A blog is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order, so that the most recent post appears first, at the top of the web page. Until 2009, blogs were usually the work of a single individual, occasionally of a small group, and often covered a single subject or topic. In the 2010s, "multi-author blogs" (MABs) emerged, featuring the writing of multiple authors and sometimes professionally edited. MABs from newspapers, other media outlets, universities, think tanks, advocacy groups, and similar institutions account for an increasing quantity of blog traffic. The rise of Twitter and other "microblogging" systems helps integrate MABs and single-author blogs into the news media. Blog can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.
The blogosphere is made up of all blogs and their interconnections. The term implies that blogs exist together as a connected community or as a social networking service in which everyday authors can publish their opinions.
Following a crackdown on Iranian media beginning in 2000 many Iranians turned to weblogging to provide and find political news. The first Persian language blog is thought to have been created by Hossein Derakhshan,, in 2001. Derakhshan also provided readers with a simple instruction manual in Persian on how to start a blog. In 2004, a census of blogs around the world by the NITLE found 64,000 Persian language blogs. In that year the Islamic government also began to arrest and charge bloggers as political dissidents and by 2005 dozens of bloggers had been arrested.
John Linwood Battelle is an entrepreneur, author and journalist. Best known for his work creating media properties, Battelle helped launch Wired in the 1990s and launched The Industry Standard during the dot-com boom. In 2005, he founded the online advertising network Federated Media Publishing. In January 2014, Battelle sold Federated Media Publishing's direct sales business to LIN Media and relaunched the company's programmatic advertising business from Lijit Networks to Sovrn Holdings.
Photobucket is an American image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community. Photobucket hosts more than 10 billion images from 100 million registered members. Photobucket's headquarters are in Denver, Colorado. The website was founded in 2003 by Alex Welch and Darren Crystal and received funding from Trinity Ventures. It was acquired by Fox Interactive Media in 2007. In December 2009, Fox's parent company, News Corp, sold Photobucket to Seattle mobile imaging startup Ontela. Ontela then renamed itself Photobucket Inc. and continues to operate as Photobucket.
Weblogs, Inc. was a blog network that published content on a variety of subjects, including tech news, video games, automobiles and pop culture. At one point, the network had as many as 90 blogs, although the vast majority of its traffic could be attributed to a smaller number of breakout titles, as was typical of most large-scale successful blog networks of the mid-2000s. Popular blogs included: Engadget, Autoblog, TUAW, Joystiq, Luxist, Slashfood, Cinematical, TV Squad, Download Squad, Blogging Baby, Gadling, AdJab, and Blogging Stocks.
BROG is the acronym for (We)blog Research on Genre, a project based in the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University, Bloomington.
Jaiku was a social networking, micro-blogging and lifestreaming service comparable to Twitter, founded a month before the latter. Jaiku was founded in February 2006 by Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen from Finland and launched in July of that year. It was purchased by Google on October 9, 2007.
Microblogging is an online broadcast medium that exists as a specific form of blogging. A micro-blog differs from a traditional blog in that its content is typically smaller in both actual and aggregated file size. Micro-blogs "allow users to exchange small elements of content such as short sentences, individual images, or video links", which may be the major reason for their popularity. These small messages are sometimes called micro posts.
BlogPulse was a search engine and analytic system for blogs. It uses automated processes to monitor the daily activity on blogs and generates trend information. It was initially created by IntelliSeek, and was later acquired by the Nielsen Company, and currently owned by NM Incite, A Nielsen / McKinsey & Company.
Sysomos Inc. is a Toronto-based social media analytics company owned by Outside Insight market leaders Meltwater.
Blogging in New Zealand is dominated by a community of around 600 blogs that comment largely on New Zealand politics, society and occurrences. One list of over 200 "author-operated, public discourse" blogs in New Zealand suggests New Zealand blogs cover a wide range of ideological positions but lack female contributors. Blogging is an active part of the media of New Zealand.
Kortney Ryan Ziegler is an American entrepreneur, filmmaker, visual artist, blogger, writer, and scholar based in Oakland, California. His artistic and academic work focuses on queer/trans issues, body image, racialized sexualities, gender, performance and black queer theory.
Project Wonderful was an advertising service created by programmer and webcomic author Ryan North in late 2006. Headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, the service supported up thousands of webcomics and blogs with auctioned online advertisements, until it was shut down in 2018.
The Canadian political blogosphere includes political commentary using any social media technology. Its culture differs from that of Europe or the US. The term 'blogosphere' was first formed colloquially in 1999, and has since evolved to mean "the cultural or intellectual environment in which blogs are written and read."
Topsy Labs was a social search and analytics company based in San Francisco, California. The company was a certified Twitter partner and maintained a comprehensive index of tweets, numbering in the hundreds of billions, dating back to Twitter's inception in 2006.
Microsoft Academic was a free internet-based academic search engines for academic publications and literature, developed by Microsoft Research, shut down in 2022. At the same time, OpenAlex launched and claimed to be a successor to Microsoft Academic.
Aislelabs Inc. is a Toronto-based technology company offering the most advanced WiFi analytics and marketing platforms in the market. Aislelabs' AI-powered engine enables entities to harness the power of WiFi through location analytics and marketing automation.
