What is a weblog? What can I find here, and how do I find it?
Weblogs are very simple websites which try to make it as easy as possible for ordinary people to express themselves, to annotate the web in their own voices, and to link to each others' writing. Many weblogs are news-oriented; many others are personal or project diaries. Traditionally, almost all weblogs have been single-author, but increasingly weblogs are being experimented with as arenas in which distributed communities of people can build ongoing conversations.
One of the simplicities which makes weblogs so useful is that weblog authors do not have to worry about creating navigation links or hierarchical structure: navigation links are built by the system using a few very simple principles. All an author has to think about is writing a "post" or "entry" - which is usually quite short, and is in itself a simple structure comprising title, lead-in (optional summary) and body content (with a few optional extras which we'll get to later). Usually, authors assign one or more categories to each post. Weblog entries almost always have one or more links to other content associated with them - in general, weblog posts are about something, and they link to the something they are about.
What are the principles by which weblogs can be navigated? As noted above, there is usually no fancy bespoke navigational structure in weblogs, just short and simple posts made frequently and easily. Navigation is provided by context and by the system.
- When was the item posted?
- The main view of a weblog shows the most recent, "current" posts. Most weblog systems show links into archives by year and month, so that users can browse through items posted near the same time. Many systems also show a one-month calendar which highlights the days on which posts were made; this helps to give a visual feel for activity in that weblog.
- What category was it?
- Authors typically assign one or more categories to each of their posts. This provides a simple means for organising the entries in the weblog into 'departments'. Most weblogging systems show links to each category that has been used within the weblog, so that users can browse through items about similar topics.
- Who posted it?
- If a weblog is written by multiple authors, the system will generally show links to allow users to browse through items by each author.
- External links to individual entries' "permalinks"
- Probably the single most useful innovation that weblogs introduced was the "permalink". Once you post a weblog entry, it "stays put" - you can share links to it which will always point to just that content. Before the permalink - and still the case in many sites - content tended to be volatile. You might share a link that points to a news item today, only to find that the content shown had changed the next time you visited the link. Permalinks encourage webloggers to "deep link" to specific, individual posts (rather than just linking to the "top-level", current-items view of other weblogs). In fact, the main kind of navigation context for weblog entries is provided by the whole-wide-web - by other people linking to individual entries because they have something to say about them.
- Search-engine links to individual entries' "permalinks"
- Because permalinks encourage cross-site conversations in which bloggers post about other bloggers' posts, page-rank algorithms such as google's score popular or useful weblog entries very highly, and return them near the top of search results lists. This is helped by the presence in typical weblog pages of many semantically related links and items, making co-location of text more likely. Because the permalink is - well, permanent - search engine hits to weblog entries can remain valuable for years.
- "Trackback" links to individual entries' "permalinks", from other weblogs discussed by them
- As we noted above, weblogs tend to be link-centric: they link to and post about other content on the web. A simple "standard" called "trackback" assists in this process. If one weblogger links to another weblogger's post, trackback enables the second weblogger's system to take note of that link and link back to the entry (other content that discusses this post).
