This is a blog post. What is a blog? What is a blogger? Why does this form of writing deserve its own terminology and when does a blog stop being a blog? According to the Cambridge Dictionary, a blog is:

“a regular record of your thoughts, opinions, or experiences that you put on the internet for other people to read”

A truncation of the word ‘weblog’, blogs in their modern form began to emerge en masse in the early 2000’s giving internet users the means to express their political opinions, create detailed ‘how-to’ guides, and share personal stories from their lives. Of note, the blog’s latest ‘post’ appears first on the page. As of 2020, there are over 600 million blogs in existence. The unmistakeable success of the format and its apparent ease of proliferation gives rise to questions as to the reasons for this and whether or not there is any future for this medium in the future.

Anyone can start a blog. A blog can be about anything. A basic blog is also free. The low barrier to entry, complete creative freedom, and potential for profit are all reasons for this explosive success. At the individual level, this means sharing stories, exploring hobbies, and creating personal brands. At a business level, companies realized they could improve customer satisfaction by keeping customers in the loop. The blog altered the way people interacted on the internet, taking the forum based culture of the past and personalizing it.

As of 2020 however, many are beginning to speculate as to whether or not the format of blogging is ‘dead’, as new means of content creation and dissemination rise to the surface. Twitter’s ‘microblogging’, YouTube’s ‘vlogging’, the visually oriented Instagram, and the more centralized nature of Facebook have taken the most successful aspects of blogs and blogging and refined them, and whilst they at first offered vastly different experiences from one another, these platforms too have begun to take the best aspects from one another and begun to amalgamate these features (e.g. Snapchat’s ‘stories’ feature has now been adopted by Facebook and Instagram).

Ultimately, though not as popular or as prevalent as during their ascendency and subsequent golden age, the blog continues to coexist alongside newer content creation iterations and remains the basis for internet based media forms used for discussion. The blog in its versatility has persisted in an internet age where things change rapidly and though the traditional blogs may dwindle in number, the characteristics that defined them will persist in new form and be given new life.