Purpose of the Blog and Website - Essay Example

Today as the world is getting more and more connected thru the internet, people have devised a variety of methods in order to be connected with otherpeople, other communities, other groups, and with the rest of the world. In addition people have used these kinds of mediums in order to express themselves to the world. The internet is a very powerful, vocal and instantaneous communication tool. And people with something to say are more than eager to use them to obtain their interests. The most common communication tools available today in the web are the Blog, the Forum and the website. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive yet brief report about these internet communication tools (Pedley 1). In this paper we present the purpose of the blog, the forum and a website. We further explain what these communication tools are for in the first place. This paper also presents the different characteristics of these communication tools. Lastly, apart from giving a comprehensive backgrounder on the three internet communication tools indicated, this paper also presents a comparison of each communication tool when compared to each other. The first internet communication tool this paper will describe is the Blog. Generally speaking, a blog is a website that is user-defined and highly customizable and is highly personalized. A user, either a single person or a group of people – a community or a organization put in entries in a journal type format and is displayed in a reverse chronological order, that is the latest entry of the blog is presented to the users. Blogs have a number of uses in order to spread information over the internet. They can provide commentaries about certain events, current news on practically any given subject, recipes on food, political views and ideologies, and more generally blogs act as personal online diaries. The usual blog is customized based on the user’s preferences. It can combine a variety of user-defined text, images, links to other blogs, web pages, and even other internet communication tools related to the subject being sponsored. More recently, blogs have the ability to leave comments in an interactive format. Blogs have now evolved such as blogs for photography as photoblogs, blogs that have the options for sketching named sketchblog, blogs showing videos or vlogs, and audo blogs or podcasting. Blog is a portmanteau or a blend of the words web and log ergo Blog. The second internet communication tool is the Forum. The Forum is an internet medium in the internet that is primarily for holding online discussions on topics and giving the users the option to upload or download content. Online forums some of which can be traced back to 1995 are very similar in nature as the dial-up bulletin boards and Internet newsgroups that was widespread during the 1980s and 1990s. This kind of online discussion often creates a sort of virtual community around forums of regular users. Some of the topics being discussed in existing forums are technology, computer games, and politics. However, presently there are almost unlimited topics for forums over the internet. Internet forums are generally identified as web forums, online message boards, online discussion boards, electronic-discussion groups or communities, web discussion forums, online bulletin boards, and for most of the online community internet forums are simply called as forums. In addition, forum may be referring to the entire group or community using the said forum as medium for discussion about a common topic. In essence, a forum is a website that is divided into several threads made by members of the group that sponsored the forum. Each oline thread is a generally a discussion that is in a shape of a series of posts made by people interested in the said topic. The posts made by the members are saved and can be read (depending on the options in the forum) by all members of the thread. The posts can be deleted or saved based on the perogative of the moderator – basically the person tasked to maintain the upkeep of the thread. The last part of the internet communication tool is the website. A website is a compilation of corollated pages in the web, images, videos and other information that is digitized and is posted in a single domain or subdomain over the internet. The web page is classified as an online document that is encoded in HTML. The pages that is part of the website is usually accessible from a common address usually called a URL or in laymans terms, a homepage. The pages of websites are usually in an hierarchical order, and depending on the type of user, is limited or restricted. Usually the website can change its overall appearance (language, format, contnet) depending on the user’s rights and restrictions. There are some sites that requires for users to subscribe in order for the users to be given full access some or all of their content. Some of these sites that require subsricption are business sites, online service sites, online network gaming sites, web-based premium e-mail services, and even websites that provide users with real time stock market information. Presently, there are more than 100 million websites that can be viewed by anyone over the web. Now that we have provided a comprehensive background on the three internet communication tools, this report would present a comparative analysis of each tool as compared to one another. In terms of the content, Websites can be generally considered as more factual compared to the forum and the blog. As websites are considered online pages where information can acquired, websites are by nature fact based. Websites present information to users that is derived from some other form of literature such as books, etc. Their manner of presentation is more often than not un-biased and objective. Forums on the other hand are more opinionated, similar to blogs. Both present opinions coming from people. Generally these comments are based on the person’s feelings or sentiments on the said topic or agenda. Whereas websites more often than not present objective information. Blogs are highly opinionated as most blogs present over the internet are made by single users, thereby anything written on the blog is based solely on one person’s opinion. Conclusions drawn up in blogs may or may not be based on facts but is ultimately based on a single entity. On the other hand, Websites and blogs are similar in terms of their appearance as they would most probably project or rather be created in the manner pleasing to the organization or the person hosting the website and the blog, respectively. Forums on the other hand would most probably stick to a very general form as forums serve a multitude of people and with that kind of service they serve a multitude of tastes, likes and dislikes, sets of preferences and characteristics. Keeping the form simple would basically please the majority. It can be said that in general, websites, blogs and forums are customizable, interrelated and are similar with each other in some of their aspects. All three tools of communication effectively attract the kind of audience they desire as evident by their widespread popularity and the kind of culture these mediums are able to produce. The language and the flexibility of these tools are maximized fully with people finding ever more ways to maximize their use. As a concluding remark, one can say that each site although very unique and different from each other, is in all accounts and purposes oddly similar to each other, all three communicating thought to everyone interested, all three able to maximize fully the potential of the internet to spread its information, and all three certainly suceeding in the objectives set when each medium was conceived and spread throughout the world. References Pedley, Paul. The Invisible Web: Searching the Hidden Parts of the Internet. London: ASLIB-IMI, 2001. Read More