Last week we explored the evolution of the internet to Web 2, and this week we’ll explore two more interesting internet developments, the Blog and the the Podcast.
The term Blog is the shortened form of the word Weblog, which is an online diary or journal. Before Blogs became popular, there were Usenet online communities, Bulletin Board Systems (BBS’s), and Internet Forums. BBS’s have more or less disappeared, and Usenet is a medium generally used by Universities and other intelligentsia, but Internet Forums are alive and well and in widespread public use. For those of you have an area of interest for which you want to share ideas, whether you are a car nut, a musician, a Linux geek, or a gardener, Internet Forums are the place to find answers and share your knowledge; I am a BIG user of Forums to get answers for everything from where to find parts for my Volvo, to how to find information for configuring a wireless card in Linux.
Blogs are online diaries consisting of text, pictures and links to other blogs or web resources. Many are topic specific, giving commentary on subjects such as news, politics, or food, while others are personal journals documenting a blogger’s personal life. Most blogs are chronologically reversed, with the most recent entries at the top, however the blogger is free to choose however he/she wants to display entries. At first I could not understand why anybody would want to air their dirty laundry publicly, but suddenly I found a reason to have my own blog, when last year I had a chance to reconnect with some British buddies I haven’t talked to for twenty five years, in fact not since we had all ridden bicycles together from Antibes, France to Corfu, Greece in 1981. Last year one of these guys went to the trouble of contacting each of us and suddenly we were all re-united by email. I decided that I would put together a blog documenting some of the highlights of my life in Whistler. I discovered that setting up a blog was dead easy with the free blog software provided by Google. Within a few days, I had a blog up and running, which greatly exaggerates my lifestyle, but my pals in
Podcasts go one step further than Blogs, in that they allow anybody to produce their own online audio and/or video broadcasts. It is the modern equivalent of setting up your own private radio or TV station. The word Podcasting is a compound word, blending the words iPod with Broadcasting; the iPod reference is a bit of a misnomer, in that an iPod is not required for producing or hearing a podcast (however, it is possible to store a podcast on an iPod or any type of music player, using podcatcher software such as that offered by iTunes). Though podcasting is a relatively new term, with the first podcasts showing up in 2003, the concept has taken off and podcasts are everywhere. One can find a podcast dealing with any topic, ranging from politics to jokes, and then subscribe to that podcast via an RSS feed. Once subscribed, that podcast is then pushed to the user’s computer each time he runs his web-browser.
There is some fascinating stuff out there in blogland and podcast-land. For a good directory of both mediums, check out www.blogexplosion.com.
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