Viewing ‘‘Blogs’’ as new information powerhouses.

The term blog or weblog has become popular only recently According to Wikipedia (2004), a Weblog is “a Web application that contains periodic, reverse chronologically ordered posts on a common Web page”.

 The term Weblog was coined by Jorn Barger in December 1997 and the first Weblog was built by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN. This was also the first Website (http://info.cern.ch/. Peter Scott defines a blog as “a page containing brief, chronologically arranged item of information. A blog can take the form of a diary, journal, what’s new page or links to other websites”.

Blogs are sites that can be used to capture particular views, ideas, or opinions overtime. It is a web application, which contains periodic posts on a common web page. Each blog tells a story, be it about a person, an organization, an event, or any other subject such as the environment, healthcare, disasters, language, literature, etc.

Blogger: - The person who maintains a blog is called a blogger and the act of creating and maintaining a blog is called blogging.

Blogs run from individual diaries to aims of political campaigns, media programmes and corporations, and from one occasional author too large communities of writers. Many weblogs enable visitors to leave comments which can lead to a community of readers centered arround the blog; others are non interactive. The totality of blogs or blog-related activities is called the blogosphere. When a large amount of activity, information, and opinion erupt around a particular subject or controversy in the blogosphere, it may be referred to as a blogstorm or blogswamp.

Early Weblogs were link-driven sites with a mix of links, commentary and personal thoughts and essays and could only be created by people who already knew how to make a website. Today, however, through the introduction of how-to-manuals, blog IDs and several user friendly web tools, even the least savvy people can create a Weblog”. A fine and useful example of such tools is the Rich Text Editor (RTE) as offered by Printexx, which claims that ‘No HTML to Learn’ and ‘No Software to Download and Install’, but with the RTE, how one's entry appears on his screen is how it will be published on the web.

 There are an estimated 1.2 million blogs in English and 1.9 million in all languages combined. They promise to have profound influence on political campaigns and mobilizations for various causes. Ivan noble, a science and technology writer for the BBC was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumour in August 2002. Since then he shared his experiences on a blog that helped many others who were also suffering from the same disease. Noble’s blog was so popular that each entry in his blog attracted 7,000 to 12,000 visitors.

With thousands of serious bloggers who regularly comment on the latest developments in their respective spheres of expertise or interest, blogs have become a major information channel.