A blog is just a web page - often in a "diary" or journal format.
In the early days of the World Wide Web (my early days at least!) creating a web page required some knowledge of hypertext markup language (html).
WYSIWYG editing software such as Adobe's PageMill, and later Claris's Homepage, made web publishing available to a greater number of non-technical, would-be web publishers, presenting the user with a "normal" page layout screen, and converting this to html in the background.
But there was still a large technical gap - and a software cost - that created a big hurdle for the "average" person to jump before they could publish their thoughts on the web.
Enter weblogs, or blogs.
Blogs were the first widely available incarnation of an idea that became known as Web 2.0 technology - where the software required to publish your web site was actually installed on a remote computer, accessible through a web browser on your computer.
To publish to a blog, no software needs to be installed on your computer, and you can edit your web site from any computer that is connected to the internet - you can publish items to your web site from internet cafes as you travel.
Of course, the original Web 2.0 technologies have now moved to a new level - Facebook, Flickr, Myspace, Twitter, etc, are all examples of technlogies that took their lead from the anytime/anywhere blog/Web 2.0 philosphy.
But there is still a place for the humble blog - and the technologies available for blogs have quietly improved over the years too.
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