
A commenter whose sole purpose is to attack the views expressed on a blog, for example, a liberal going to a conservative blog, or vice versa. Many trolls will leave their remarks on multiple posts and continue to visit the blog, sparking spirited debate amongst the blog's regular readers. Trolls' verbosity can range from eloquent to crass, although most trolls probably fall into the latter category.

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HomeWork

It has been a busy semester, so, what you need to do is to:

Write a post on your blog, comment on this post, send a trackback to a public Web Site which provides Trackback URL and Receive a Trackback from somewhere(Maybe another post of your blog).

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