A photoblog (or photolog) is a form of

photo sharing A photograph (also known as a photo, or more generically referred to as an ''image'' or ''picture'') is an image created by light falling on a photosensitivity, photosensitive surface, usually photographic film or an electronic image sensor. Th ...

and

publishing Publishing is the activities of making information, literature, music, software, and other content, physical or digital, available to the public for sale or free of charge. Traditionally, the term publishing refers to the creation and distribu ...

in the format of a

blog A blog (a Clipping (morphology), truncation of "weblog") is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries also known as posts. Posts are typically displayed in Reverse chronology, reverse chronologic ...

. It differs from a blog through the predominant use of and focus on photographs rather than text. Photoblogging (the action of posting photos to a photoblog) gained momentum in the early 2000s with the advent of the

moblog Mobile blogging (also known as mobloggingIto, M. (2002) 'Mobiles and the appropriation of place', receiver magazine, 8, www.receiver.vodafone.com) is a method of publishing to a website or blog from a mobile phone or other handheld device. A moblog ...

and

cameraphone A camera phone is a mobile phone that is able to capture photographs and often record video using one or more built-in digital cameras. It can also send the resulting image wirelessly and conveniently. The first commercial phone with a color c ...

Construction

There are three popular ways to host a photoblog. Photoblogs on individual domains, photoblogs on blogging hosting services such as

WordPress WordPress (WP, or WordPress.org) is a web content management system. It was originally created as a tool to publish blogs but has evolved to support publishing other web content, including more traditional websites, electronic mailing list, ma ...

Blogger A blog (a Clipping (morphology), truncation of "weblog") is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries also known as posts. Posts are typically displayed in Reverse chronology, reverse chronologic ...

, and photoblogs on photo specific blogging services such as

Fotolog Fotolog.com (originally Fotolog.net) was a social network for sharing primarily photos. The site claimed that its vision was to build a "good" social network which prioritizes the well-being of users. The site only allowed all members of the comm ...

Flickr Flickr ( ) is an image hosting service, image and Online video platform, video hosting service, as well as an online community, founded in Canada and headquartered in the United States. It was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and was previously a co ...

. The dynamic nature of blogs, including photoblogs compared to static sites means that blogs require some form of

content management system A content management system (CMS) is computer software used to manage the creation and modification of digital content ( content management).''Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy''. Ann Rockley, Pamela Kostur, Steve Manning. New ...

(CMS) rather than being built mostly by hand. These content management systems usually provide the photoblog's authors with a web service that allows the creation and management of posts and the uploading of images. The CMS delivers webpages based on the data entered by the photoblog author. Access to photoblogs is usually unrestricted and available to anyone with internet access and a

web browser A web browser, often shortened to browser, is an application for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's scr ...

. Some existing blogging CMS have been modified by the use of add-ons or plugins (and sometimes core code rewriting) to enable the transition from text blogging to photoblogging. As an example, a photoblog author might limit his blog to display a single entry per day (as opposed to several entries which is typical for text blogs) and he might put thumbnails in entry excerpts to provide archives that display images instead of text snippets. Over time, developers have begun to write purpose-built CMS just for creating photoblogs. Additionally, many services specializing in hosting and displaying images, such as Flickr and Fotolog, have APIs that allow other blogging systems to display their images, giving the user many options as to the construction of a particular site. Good photoblogging platforms also include camera metadata (

Exif Exchangeable image file format (officially Exif, according to JEIDA/JEITA/CIPA specifications) is a standard that specifies formats for images, sound, and ancillary tags used by digital cameras (including smartphones), scanners and other system ...

) that display the camera settings of each photo taken.

Developments and accessibility

The early days of photoblogging required some level of technical experience with setting up a webserver and installing or writing the

CMS CMS may refer to: Computing * Call management system * CMS-2, a programming language implemented for and used by the United States Navy * Code Morphing Software, a technology used by Transmeta * Collection management system for a museum coll ...

code for it (e.g.

Pixelpost Pixelpost is an open source photoblog application powered by PHP and MySQL, developed for publishing photos on a chronological base. Main features include multilingual capability, comment function, Exif support, spam filtering, categories, tag ...

or Picoplog). Some photobloggers still prefer this option of running their own server, as this gives them full control over the display and functionality of their photoblog. However, there are now a range of photoblog hosting services available which provide a ready-made solution in which everything has already been set up. This has made photoblogging more accessible to the layman. Convergence of mobile phones with digital cameras has opened a new era in photoblogging as authors may publish photos directly from smart devices to the Web. Visual blogging enables people with limited English, or low literacy to contribute to material on the Web. Combined with automatic (photo-booth) uploading technology, this is a powerful tool to build digital literacy and digital citizenship in marginalized groups.

References

External links

{{Portal bar, Internet Photography websites Internet terminology 2000s neologisms

Construction

Developments and accessibility

See also

References

External links