A Blog on 'BLOG'

Here goes another Blog. And this time I thought I’d write a blog on the word blog itself.
Today, almost everyone knows what a blog is. About 4-5 years ago if someone used the word ‘blog’, almost everyone drew a blank face as it was an alien concept for them at that time. Hardly one in a dozen people had any idea what a blog is. And by people I'm referring to engineering student. But in the past few years, ‘blogging’ has been gaining popularity at a very fast pace.
The reason: It is one of the best ways for people to express their thoughts and opinions on anything and everything they can think about.
Today itself I was reading about Abhinav Bindra’s blog. On the eve of his Olympic gold event, he had written about how he was feeling that day.
Various people use their blogs for various purposes. Bindra uses his blog to write down his thoughts. On the other hand, there are a lot of celebrities, like Amitabh Bachchan and Aamir Khan, who use their blog as a medium to communicate with their fans. They can also get a feedback on their performance from all the people who visit their blog. Some people use their blogs as a ‘Dear Diary’ entry too. Blogs can also be used as a knowledge repository, for conducting a survey and much more.
We use the word BLOG so frequently. I am writing a blog. You are reading my blog. But how many of us know why we use the word blog? How did this word originate? One in a dozen engineers again I’d say….. Haha! Even I was among the ignorant eleven in the dozen. And then I thought I should google it. So let me throw some light on this topic. :)
The word BLOG is a short form for the term ‘Web Log’. As described well enough by both the words, a blog is a website usually maintained by an individual, which has regular ‘posts’ containing commentary, news, thoughts, images, audio/video files, etc. These posts are generally arranged in a reverse chronological order. A collective term for all blogs in this world and their interconnections is Blogosphere.
And that's not all. There are also search engines which are exclusively for searching blogs. Bloglines, BlogScope, Technorati are good examples of such search engines. People can post comments on a blog and express their opinion. They can subscribe to a blog as well. There are many ways to subscribe to a blog. Either they can choose to get a mail whenever a new post is published, or they can also subscribe to the RSS feed(which is another very interesting and thoughtful invention) of that blog.
The blog culture is also evolving slowly and steadily, and with constant improvements (like the RSS feed and other additions) it should grow more in India. Lets wait and watch what happens next.