Quotes

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Forums

Similar to the dial-up bulletin boards (BBS) and newsgroups that characterized the Internet of the 1980s-1990s, web-based forums (a.k.a., ‘message boards’) began in the mid-1990s as a place for holding discussions. Innumerable forums are dedicated to a wide variety of different subjects, covering the gamut from science and technology to politics to popular culture.

Blogs

Weblogs (or ‘blogs,’ for short) are different from forums or newsgroups in that there are very few authors — often only one — who can create new subjects, although discussion of those topics is encouraged and achieved by way of ‘comments’ from the readers. Consequently, blogs serve principally as a personal journal that the author invites others to read. (While the popular term for the author of a blog is now a blogger, one of the earlier terms was escribitionist, a play-on-words attesting to how these authors wanted their thoughts ‘exposed’ to a wider audience.)

The term weblog was coined in 1997, shortened to blog in 1999, and is now a legitimate entry in several English language dictionaries, both as a noun (”a blog”) and as a verb (”to blog”).

Podcasts

The release of the popular iPod and other portable music players coincided with the advent of new syndication technologies on the web, thus begetting the podcast — a web feed of multimedia files (usually audio, sometimes video) that anyone can download to play on their computer or portable media player.