The precise details of the history of blogging are not entirely agreed upon, beyond that the medium as we are currently most familiar with began around 1996 and involved the regular posting of items in reverse chronological order on a webpage (Blood 2000). It is this visual representation, incorporating other such features as links, comments, taglines, archives, permanent links, blogrolls and more which has largely dominated discussion about the nature of blogs and their potential use. While these features are extremely significant aspects of what makes up a blog, arguably the most important developments in this area have had little to do with visual representation and form, and much more to do with the facility for the development of individual digital identity and an XML language known as RSS. Through blog technologies now available, individuals are able to simply represent themselves online and as an abbreviation of either RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication, RSS allows users to literally subscribe to a web page and receive complete or summarised new content. This can be done either through an application similar to an email inbox known as a news aggregator or a web based environment most commonly described as a river of news aggregator |
