What Is Blogging?

What is blogging? Why was it started?

After looking over the history of blogging and ‘Students who blog > The Scopes – Otago Polytechnic’ by Rachel Gillies, I’ve come to the conclusion that blogging is a place where authors can catalogue their thoughts on the World Wide Web. (Gillies, 2009) Gillies states this in her post about the students she taught at the Dunedin School of Art at Otago Polytechnic, New Zealand. Having taught them to use their blogs as a place for reflection and development, this has been a common theme in blogs since it started in 1994. I believe, the blog was created to log one’s personal thoughts in a diary-like form around what was happening in their personal life but also on the everyday news of the outside world.

‘The Blog’ has changed vastly from 1994-2014. By 2014, the blog was considered ‘dead’ – It stepped aside for social media also known as ‘micro-blogging’ on websites such as Tumblr, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and many more. However, blogging still appears across vast genres on the internet because, in the 2018 Sensis social media report, they found that 68% of all internet users read online reviews and blogs. This shows the blog is still alive in one way or another.