The evolution of blogging

'Do you blog?' was one of the most happening questions a couple of years back. You were considered cool if you had one, and still cooler if you had one in a regional language! What made blogs happening? The fact that you could connect with a number of people scattered all over the world who'd know you for your words took the online world by storm. But then, you may ask are all blogs written by anonymous people? No, they are not. From celebs to common people, from cooking recipes to politics and space, there are thousands who blog about a zillion things under the sun and beyond it.

In a span of less than 5 years, blogging has evolved from being an online journal to sharing your thoughts from anywhere at any time. You can fix templates, update them and even blog from your mobile phones. And this, in a way gave rise to micro-blogging, with Twitter being first on the scene. So what exactly does one do on Twitter, you may ask. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on your account, visible on your friends' profiles, those that decide to 'follow' you. You can also tweet up links to your photos or videos. This is perhaps the quickest and chirpiest way to keep in touch with a lot of people.

But what happens if you are in a mood for writing more and not really as much as you would in a blog? Enter the concept of macro-blogging. This is a blogging concept that doesn't restrict your thoughts to 140 but doesn't let them go beyond 1400 characters. The most popular macro-blogging platform out there today is Woofer. But here's the catch - your macro-blog posts have to be exactly 1400 characters long. Talk about precision.

And that's not all - there's nano-blogging (less than 14 characters) and meso-blogging (lies somewhere between macro and micro-blogging, though we really can't comment on what multiple of 14 it is) as well. For the poetically inclined, there's Haiku blogging, via Japan's nano-blogging platform, Chuitter. And if words are not your chosen mode of communication, you can choose to spread your message via photo blogs or even video blogs.

We're waiting with bated breath to see what form blogs will take next.