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This category is not for blogs, but for blogging platforms and websites that are about blogs. A blog is a web-based publication that shares online journals, consisting of dated entries about various topics.

Until 2009, blogs were usually the work of a single person, who would write about his life or a topic that interested him. However, in the 2010s, multiple-author blogs became popular, featuring the work of several authors, who may or may not even know one another. Then, newspapers and other media outlets, universities, advocacy groups, and other institutions began publishing blogs, often professionally edited.

The term blog is a truncation of weblog, coined by Jom Barger in December of 1997, and has since become a verb as well as a noun, and a person who blogs became known as a blogger.

Before blogging became popular, people discussed issues in digital communities such as Usenet, in online services like GEnie and CompuServe, or in Bulletin Board System (BBS) forums. In the 1990s, Internet forum software was created, allowing ongoing conversations using threads and posts.

The earliest commercial blog platform was part of the first business-to-consumer website, created by Ty, Inc. in 1995, which featured a section called "Online Diary," with entries made by featured Beanie Babies.

Today's blogs evolved from online diaries, where people would keep a running account of whatever was going on in their lives and were largely intended for distant family members. On early blogger was Justin Hall, who began personal blogging as a student at Swarthmore College in 1994. However, early blogs were manually updated parts of common websites, modeled after journals or diaries that people have maintained in written form for years.

Eventually, the software was introduced to facilitate the creation and maintenance of weblogs, generally posted in reverse chronological order, making the process easier and more accessible to people who were less technically inclined. Open Diary, LiveJournal, and Blogger were among the first dedicated blogging platforms. By the mid-2000s, blogs became mainstream.

Blogs can be hosted on regular web hosting services or on dedicated blog hosting services, while some blogging platforms are maintained through the use of downloadable blog software, with updates uploaded to a server.

There are several different types of blogs, differing according to the type of content presented, as well as in the manner in which the content is delivered.

Personal blogs are maintained by a single individual, and generally serve as an ongoing online diary or journal. Group blogs are written by multiple authors, whose topics generally follow a common theme, such as advocacy issues, politics, or entertainment. Corporate or organizational blogs are sometimes available only to employees on a company Intranet, although many companies maintain public blogs for branding purposes, many of which use ghostwriters.

Blogs may also be identified according to their topics, such as education blogs, legal blogs, music blogs, political blogs, and travel blogs.

Blogs that focus on videos are known as vlogs, while those that concentrate on photos are photoblogs.

The community of blogs and bloggers is often referred to collectively as the blogosphere.

As discussed in the opening paragraph, this category is for topics related to blogs, such as websites featuring blog software or blog platforms, as well as those offering guidance or suggestions for blogging, but it is not intended to be a list of blogs. The Aviva Directory does maintain a blog directory, known as the Aviva Blog Directory, which is listed below.

 

 

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