What's Blogging?

The origins of modern blogging are often as argued about as what blogging is.

Many point to blogs as websites or webpages that provided links and comments to other pages, and its is from this basis that modern blogs emerged.

Tim Berners-Lee, father of the World Wide Web, first posted a web page in 1992 at CERN that kept a list of all new web sites as they come online.

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) started a What’s New list of sites in June 1993. Notably the site provided entries sorts by date and the What’s New links included commentary. This service was eventually taken over by Netscape in what became one of the most popular web sites of its time.

In January 1994, Justin Hall launches Justin’s Home Page which would later become Links from the Underground. The site included links to and reviews of other sites. Notably on 10 January 1996, Hall starsts writing an online journal with dated daily entries, although each daily post is linked by through an index page. About the journal he writes “Some days, before I go to bed, I think about my day, and how it messed with my life, and I write a little about what I learned .”
On February 1996, Dave Winer writes a weblog that chronicles the 24 Hours of Democracy Project.

In April, Winer launches a news page for users of Frontier Software, that goes onto became Scripting News in 1997, one of the oldest weblogs remaining on the net today. The company he heads, Userland goes on to release Radio Userland, one of the first blogging software tools.
After Jorn Barger introduced the term weblog into popular use in December 1997, blogging as we now know it continued to develop.

In November 1998, Cameron Barrett published the first list of blog sites on Camworld.
In early 1999 Peter Merholz coins the term blog after announcing he was going to pronounce web blogs as “wee-blog”, that was then shortened to blog. At this stage, a list maintened by Jesse James Garrett recorded that there were 23 known weblogs in existence.

As blogging started to grow in 1999, the first portal dedicated to listing blogs was launched, Brigitte Eaton launched the Eatonweb Portal. Eaton evaluated all submissions by a simple assessment that the site consist of dated entries, one of the criteria we use to day in identifying a blog.

In May 1999, Scott Rosenberg at Salon.com writes one of the first media articles on the emergence of weblogs and refers to the growing number of “Web Journalists”.

In August 1999, Pyra Labs, today owned by Google, launches the free Blogger blogging service, that for the first time provides an easy set of tools for anyone to set up a blog. Other services launched around the same time include Pitas and Groksoup, neither of which capture the imagination of bloggers in the same way as Blogger did.

Over the following 12 months, blogs explode, new companies and tools enter the market. The rest, as they say, is history.

Advantages:

1. People is more connected to the reality and global changin, they have information and can share it.

2. We can have updated information on topics that sometimes are not published in common newspaperss.

3. Information on blogs may be useful to prepare a paper, presentation or homework

4. Before writing on a blog people have to think and reflect and it contributes to a better writing process and presentation of clear ideas.

5. Posts are easy to present and they help to cooperative learning

6. When you have a difficulty you may get an accuarate answer though posts 24 hours a day

7. You can express your opinions and make the world to know them

Disadvantages

1. You may get offensive comments on your posts when people don't agree with your opinions

2. Not all the information you read on blogs is real or based on facts. You can have lots of subjective information that you may need to distinguish from real events

3. You don't have a 100% percent of control on your free blog because you don't really own it and you can't apply all the plugins or style stuff you may want.

4. Sometimes the information you write or the topic you are developping is not useful or relevant.

5. If you are not careful and responsible writing you may hurt some feelings and cause useless controversy

Classroom Use

the use of blogs in the classroom is very important because students feel they are talking in their own language with their own voices. Using blogs allow students to express their opinions and work in a cooperative way.

Blogs are directely related to new technologies and new approaches to teaching and learing. Blogs help to develop readin, writing and overall comprehension of a secod language, english in our case, and students are doing better than non-webloggers some teacher claim.

Students can be more interested in school work if they have something which is motivating and related to their context as internet and new technologies are, however not eveyone may feel interested on these topics and the results will continue to be the same

Students can have access to their blogs any time they want and during their free time they con learn more about things that interest them and as a result their performance in class will improved.