A blog, in Web 2.0 and in Internet jargon, is a particular type of website where the contents are displayed in an anti-chronological form (from the most recent to the furthest in time). Generally the blog is managed by one or more bloggers who publish, more or less periodically, multimedia content, in text form or in the form of a post, a concept similar to or similar to a newspaper article.
History
The phenomenon began to take hold in 1997 in America; July 18, 1997, was chosen as the symbolic date of birth of the blog, referring to the development, by the American Dave Winer, of the software that allows its publication (we speak of proto-blog). The first blog was actually published on December 23 of the same year, thanks to Jorn Barger, an American trader passionate about hunting, who decided to open his own personal page entitled RobotWisdom to share the results of his research on the web regarding his hobby; he coined the word weblog to describe his site’s list of links. In the spring of 1999, however, Peter Merholz proposed the abbreviation blog on his website Peterme.com.
Playing with the word WebLog, he created the phrase We Blog (or even Wee Blog).
In those years, the term weblog or blog generally referred to lists of links, or rather to comments on lists of links (a type of very useful information for users before the spread of search engines); today sites of this type are practically almost all inactive. In 1999 it also became fashionable in Italy, with the birth of the first free services dedicated to the management of blogs; among the most used: Blogger, AlterVista, wordpress.com, blogsome, Il Cannocchiale, Io Bloggo, Blogdrops, Noiblogger, Libero, LiveJournal, Windows Live Spaces, MySpace, Skyrock.
Between 2009 and 2010 a blog crisis is felt or feared, above all because of the immense success of the new social networks; even if it is believed that, especially with regard to thematic blogs, social networks such as Facebook and Twitter are not suitable for responding to the needs of the blog reader as certain types of posts, characterized by a particular length, require a particular reading format. The reason why blogs spread so much is to be found in several factors: from the public display of one’s private life to the creation of complex and specific texts; at the base of the diffusion there is in any case the characteristic of sharing. As of February 16, 2011, there are more than 156 million public blogs in existence.
Since 2010, companies and professions have also approached the world of blogs by including them as tools, together with social networks, on their websites and as a space to promote their company or business through informative and diary writing where, on the one hand, we talk of their business, new projects and new products, on the other hand they talk about their sector interacting in this way with information and news from the blogosphere and traditional media. Social Networks in the commercial and professional world have replaced the blog function but have not supplanted it because it allows a broader and more in-depth communication. This connection between the professional world and the blog has allowed the professional world of the web to grow and create specializations within professional writing that on the web deals with creating online content, not only pleasant to read but also able to respond to various needs computer and mobile that require complete, exhaustive texts, able to be first in search engines through online editing techniques defined with the acronyms SEO or SEM. Alongside bloggers who create personal spaces to express their ideas, write their poems, professional bloggers are born who also take care of their blog to promote companies and to help professionals and businesses in the care of their blogs with specific professional techniques of online editing.