Blogs are set up to be personal forums for someone's opinions. That's the point, the liberating thing about them. bloggers don't have to get their copy past an editor, and they can sound off at any length — no word limits in cyberspace. They're products of a seismic cultural shift that makes someone's hangover as newsworthy as the arrival of a Harry Potter novel. The sassier the voice, the more successful the blog is likely to be.
—Jennifer Howard, "It's a Little Too Cozy in the Blogosphere," The Washington Post, November 16, 2003

Blogs? Blah! Two days don't go by that someone doesn't e-mail me a link to a blog. It's a whole sentence, by the way, that I wouldn't have understood, much less uttered, two years ago. A blog is a kind of instantaneous diary that someone writes on a Web site so that other people might read it. People send me links to their blogs, their's daughter's blog. 'She's in the sixth grade; isn't that cute?' Or 'Princeton; isn't that wonderful?' A friend's blog, blogs kept by friends of friends. Entertainers and political candidates post blogs, or at least someone on their staff does it for them. But thousands of unsung people also post blogs. That's their beauty. A taxi driver can post a blog that Jennifer Lopez and millions of others can read.

Several blogs I've seen seem entertaining and interesting, but many remind me why writing can be a profession and that confession may be good for the soul but bad for literature. A great many blogs seem to consist of kvetching and moaning, not rumination.
—Scott Simon, "Inane blogs," National Public Radio, November 15, 2003

In the old days people used to have links pages on their websites, or used to publish their bookmarks files as pages in their own right.

Weblogs are more active and tend to be updated every day. This follows the classic advice for successful web sites — update regularly to keep visitors coming back for more.

The best of them have developed their own personalities and command a loyal audience. Many of the early weblogs — commonly shortened to 'blogs — link to one another and have built up quite a community of webloggers, the authors who maintain them.

Weblogs remained fairly niche-market for a while because there was no easy way to build them. Most bloggers had to hand-code their pages each day and upload the files every time they added a new link or comment.
—"The Big Byte," Evening Chronicle (Newcastle, UK), August 24, 1999

> This Deja community is for discussion of
> 'weblogs', a comparatively new sort of
> personal webpage where you share your
> thoughts about the interesting webpages
> you visit, usually on a daily basis.

Thank you so much for creating this Forum.

I think that there are a couple of things wrong with this definition of a 'blog. First, a weblog need not always be the Flutterby/Camworld type of "surfer's journal" although that is what many authors do. A weblog can be any newest-first chronicle with (or occasionally without) hyperlinks. The content, and the links, can be driven by other events or motives: latest papers published on a site topic, team research, whatever.
—Tom Neff, "Re: A description of weblogs," deja.comm.weblogs, July 27, 1999