Sorry for sounding backward, but I just stumbled across the word “blog” and cannot understand how a blog differs from Joe Blow and his home-brewed personal webpage.
What is with all the hoopla over blogs? How many are there nationwide?
Some of the quantity may have something to with the ease of running a blog. Back in the old days you’d have to break out BBEdit Lite, write HTML, manually keep track of all of your links, update them, organize your website, and not lose track of anything. And *then[i/] add your content, keep it up to date, add more, and be timely. Oh, then there’s the firing up of the FTP client, synchronizing you local files with the remote files, and just hoping that it’ll all work and not break.
Tools have come a long way since that time, and they can automate a lot of that. You still have to worry about consistency a bit, though.
Most blogs are now server-driven content. When you see those .php (or sometimes .pl for perl) extensions instead of .html, you know you’re dealing with server-generated content. PHP is a scripting language that works with HTML. The server acts on the code, and produces “pure” HTML. The files on the server are mixed HTML/PHP, but the server actually spits out pure HTML based on the code (look at the source for a PHP page, such as this SDMB page – all standard HTML).
The above means you can get a free (beer and speech) copy of PostNuke (for example), upload it to your PHP- and mySQL- (a free [beer, speech] relational database system) enabled server, and not worry about so much site management anymore. You can edit content from anywhere in the world you can find WWW access. Adding content is strikingly similar to using the SDMB, which is also a PHP-driven system.
So while WWW is credited as being the great enabler of allowing anyone to publish and be heard in the world, the blog makes it super-simple and allows truly anyone without specialized knowledge to publish in an professional-looking manner (YMMV). You can have experts set up the system, or do it yourself generally without any special knowledge.
I’m slowly converting my site to use PostNuke; I won’t link to it, though, since it’s not nearly ready for prime-time.
I always thought a weblog contained constantly updated “journals” detailing the webmaster’s daily activities, opinions, etc. Hence the log portion of the term.
I’m not sure what you’re asking. If you’re asking if the reasons for and uses of a blog differ from those of a plain ol’ website, then the answer is no, not in any meaningful way.
If you’re wondering why people use the term blog instead of justing saying plain ol’ website, the answer is, to be more specific. Blog is a smaller set of websites. If I direct you to someone’s blog, you have a better idea of what to expect.
Balthisar makes good points about why there are so many damn blogs. I can make it even easier for you to make your own - use this tool: http://www.brunching.com/journalgenerator.html
Oops, I guess that while getting to the technology-why I kinda forgot the human-why. Taking into account everything that I said above, the webmaster’s daily opinions, activities, &tc would be a lot of work without the software to support a blog. It’s just not worth the time to publish an entire site every time you want to add an item. The blogging software makes it super-easy to log into your admin account, add a new “news” item, and post it instantly. You’re done, and you didn’t do a thing with HTML, touch your server, or anything. You let PHP and mySQL do all of the work, giving you plenty of time to blather on about your latest siting of the deadly Mexican staring from from Sri-Lanka (or whatever). If you’re on vacation without your computer, it’s a simple matter to walk into an iCafe for 10 minutes and update your content. You can also involve other administrators if you care to without compromising the security of your web account, shell access, or server Unix permissions settings.
And while I mentioned PostNuke as a possibility, it’s not strictly “blogging” software, although it’s perfectly suited as one and I believe its roots were strictly blogging (it’s a phpNuke branch). PostNuke is referred to as “content management software [or system]” or CMS. HotScripts is a good place to look for others. Mind you, it won’t work on most of your free hosting accounts; you’ll need a web-server account somewhere, and one willing to give you shell access is even better.
The technology aside, as lorinada says, the main defining feature of a blog is the journal format. This may be at a very personal level: “I woke up feeling depressed and had two cups of coffee before feeding my cat”. Or it may be an ongoing selection, with commentary, of links to websites covering some particular topic. The hoopla is that at their best, blogs can act as tightly-focused web news magazines; an intelligent pre-selection of what’s worth reading. If, say, you like science, there are science blogs that provide a digest of what’s interesting in science websites and science news.