Writing+and+Text+Publishing+Tools



Introduction  In today’s world, there is no distance between people anymore; they are not far away from each other any longer. Communication has a big importance in that, people talking on the phone, chatting or e-mailing on internet. However, beside of chatting and e-mailing on internet, there is something new and it already has 50 million fans from all around the world. Its name is Blogging. In this chapter, these questions will find their answers. What is Blog?  Blog is the abbreviation of “Web log”. It is a publicly accessible, online chorological collection of personal sharing with other people ( The EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative , 2005). It is easy to create and use it from anywhere all around the world with internet connection. People are able to share anything they want by using blogs. They can share their photos, their favorite videos, and their ideas about life, their current classes or their myriad experiences. Blogs are designed as a communication tool which is a form of internet publishing in personal, professional and public. According to Prachi Parashar Panday paper (2007), t ypical blog logic consists of posts and related comments and blogging is a process of:
 * What is Blog?
 * What is the importance of it?
 * What is the history of Blog/ Blogging?
 * How does it work?
 * What makes Blog different as a writing and text publishing tool than other tools?

• Reading/Listening to thoughts, views, experiences

• Reflecting on thoughts, views, experiences • Analyzing, Questioning,Critiquing,Reacting,Agreeing/Disagreeing • Writing/Recording your reflection • Sharing your reflection

What is the importance of Blog? <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;"> As said above, blog can be established for different purposes and these purposes create different type of blogs such as personal, professional and public. One of those can be chosen according to personal requirements. In blogs people are able to store their experiences or thought in different formats such as text, images, audio, and video ( <span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Panday, 2007 <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">). <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">If a person has a personal blog, he or she can post his or her daily, weekly or monthly diary. In this blog person can record his or her experiences, put his/her photos and also upload audio files so that his or her family members who are living far away from his or her can check the photos and hear their relative’s voice. Therefore, people can share their trip, class or life experiences via text file, photos, audios, and videos with other people. In this case, people can benefit from the experiences of someone who is even not known well by people. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">A professional blog about education or corporate can be preferred by people, because it is easy to create and use. People can reach and use it easily. It could be established in order to educate students in a class or train the workers in a corporate. Instructors can share some important stuff or information like an article to read or video to watch on their blogs. Blogs also provide chance to store the information from experts or users. In this case, shared information is reusable by others. Students or workers can access these blogs and benefit from them. Also they, who are benefit from these blogs, have a chance to make a comment about the sharing stuff whether it was helpful for them. These comments could be feedback for instructors to see how much their blogs on track to train their workers or students. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Another type of blog is public or community blog which can be preferred by people in order to discuss public issues. People can share the questions, which show up after reading an article, newspaper or book, or watching the news on TV, on this type of blog and try to find the answers. Also they can share their feeling or thought about anything. Public blogs are the place where people feel free to question and critique the decisions. A public blog gives people opportunity to become a journalist, a reporter, an author, and publisher ( <span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Panday, 2007 <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">).

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">What is the history of Blog/ Blogging? //<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">1994-1999 // <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;"> First blog was created by Justin Hall in 1994 and its name was Likns.net. People have not been called it as a blog until 1997. “Weblog” is coined first time in 1997. “The word’s creation has been attributed to <span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px; text-decoration: none;">[|Jorn Barger] <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">, of the influential early blog //Robot Wisdom//. The term was created to reflect the process of “logging the web” as he browsed.” (Chapman, 2011). Peter Merholz who is a programmer shortened “weblog” name to “blog” in 1999. During these early years blogging platforms started cropping up. Livejournal is one of the fist blogging platforms. In 1999, platform got Blogger name which started by Even Williams and Meg Hourihan at Pyra Labs (Chapman, 2011). //<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">2000-Current // <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;"> 2000s were the golden era of blogs. Blogs got growth in the early 2000. According to Jesse James Garret’s list, 23 blogs were established on internet and this number increased to 50 million blogs by the middle of 2006 according to Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere report. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;"> In 2001 there was enough interest in blogging and articles and guides about how to blog got increase. After that point “meta blogs” (blogs about blogging) got an important role on it. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;"> After blogs owners started making money from their blogs, the number of meta-blogs increased a lot. Blog owners like Darren Rowse ( <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">[|Problogger.net] <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;"> and <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">[|Digital-Photography-School.net] <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">) and John Chow made a lot of money by guiding other bloggers how they could turn blogging into a full time career (Chapman, 2011). <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;"> Nowadays, blogs has a more important role than previous years. It has too much responsibility in many different fields such as education, training and business in last decade. The number of bloggers reached to 50 million in today’s world and it still keeps increasing (The EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative <span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">, 2005 <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">). <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">How does it work? <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;"> A blog can be considered as an online journal and using it is as simple as using an email. Bloggers enter what they want to post into a blogging application, add formatting or hyperlinks, and save the post. The application adds the entry to the blogs, making the content available for who want to see it or read them and altering users who have subscribed to that blogs’ content (The EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative <span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">, 2005 <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">). Moreover, blog stores the posts monthly according to their date as said before above. In this case, it is easy to search and find the any post. After that point, followers of this blog can read posting and submit a comment which indicates whether they like or they did not like the post. These are kinds of feedback for bloggers to see the lack points in his or her post. This is the fist way to communicate with blogger. The other way is that follower can post his or her comments to his or her own blog instead of posting it on original blog and linking back to the original post. It is called trackback. “Trackback notifies bloggers when one of their posts is referenced by another blog, making it possible to determine the popularity of a post based on the number and diversity of incoming links to a post.” (The EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative <span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">, 2005 <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">)

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Figure 1: Running of blogging community __﻿__ <span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">What makes Blog different as a writing and text publishing tool than other tools? <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;"> As we said before blog is one of the useful web 2.0 tools. There are also many other web 2.0 tools which have different purpose than each others. Facebook, twitter, diigo, linkedin, second life and flicker are some of the popular tools nowadays. However, if these tools above are as popular as blogs, there are two questions to answer then: <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;"> Blogs are special places for people to share their ideas, thoughts or lives with other people. It is a kind of an electronic book to read. This book’s subject might be anything like a personal dairy or journal, personal opinion about anything happened in the world, or general information about any academic or scientific topic. However, publishing something on blog is much easier to publish something on newspaper or book. First of all it is cheaper and more economical. People do not need to pay anything to publish something in their blogs. Otherwise, they need to prepare to sacrifice among of money to put their writing and text on newspaper or book. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;"> In addition, while twitter and facebook are great social network to connect and share something with other people, they are not more appropriate than blogs for publishing any writing and text. Also, while flicker is a really good web 2.0 tool to share personal or general photos along with personal comments, it is not proper at all to make 1 or 2 page publishing. Moreover, blogging includes almost all the features of other web 2.0 tools and, in blogs, people can do almost whatever they are doing in facebook, twitter and flicker. As said in previous parts of this chapter above, people can connect with each other and they can share photos, audios and videos with others by using blogs. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">References <span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">7 things you should know about…Blogs (2005). Educause Learning Initiative. Retrieved August 5, 2011, from <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">[] <span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Bryant, T. (2006). Social Software in Academia. Educause Quarterly, 29(2). Retrieved August 5, 2011, from http://www.educause.edu/apps/eq/eqm06/eqm0627.asp <span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Chapman, C. (2011). A Brief History of Blogging. Retrieved August 5, 2011, from <span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px; text-decoration: none;">[] <span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Downes, S. (2004, September/October). Educational Blogging. Educause Review, 39(5), 14-26. Retrieved August 5, 2011, from http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ERM0450.pdf <span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Farmer, J. (2003). The potential of personal publishing in education III: Where to now? Xplanazine. Retrieved August 5, 2011, from http://www.xplanazine.com/archives/2003/10/incorporated_su_5.php <span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Leslie, S. (2003, October 9). Matrix of some uses of blogs in education. Message posted to EdTechPost. Retrieved August 5, 2011, from http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000393.html <span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Lohnes, S. (2003, Winter). Weblogs in Education: Bringing the World to the Liberal Arts Classroom. The NITLE News, 2(1). Retrieved August 5, 2011, from http://newsletter.nitle.org/v2_n1_winter2003/features_weblogs.php <span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">McIntosh, E. (2006). From Learning Logs to Learning Blogs. Scottish Languages Review, 13. Retrieved August 5, 2011, from http://www.scilt.stir.ac.uk/SLR/Current%20Issue/SLR13%20McIntosh.pdf <span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Panday, P. P. (2007). Why blog? Retrieved August 5, 2011, from <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">[] <span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Roberts, S. (2003). Campus Communications & the Wisdom of Blogging. Campus Technology. Retrieved August 5, 2011, from http://www.campustechnology.com/article.asp?id=7982
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">What point does make blogs significant?
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">What are the differences between blogs and other popular tools?