A "blog" is a personal website which gives Internet users an easy and simple way to publish information online, in the form of a journal. The term "blog" is a contraction of "weblog."
A blog is a Web page, generally created with the use of a dynamic tool for managing the layout of the content. The author can publish news, links to websites, or his or her own short messages. On a blog, posts are published in reverse chronological order, i.e., the most recent posts are shown at the top of the page, followed by the older messages.
What makes a blog special among websites is that a blog includes comment threads so that readers can react to published information, which makes blogs an interactive and discussion-rich medium.
The concept of a blog is closely linked to that of RSS feeds, which other blogs (or other sites with RSS) can use to aggregate the blog content. RSS is based on an XML feed that lets blogs integrate this external content directly into their own sites.
A link on a blog which points to another blog is called a trackback. Under this system, blogs the world over are linked with one another, forming what is called the "blogosphere".
Creating a blog does not require any special computing skills. Any author can publish one with the help of an online tool for adding and editing articles. To create a blog, all you need to do is (1) find a blog hosting service and open an account with it, and (2) publish content using the tools you get.
