Ok, in today's world, who doesn't know what a blog is? Put up your hand. Wow! Okay, here's the skinny on blogs.

The Web is a mass medium

The word medium is short for medium of communication. Media is the plural of medium. Media is short for media of mass communication. Mass media are those organizations intending to communicate one-way to a large audience, disseminating facts, opinions, entertainment and other information. Mass media include sites on the World Wide Web.

By the way, the Internet and the World Wide Web are not synonymous. The Internet carries the World Wide Web, but also many other services including e-mail and file sharing. In other words, the Web is one part of the Internet while the Internet is more than just the Web.

Blogs

The word blog is short for web log, which is a journal or newsletter published on the Web and updated hourly, daily, weekly or on some other frequent schedule. The activity of writing and updating a blog is blogging and someone who maintains a blog is a blogger.

Blogs are published via software that a person with little technical background can use to write, update and maintain such a journal. Information posted to a blog is published instantly. Most blogs are intended for public consumption and generally represent the personality and views of the blog creator or publisher of the Web site.

Information published on a blog usually appears in reverse chronological order. It usually consists of either comments and thoughts on a topic or theme, or else feature stories about one or more topics of interest to the blogger. The content of a thought piece might include philosophical reflections, opinions about the Internet, or commentary on social or political issues. The content of feature-story blogs would be colorful, descriptive human-interest stories about people, places and events. Blogs often are updated frequently with the latest news, views and trends.

This page has examples of blogs produced by students in response to various assignments in a variety of courses.

Please excuse the mess. Students are building these blogs even as you read this page.