Gone are the days of writing HTML markup if you want to maintain a personal Web site. Well, those days are not entirely gone, but the end is in sight. Why? It is all due to the rise of the blog. Blog is short for Web log and as this name suggests the early examples were little more than logs of daily activities put up on the Web. This usually involved the daily update of some HTML page. This was the state of blogging until about 2001. During 2001 Web based software for blogging and dedicated hosts for blogging started to gain popularity and acceptance, which lead to a dramatic increase in the number of blogs and the number of people blogging.
Since 2004 or so blogging has become main stream. You will now find blogs maintained by such companies as Boeing, McDonald’s, and Chrysler to name a few. In many cases, these blogs represent an effort on the companies’ part to engage with its customer base by allowing them to comment on the activities the companies post about. In addition to using the social nature of blogs to engage with readers, more and more people are using blogs to replace their static Web sites. In such cases people are using the blog’s database foundation as a personal content management system. In fact this site is an example of such a use. For those desiring to use a blog to replace their static Web site there are a number of options, which you can get more information about by clicking the links in the sidebar.
You may also be interested in reading ELI 7 Things About Blogging here.
Blogs in Plain English by Common Craft