Sissy and Madre, a couple of regular readers, were wondering about the origins of blogs. I knew that the term blog was a shortened form of weblog but I didn’t know much about how they came to be so I did a little research, very little.

Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, comes to the rescue with this entry . Blogs are basically the next evolutionary step from online forums. Initially, the ability to blog was limited to those who had a technical knowledge of the internet. Blogging exploded in popularity when free services like Blogger and LiveJournal came along and allowed anyone with the skills to fill out an online form to become a publisher.

Blogs come in many flavors. There are blogs devoted to specific topics such as gadgets, cities, real estate, and the media. Those examples are ad-supported commercial blogs with a paid staff to write and edit them. However, the vast majority of blogs are merely online journals where people post whatever’s on their mind.

Blogging and the internet in general raises a pretty important question that I’d like to discuss later and that is “What is lost by the loss of privacy?” We’re giving away a large portion of our privacy as we surf, shop, and pontificate on the web. Privacy advocates think this is a bad thing. Is it? What do we gain in return? Stay tuned to find out.

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