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Weblog – The logbook for internet surfers

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    When Sebastian got up from his computer, he was quite perplexed. He had spent half the afternoon looking for a page on the Internet that he had found by chance a few weeks ago, and from which he now hoped to get help for his planned presentation. But as often as he “googled and yahooted” other Internet sites, he didn’t find this particular one, which contained the image he now needed. Like Sebastian it goes many, which look for in the Internet purposefully information for their work and despair at the flood of sides, which are supplied by the search machines.
    As a rule, not too much sticks in the memory from the walks on the Internet – usually only what is surprising or corresponds to one’s own interests and preferences. For example, Sebastian could still remember the vivid picture of the planets of the solar system, which had made their interrelationships clear in an understandable way. He wanted to use this picture as a highlight in his geography presentation, but no matter how often he googled the terms “planet, solar system”, he always got a long list of web addresses that contained a lot of interesting information about the planets, but not the picture he was looking for.
    Resourceful programmers have developed small programs that help Internet surfers better manage the flood of information on the Internet – weblogs, or blogs for short. This term is explained by the combination of the words “web” for Internet and “logbook,” the latter describing the diary kept on ships, in which all the events surrounding a ship and its voyages are recorded. Such tools can also be found in other areas of life: scientists, for example, keep workbooks similar to logbooks in which they record the course of investigations and experiments. But schoolchildren are also familiar with such diaries: class registers.
    In fact, weblogs are nothing more than personal Internet pages that you can create without any programming knowledge and that serve to document your forays through the Internet. Many weblogs are available free of charge and with just a few clicks you can set up nicely designed and clearly arranged weblogs for your own use, with the latest entries at the top and the old ones automatically pushed to the bottom or stored in an archive by the week, month or year. Some weblogs offer a table of contents, a calendar, and a search function that lets you quickly browse through all previous entries. With this, Sebastian would have had little trouble finding this Internet page with the picture of the planets again.

    The special thing about blogs, after all, is that they can be publicly disseminated on the Internet and made accessible to other people.
    Therefore, there are also groups of people who jointly maintain a weblog, to which all contribute as “collectors” and use as “readers”. In such common blogs, not only interesting web pages are recorded, but more or less regular entries are made on topics of interest (topic blogs). So you can keep weblogs as a school class, in which you record common school tasks and also exchange solutions 😉
    A possibility that has been used since the first weblogs is to link several personal or shared weblogs with each other, so that networks of blogs are created that are linked to each other in terms of content or topic. For example, there are weblogs on literature, films or famous people, which are usually “fed” with information by a group – in recent years, numerous politicians have begun to keep such public diaries. But there are also weblog groups in which people get together to deepen or continue everyday social contacts in this way. Many weblogs offer the possibility of writing comments on individual entries. Some weblogs can also be subscribed to like a daily newspaper, so that you are automatically informed by email about new entries (RSS feed).
    It is impossible to describe all the possibilities of blogs. The best thing to do is to set up a blog yourself, as an estimated 50 million people around the world do.


    Before we forget: there is also a blog for our learning tips: https://study-skills.lerntipp.at/. There you will find comments on websites that deal with learning.