SPECIAL REPORT: Blogging: What is it?

SPECIAL REPORT

– Baptist bloggers wielding influence, getting press in watershed year

– Cyber world offers ministry helps for Texas Southern Baptists

They are relatively few in number and relatively young. Until recently few Southern Baptists were aware of their existence.

Yet their rhetoric influenced the mood, discussion and probably some outcomes at the 2006 Southern Baptist Convention.

Who are “they?” Bloggers.

What is a “blogger?” Anyone maintains a blog.

Short for weblog, a blog is someone’s personal journal that is entered to a site on the Internet, available for public viewing and sometimes for responses from readers.

Blogs may be used for any purpose the author desires?as a diary, to report breaking news, as a commentary on topics of interest to the author, or a place to get on a soapbox and vent. The only standard formatting rule is that each entry should be dated.

Blogs of various kinds began popping up on the Internet in the late 1990s. The term “blog” was coined in 1997 by online diarest Jorn Barger, according to a blogging timeline at Wikipedia.com.

In the beginning stages, only those who knew how to create Web sites were keeping personal online journals. But software companies soon began to develop Web-based tools to make it easy to build a Weblog.

Online hosting services like blogger.com made setting up your own blog both instant and free.

Technorati.com is a site devoted to monitoring “what’s going on in the world of Weblogs”?the “blogosphere.” The company currently claims to track about 48 million blog sites. Its data indicate that each day about 75,000 new blogs are created and over one million new entries are posted to blogs. They also track the relevance and influence of blog sites based on how many hits (how many visits) a site receives, and how many other sites link to it.

An article on Technorati.com explains the power of blogs:

“They allow millions of people to easily publish their ideas, and millions more to comment on them. Blogs are a fluid, dynamic medium, more akin to a ‘conversation’ than to a library?which is how the Web has often been described in the past. With an increasing number of people reading, writing, and commenting on blogs, the way we use the Web is shifting in a fundamental way. Instead of being passive consumers of information, more and more Internet users are becoming active participants. Weblogs let everyone have a voice.”