Bricklin on Technology

Chapter 6. Blogging and Podcasting: Observations through Their Development

The Internet has given us enhanced connectivity for communicating with others. It has lowered the cost of sending messages or publishing thoughts to virtually zero. Many different means for exploiting this technology for communication have been developed, and new ones are emerging all the time.

One very visible and important development has been that of blogs and blogging. A blog is basically a simple personal web site where a named (either real or pseudonymous) author (the blogger) posts written items listed in reverse chronological order, with the most recent on top. Each post may be referred to through its own web address—a permanent link, or "perma-link." Some blogs have facilities for readers to directly post comments that become associated online with the original post without needing to email them to the blogger, but not all do. (My blog does not support direct comments.)The term blogging is what we commonly use today. In the early days, we also used the terms personal web site, log, web log, online diary, and others. The term blog is simply a contraction of the phrase web log.

Creating and publishing the HTML computer code to display text through a browser is somewhat technical and tedious. HTML, which stands for Hypertext Markup Language, is a programming language used to specify the contents of a web page. It is the language that browsers translate into what you see. Web pages are usually stored ...