A blog, short for weblog or web log, is a website on which chronologically organized entries are kept. The blog may be personal or professional, may be kept up daily or at erratic intervals, and may allow or disallow responses and exchange between the blogger and readers. Blogs are used in-house in organizations and as a way for organizations to communicate with customers. A photoblog — sometimes referred to as a photolog, fotolog, or phlog — is a blog in which photographs are a prominent, or the predominant, feature.
The amount of text in a photoblog and its relationship to the photographs varies with the photoblogging software and the photoblogger’s choice. At photoblog™, text is, in at least some cases, limited to a title and a category. Some photos also include captions, and on occasion, there is a summary statement following the photographs. Other than that, the photoblog entry consists only of photographs. Sometimes the photos appear to be unaltered, and in other cases, they have clearly been photoshopped. Often, they appear to be from one photo shoot.
The flickr® blog includes entries that were created by drawing photographs from a variety of flickr® users. They include a title that states the theme of the collection, and are followed by a summary paragraph and also credits. The photos appear singly or in blocks.
Flogr™ is a flickr® app that allows creation of a photoblog displaying the photograph, the EXIF details, a summary paragraph, and geo data, if the photoblogger wishes. In its basic form, each photo and its data forms a post by itself, making it different from the other photoblogging approaches discussed so far. It also has a slideshow page, a tag cloud page, and an about page.
One of the important elements to consider when considering creating a photoblog is where the photographs will be hosted. Photographs take up a lot of server space, and they also can download slowly, making visitors have to wait to view material on your site. The standard is, therefore, to host the photos at an online service and merely link to them from the photoblog. Note, however, that there is a possible downside to this approach for the photoblogger who creates postings using other people’s material. Should any of the people whose photographs the photoblogger used reorganize or remove a photograph, the link will be broken, and the photoblogger will have an empty space on his or her blog.
