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Before blogging became popular, digital communities took many forms, including Usenet, commercial online services such as GEnie, BiX and the early CompuServe, e-mail lists and Bulletin Board Systems (BBS). In the 1990s, Internet forum software, created running conversations with "threads." Threads are topical connections between messages on a virtual "corkboard."
The modern blog evolved from the online diary, where people would keep a running account of their personal lives. Most such writers called themselves diarists, journalists, or journalers. Justin Hall, who began personal blogging in 1994 while a student at Swarthmore College, is generally recognized as one of the earliest bloggers, as is Jerry Pournelle. Dave Winer's Scripting News is also credited with being one of the oldest and longest running weblogs. Another early blog was Wearable Wireless Webcam, an online shared diary of a person's personal life combining text, video, and pictures transmitted live from a wearable computer and EyeTap device to a web site in 1994. This practice of semi-automated blogging with live video together with text was referred to as sousveillance, and such journals were also used as evidence in legal matters.
Early blogs were simply manually updated components of common Web sites. However, the evolution of tools to facilitate the production and maintenance of Web articles posted in reverse chronological order made the publishing process feasible to a much larger, less technical, population. Ultimately, this resulted in the distinct class of online publishing that produces blogs we recognize today. For instance, the use of some sort of browser-based software is now a typical aspect of "blogging". Blogs can be hosted by dedicated blog hosting services, or they can be run using blog software, or on regular web hosting services.

Rise in popularity

After a slow start, blogging rapidly gained in popularity. Blog usage spread during 1999 and the years following, being further popularized by the near-simultaneous arrival of the first hosted blog tools:

• Bruce Ableson launched Open Diary in October 1998, which soon grew to thousands of online diaries. Open Diary innovated the reader comment, becoming the first blog community where readers could add comments to other writers' blog entries.
• Brad Fitzpatrick started LiveJournal in March 1999.
• Andrew Smales created Pitas.com in July 1999 as an easier alternative to maintaining a "news page" on a Web site, followed by Diaryland in September 1999, focusing more on a personal diary community.
• Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan (Pyra Labs) launched blogger.com in August 1999 (purchased by Google in February 2003)

There are many different types of blogs, differing not only in the type of content, but also in the way that content is delivered or written.

Personal blogs

The personal blog, an ongoing diary or commentary by an individual, is the traditional, most common blog. Personal bloggers usually take pride in their blog posts, even if their blog is never read. Blogs often become more than a way to just communicate; they become a way to reflect on life, or works of art. Blogging can have a sentimental quality. Few personal blogs rise to fame and the mainstream, but some personal blogs quickly garner an extensive following. One type of personal blog, referred to as a microblog, is extremely detailed and seeks to capture a moment in time. Some sites, such as Twitter, allow bloggers to share thoughts and feelings instantaneously with friends and family, and are much faster than emailing or writing.

Corporate and organizational blogs

A blog can be private, as in most cases, or it can be for business purposes. Blogs used internally to enhance the communication and culture in a corporation or externally for marketing, branding or public relations purposes are called corporate blogs. Similar blogs for clubs and societies are called club blogs, group blogs, or by similar names; typical use is to inform members and other interested parties of club and member activities.

By genre

Some blogs focus on a particular subject, such as political blogs, travel blogs (also known as travelogs), house blogs, fashion blogs, project blogs, education blogs, niche blogs, classical music blogs, quizzing blogs and legal blogs (often referred to as a blawgs) or dreamlogs. Two common types of genre blogs are art blogs and music blogs. A blog featuring discussions especially about home and family is not uncommonly called a mom blog. While not a legitimate type of blog, one used for the sole purpose of spamming is known as a Splog.

By media type

A blog comprising videos is called a vlog, one comprising links is called a linklog, a site containing a portfolio of sketches is called a sketchblog or one comprising photos is called a photoblog. Blogs with shorter posts and mixed media types are called tumblelogs. Blogs that are written on typewriters and then scanned are called typecast or typecast blogs; see typecasting (blogging).

A rare type of blog hosted on the Gopher Protocol is known as a Phlog.

By device

Blogs can also be defined by which type of device is used to compose it. A blog written by a mobile device like a mobile phone or PDA could be called a moblog. One early blog was Wearable Wireless Webcam, an online shared diary of a person's personal life combining text, video, and pictures transmitted live from a wearable computer and EyeTap device to a web site. This practice of semi-automated blogging with live video together with text was referred to as sousveillance. Such journals have been used as evidence in legal matters.

Community and cataloging

The Blogosphere

The collective community of all blogs is known as the blogosphere. Since all blogs are on the internet by definition, they may be seen as interconnected and socially networked, through blogrolls, comments, linkbacks (refbacks, trackbacks or pingbacks) and backlinks. Discussions "in the blogosphere" are occasionally used by the media as a gauge of public opinion on various issues. Because new, untapped communities of bloggers can emerge in the space of a few years, Internet marketers pay close attention to "trends in the blogosphere".

BlogDay

BlogDay was created with the belief that bloggers should have one day dedicated to getting to know other bloggers from other countries and areas of interest. The designated date is August 31, because when written 3108, it resembles the word "Blog". On that day, bloggers recommend five new blogs to their visitors, so that readers discover new, previously unknown blogs.

Blog search engines

Several blog search engines are used to search blog contents, such as Bloglines, BlogScope, and Technorati. Technorati, which is among the most popular blog search engines, provides current information on both popular searches and tags used to categorize blog postings. The research community is working on going beyond simple keyword search, by inventing new ways to navigate through huge amounts of information present in the blogosphere, as demonstrated by projects like BlogScope.

Blogging communities and directories

Several online communities exist that connect people to blogs and bloggers to other bloggers, including BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog. Interest-specific blogging platforms are also available. For instance, Blogster has a sizable community of political bloggers among its members.

Blogging and advertising

It is common for blogs to feature advertisements either to financially benefit the blogger or to promote the blogger's favorite causes. The popularity of blogs has also given rise to "fake blogs" in which a company will create a fictional blog as a marketing tool to promote a product. ^{Source : BlogCatalog, Blogger. Blogosphere, Blogscope, Wikipedia, Yahoo, Technorati, Wordpress}

Free Shipping - One More Accurate Marketing Strategy and Target Brilliant

Online sales model

Internet vendors benefit from a simplified sales model as compared to traditional brick-and-mortar stores. By storing goods remotely at a warehouse location and shipping goods directly to a consumer, significant transportation needs are eliminated both on the part of the vendor (shipping goods to stores) any by the consumer (traveling to stores). Additionally, near universal access to the Internet means that a relatively few warehouse locations can compete with a market without having to deal with amounts of real-estate.

Shipping and Fees

The simplified business model provides potentially lower costs or higher profit margins for remote vendors. The 'up front pricing' model attracts customers with low up-front prices reflecting the lower cost of goods to the vendor with less overhead. The vendor would then add the cost of shipping, and any other applicable fees to the order before processing. Since the vendor typically makes the shipping arrangements, it is entirely possible that the cost of shipping passed on to the consumer will not be the same as the cost of shipping borne by the vendor. Some online vendors use this as a source of revenue, further increasing profits or allowing the vendor to advertise even lower up-front prices. (The classic joke here is the "free car" worth $20,000 that has a $30,000 shipping and handling fee)

Free Shipping Day

"Free Shipping Day" was created by the founders of FreeShipping.org and has run since 2008. One day in the holiday season (in 2010, this day was December 17th), companies such as Toys "R" Us and J. C. Penney participate by offering free shipping. These merchants are featured on the official Free Shipping Day website. There were 1,750 participating merchants in 2010. ComScore estimates that shoppers spent more than $942 million on Free Shipping Day, 2010, a 61% increase over the previous year.



^{Source : Wikipedia, Free Shipping Day, Marketing Journal}

Browser Wars, Internet Marketing Wars to scramble market part 3

2008–today

Usage share as of Q2 2009 by percent of layout engines/web browsers

Mozilla released Firefox 3.0 on 17 June 2008, with performance improvements, and other new features. Firefox 3.5 followed on 30 June 2009 with further performance improvements, native integration of audio and video, and more privacy features.



Google released Chrome browser for Microsoft Windows on December 11, 2008, using the same WebKit rendering engine as Safari and claiming a faster JavaScript engine called V8. An open sourced version for the Windows, Mac OS X and Linux platforms was released under the name Chromium. According to Net Applications, Chrome had gained a 3.6% usage share by October 2009. After the release of the beta for Mac OS X and Linux, the market share had increased rapidly.



On March 19, 2009, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 8, which added accelerators, improved privacy protection, a compatibility mode for pages designed for Internet Explorer 7 and improved support for various web standards.

During December 2009 and January 2010, StatCounter reported that its statistics indicated that Firefox 3.5 was the most popular browser, when counting individual browser versions, passing Internet Explorer 7 and 8 by a small margin. This is the first time a global statistic has reported that a non-Internet Explorer browser version has exceeded the top Internet Explorer version in usage share since the fall of Netscape Navigator. This feat, which GeekSmack called the "dethron[ing of] Microsoft and its Internet Explorer 7 browser," can largely be attributed to the fact that it came at a time when IE 8 was replacing IE 7 as the dominant Internet Explorer version. No more than two months later IE 8 had established itself as the most popular browser version, a position which it still holds as of May 2010. It should also be noted that other major statistics, such as Net Applications, never report any non-IE browser version as having a higher usage share than the most popular Internet Explorer version, although Firefox 3.5 was reported as the third most popular browser version between December 2009 and February 2010, to be replaced by Firefox 3.6 since April 2010, each ahead of IE7 and behind IE6 and IE8.




On January 21, 2010, Mozilla released Mozilla Firefox 3.6, which allows support for a new type of theme display, 'Personas', which allows users to change Firefox's appearance with a single click. Version 3.6 also improves JavaScript performance, overall browser responsiveness and startup times.


In October 2010, StatCounter reported that Internet Explorer had for the first time dropped below 50% market share to 49.87% in their figures. Also, StatCounter reported Internet Explorer 8's first drop in usage share in the same month.


StatCounter global market share figures were as follows for September 2010. Internet Explorer 50%, Firefox 32%, Chrome 12%, Safari 4% and Opera 2%, leaving all the others sharing the remaining 1%.

Other browser competition

Microsoft Windows

Internet Explorer has, as of February 2010, the largest usage share on Windows, with Mozilla Firefox closing in as the second most used web browser. In June, 2007, Apple's Safari browser was released for Windows in beta form. In March, 2008, Apple released Safari 3.1 and began including it as a pre-selected update in the Apple Software Update program. Since then, Safari's market share on Windows has tripled and it is currently competing for the third place along with the Opera and Google Chrome web browsers. Google released its own browser, named Google Chrome, on September 2, 2008, borrowing technology both from Apple's Safari and Mozilla's open-source Firefox, among others, that included UI components similar to some of the latest Internet Explorer and Safari versions' components.
Other notable browsers for Windows are SeaMonkey, a replacement for the Mozilla Application Suite and the discontinued Netscape 9. Front ends for the IE shell like Maxthon, Avant Browser and Enigma Browser that added features like tabbed browsing to IE were once popular, but with the advent of Internet Explorer 7, are falling out of use since Internet Explorer 7 now includes tabbed browsing. Orca Browser is also available made by the makers of Avant Browser (Avant Force), but is based on the Gecko Engine (Firefox).

Linux and Unix

The Unix-based Konqueror browser is part of the KDE project and is the primary competitor against Mozilla-based browsers (Firefox, Mozilla Application Suite/SeaMonkey, Epiphany, Galeon, etc.) for market share on Unix-like systems. Konqueror's KHTML engine is an API for the KDE desktop. Derivative browsers and web-browsing functionality (for example, Amarok has a Wikipedia sidebar that gives information about the current artist) based on KDE use KHTML.

Mac OS X

Safari is Apple's web browser for Mac OS X, and also has the highest usage share on Mac OS X. The web browser is based on WebKit, a derivative of the KHTML engine. Other Mac browsers including iCab (since 4.0), OmniWeb (since 4.5), and Shiira, use the WebKit API, and many other Macintosh programs add web-browsing functionality through WebKit. Mozilla Firefox and Opera Browser also have high usage on Mac OS X.
Camino is a Mozilla-based Gecko browser for the Mac OS X platform, and uses Mac's native Cocoa interface like Safari does, instead of Mozilla's XUL which is used in Firefox. It was initially developed by Dave Hyatt, until he was hired by Apple to develop Safari.

Embedded devices

Opera Mini is a popular web browser on mobile devices such as most Java ME enabled internet connected phones and smartphones because of its small footprint. It has also recently been released for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Opera Mobile for smartphones main competition is from Netfront. Sony developed a mobile browser for their PSP, using Netfront's codebase. Sony's PlayStation 3 also includes a web browser. PC Site Viewer, the web browser included on many Japanese cellular phones, is based on Opera. In February, 2006 it was announced that Nintendo "will release an add-on card" with a version of Opera for the Nintendo DS (Nintendo DS Browser). This DS browser has since been criticized for its lack of Flash support and slowness. Opera is also used as a web browser on the Wii console.

Nokia released a webkit-based browser in 2005, which comes with every Symbian S60 platform-based smartphone. On Nokias N900 is MicroB, a Firefox derivate, preinstalled. It competes with Opera for the N900.

Windows Mobile comes with Internet Explorer Mobile by default and competes with Opera Mobile, Netfront, Iris, and Mozilla's Minimo, and lately the Skyfire browser (also available for Android and Symbian).
Safari, Apple's browser based on WebKit/KHTML, comes with iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad
Android, Google's open-source OS for mobile devices, uses a browser based on WebKit. Since March 2010, Opera Mini has been available for Android.

Although they compete strictly in terms of browser technology development but they are "auxiliary" in terms of support for additional devices such as the microsoft windows can be installed mozilla, opera, google chrome, safari also mobile devices like the iphone there is opera mini, windows mobile, you think it is a tight competition between the browser in a user or simply indulging purely business?

source : wikipedia, microsoft, opera, mozilla, google, apple