Tutorial Blog

Unlike blogs, a blog engine is not a single website. However, the engine consists of different parts that are organized in a very structured way. Let us first discuss what the different types of blogs are.

Types of Blogs

In the real world, there are different types of blogs. I do not actually mean their purpose, but rather the category of their contents. In the following sections, you will see some of them and understand their necessity.

General Blogs

When people say “blog”, they usually mean the blogs that belong to this category. These blogs are generally text-based, but contain a lot of images and other media like audio and video. These blogs are easy to maintain, lightweight, and are very popular for their simplicity. WordPress and Drupal are general blog engines.

Photo Blogs

Photoblogs or Phlogs are special kind of blogs where a group of people or individuals share their photos collected from various sources. These blogs are generally dedicated towards a specific audience. Most photoblogs are free. The usual subjects of photoblogs are films, wars, herbs, natural beauty or even weird images, and so forth; it’s impossible to specify all of them. Professional photographers also share photos through their blogs.

In photoblogs, images are the main content; we all know that a picture speaks a thousand words. Among the photoblogs, one of the most important is Photoblogs.org, which is developed by Brandon Stone. Photoblogs.org started with 15 blogs in 2002 and now it contains around 10,000 blogs in 40 languages!
Some photobloggers upload images in their web space using any FTP application and directly link them through their blogs. Some bloggers use online photo repositories like Flickr, SmugMug, or Zoomr to reduce the bandwidth and also to achieve full-fledged image administration. These days PicasaWeb is also a very popular image-sharing service.

Mobile Blogs

Mobile blogs are often known as Moblogs. In this type of blogs, people access the contents and modify them for their mobile phones or portable devices like PDAs. Moblogs are usually developed in Japan where people have a huge number and variety of portable devices with cameras. The term Moblog was suggested by Adam Greenfield, who also arranged the First International Moblogging Conference (1IMC) in July, 2003.

Mobile blogs are very popular these days due to the availability of portable devices. In 2004, on Singapore’s national day, a national Moblog was launched, which is the first national moblog in the world. Mobile blogs are often known as gLogs (pronounced as glogs), when they are especially used as photoblogs.

Audio Blogs

Audio blogs are especially designed MP3 blogs, whose contents are downloadable in MP3 format. Most audio blogs are devoted to a special genre of music like rock, classic, or jazz. Audio bloggers also publish their content in AAC or Ogg Vorbis format, which is the most popular among *nix users. According to Wikipedia, many music bloggers publish content that may violate copyright laws. However, sometimes they manage to avoid it, since most of their contents are either old or not Many audio bloggers also place a notice in their blogs like “If the owner objects about this post, I will immediately remove it from my blog”. Many commercial music companies also maintain audio blogs and publish their music files as an advertisement to gain popularity.

Video Blogs

Often known as vlogs, video blogs are similar to audio blogs except for the type of content they serve. Vlogs distribute video files to Netizens. These blogs became very popular when video streaming was invented and people started getting higher bandwidth connections than they had previously. After the marketing of Apple’s iPod or iTune, vlogs became extremely popular. In the iTune community, video blogging is often known as “video podcasting”. Some important facts from vlog history include: Yahoo’s vlogger community grew to more than 1000 members in June, 2005; Apple declared that its iPod will play video files; and, Apple’s iTune store will also serve videos. These days VlogMap.org shows vloggers from around the world with the help of Google Earth and Google Maps.

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