Web 2.0 Architectures

Personal Websites and Blogs

The term blog is short for weblog, a personal log (or diary) that is published on the Internet. In many cases, blogs are what personal websites were initially meant to be. Many early website gurus preached the idea that online content should always be fresh and new to keep traffic coming back. That concept holds just as true now as it did then—the content has just shifted form.

Applicable Web 2.0 Patterns

Many blogs embrace a variety of the core patterns discussed in Chapter 7, such as:

• Participation-Collaboration

• Collaborative Tagging

• Declarative Living and Tag Gardening

• Software as a Service

• Asynchronous Particle Update (the pattern behind AJAX)

• The Synchronized Web

• Structured Information (Microformats)

Shifting to Blogs and Beyond

Static personal websites were, like most websites, intended to be sources of information about specific subjects. The goal of a website was to pass information from its steward to its consumers. Some consumers might visit certain websites (personal or otherwise) only once to retrieve the information they sought; however, certain groups of users might wish to visit again to receive updated information.

In some ways, active blogs are simply personal websites that are regularly updated, though most blog platforms support features that illustrate different patterns of use. Because there are no hard rules for how frequently either a blog or a personal website should be updated, nor is it possible to classify either in a general sense, it ...