স্বাস্থ্য ও সুরক্ষা

Blogging

Ridoy Hossain

1. Origins and definitions

The blog (a contraction of web log/weblog) is a form of online publishing, com-

munication, and expression that has gained significant popularity since its emerg-

ence in the late 1990s (Blood 2002; Rosenberg 2009; Winer 2001). The terms blog

(n.) and blogging (v.) were first included in the Oxford English Dictionary in 2003,

and blog (n.) was chosen as Merriam-Webster’s word of the year in 2004 (Mer-

riam-Webster 2004). Princeton’s WordNet database defines a blog as “a shared on-

line journal where people can post diary entries about their personal experiences

and hobbies(; …) postings on a blog are usually in chronological order”, and de-

scribes blogging as “reading, writing, or editing a shared on-line journal”. Blogs

are used to publish a wide array of content: In addition to textual blogs (the focus of

this chapter), blogs are also used to share photos, audio clips, and video clips

(Scheidt 2009). Although some degree of openness and sharing is usually associ-

ated with blogging, blogs with access restrictions exist in corporate and organiz-

ational spaces and where individuals wish for their blog to remain private. Associ-

ated terms such as blogosphere (n.) and bloggy (adj.) have also entered the

vernacular in the course of the last decade, denoting blogs in their (implied) totality

and the (implied) characteristics they share, respectively. Blogging is a global phe-

nomenon, reaching across languages, communities, and organizational contexts

(Bruns and Jacobs 2006; Russell and Echchaibi 2009; Schlobinski and Siever

2005).

Definitions of what constitutes a blog from scholars in different disciplines

highlight different aspects of blogs, such as genre antecedence (Karlsson 2006;

McNeill 2003, 2005), structure and content (Herring, Scheidt, Bonus, and Wright

2004), communicative function (Brake 2007), rhetorical practice (Miller and

Shepherd 2004), and practitioner perspective (boyd 2006), or they attempt to es-

tablish theoretical frameworks which integrate several of these facets (Schmidt

2007). The divergent and at the same time overlapping scholarly approaches to

blogs as text, discourse, social action, and cultural practice reflect both the per-

spectives of a range of academic disciplines and the shifting interpretation of the

blog format by practitioners and non-practitioners. Simultaneously, there appears

to be a gradual move away from definitions that tie blogs exclusively to a specific

style or content closely resembling antecedent practices, such as diary-writing and

journalism, to definitions that are more open and recognize what boyd refers to as

“the efficacy of the practice” (2006: para 2). As blogs come of age and merge with