Characteristics of blogging

A blog is a website where Internet users can post content on various topics. Blogging is the practice of writing content on a blog. A blog can have any type of content such as event description, news, and personal views and so on. Entries are arranged in reverse-chronological order in a blog i.e. latest entry is displayed on top followed by earlier entries. Many Internet users indulge in blogging to share photographs, audio or video files and maintain online diaries.

Popularity

Blogging has become a rage among the Internet users. Its popularity can be gauged from the fact that as per blog search engine Technorati, the numbers of blogs were in excess of one hundred million and still counting. Internet users can set up their blogs on various platforms such as Blogger and WordPress. Besides these, major organizations around the world have set up their own blogs so as to communicate with their customers and potential customers, collect their feedback and suggestions related to their products and services.

Impact

Professional Blogging has made a deep impact on the way people discuss both national and international events. They can do so by writing their views on current events on their own blogs and those of others as well. Other Internet users can post their replies on the same blog. Their replies can be both for and against the topic that has been posted. In this way, a long thread of communication starts building up when more and more users join the discussion.

Blogs are increasingly being used by individuals to broadcast some breaking news which can have tremendous impact on the general public as a whole. Blogging was extensively used by Internet users across the world to raise a voice against the war against Iraq, which was widely considered as illegal. Similarly, when the outgoing regime in Iran used widespread fudging of electoral rolls, blogs became the rallying point for raising voice against the government.

Various blogging platforms

A number of websites allow their users to set up blogs. Popular such platforms include Google owned Blogger, Twitter, Wordpress and Blog.com. These websites are frequented by numerous individuals everyday to post content such as text and images. An interesting thing to note about blogs is that users do not need to have an understanding of applications such as HTML, PHP, and ASP etc to create their own personal web space. This is mainly because blogs can be set up without any knowledge of such technologies.

Many organizations tend to set up their own blogs to reach out to their customers. With the help of their blogs, they can collect feedback and useful suggestions from their customers and gauge public opinion about their products and services. For instance, popular computer parts manufacturer, Dell Computers has its own blogging platform named Direct2Dell.

Here, Dell's customers can post their feedback about Dell's products which is then used by Dell Inc for internal purposes. After the introduction of this platform, Dell was able to increase customer satisfaction by taking care of feedback, both positive and negative, provided by its customers.