Types of Blogs

As blogging becomes more and more diverse, bloggers tend to create innovations on making their blogs be more attractive to readers. Based on the content and media used in making blogs, they can be categorized as the following:

Personal Blogs

Personal blogs are the most common type of blog, a blogger used to write and post his personal journal like personal commentaries, events, and other cases that happen to the blogger’s personal life. Some of the writers let other people read their blogs and the other want to keep it secret hence they just post it in the website for them to read if they want or just want to participate the modern way of writing a diary. Modern blogs have become highly interactive as readers are free to leave comments and opinions via tagboards. More than anything else, personal blogs are mainly intended to keep friends and readers get updated with what’s going on with the blogger.

Corporate Blogs

As business entities drifting towards the potential of information technology as a mass media to promote their products and services, corporate blogging has become an indispensable tool in internet marketing. Corporate blogs are solely for business reasons, businesses uses this type of blog to promote their products and services as well as to broadcast news about the company and other important events. Corporate blogs discuss mainly on practical features and SOP’s of a company’s product or service. This type of blog can also be used for public relation purposes.

Collaborative Blogs

Collaborative blogging is a special form in maintaining a blog. In this way, selected bloggers are allowed to edit any posted blog of their co-blogger. It is often practical to reduce time in updating the blogsite while maximizing the content of the blogs. One example is a blogsite for project management systems (PMS) where members of the project are allowed to change any posted blogs. In return, every member is notified via email to update them anything that happened on the posted items. Sometimes, even readers are allowed to add anything about the topic of the blogs. Popular to this kind of collaborative blogging are wiki pages where anyone can add any information about the blog topic.

Topical Blogs

Some blogsites exist with a single topic and their blogs are called topical blogs. These blogs are highly concentrating on the topic which they are dedicated to. Topical blogs particular subject include political blogs, travel blogs, all about food, music blogs, web design, sports, fashion and many more. Information, tips, experiences, products and equipment reviews are the stuffs topical blogs are made of. Popular examples include Engadget and Gizmodo that are talking about consumer information on electronic gadgets.

Spam Blogs

Spam blogs or splogs is another commercial scheming to promote company products and services. However, these blogs are automatically generated by software autonomously performing a series of operations to create even nonsensical and redundant text in its content. Its main purpose is to create a mass-link and increase the traffic of a particular website. This will affect search engine listings when taking account the number of inbound links of the website. Spam blogs can have serious effects on system resources of blog host servers. Spam filters are often installed in the system to prevent blog congestion. Search engines are also penalizing company websites engaged in this kind of blogging.

Photoblogs

Photoblogs is the simplest form of media-type blogging using sketches and pictures to create a thousand words in the minds of the viewers. Photobloggers are highly concentrating on posting photos on photo-sharing host sites instead of text to share to the internet community. Photoblogs are often compiled in albums and slideshows where sometime photo commenting is also enabled. It is being utilized mainly by professional and amateur photographers to display a collection of their works. More often, photoblogs are also being used as tandem to ordinary text-based blogs to enhance message delivery and convey more information on how a topic should look like. Flickr is one typical example of photo-sharing sites where bloggers used as photo repository.

Podcasts

Podcast is derived from the words iPod and broadcast, intended originally on placing recorded audio files on portable audio players like iPod. Creative technologies attempted to break podcast’s association with Apple’s iPod’s by defining it as Personal On Demand broadCast. Regardless of its modern interpretation, podcast has become an audio blogging system where audio blogger can post recorded audio file in any web hosts so others can download and listen. This function is similar to online radio streaming where listeners can play them using a computer or audio player. Podcasts can also be downloaded using push technologies like RSS podcast feed as an audio counterpart to text RSS feed.

Videocasts

Videocasting or vlogging is another media-type podcast which utilized video records rather than audio files. Vlogs are similar to podcasts which video bloggers posted on video hosting sites and made available for internet users to view. Initially, videocasting is used to replay talkshows and other TV programs on the net. Companies have also adopted vlogging as an effective instructional material for their handling and usage of their products. As video sharing sites had become so popular like YouTube and MetaCafe, vlogging gained widespread acceptance among internet users who loved to watch everything rather than to read. Vlogging also fosters demand on greater bandwidth capacity and much higher computer specs to enjoy real-time video streaming and prevent system buffering.