Weblogs have exploded in popularity in the past 5 years. They are almost always single-author websites which publish daily diary entries, notes about news items or short essays, and weblog posts tend strongly to be link-centred; authors will usually post brief notes about other content on the web. Navigating a weblog is very simple: the main view shows recent posts; an archive interface shows previous posts by date-range or category. If you have not already encountered weblogs, brief introductions can be found at http://www.bigwales.com/999458.htm and http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/elearning/tools/blogbuilder/blogpage/.

What has made weblogging powerful is (a) the development of lightweight standards like trackback and RSS for integrating among them and (b) their link-centred nature, which makes them well-connected in mini-webs which cascade links and propagate a multitude of links to popular pieces of content, and makes popular weblog posts come up very high in google's page-ranking algorithms.

Since we have recently implemented all the important standards used by the weblogging world, we can now offer fully-featured weblogs as part of our own sites' content. Since our new discussion system completely supports the blogging standards, discussion posts are, in essence, weblog posts which are also located in a reply-thread structure. There have been many experiments in recent years to try to harness the popularity of the single-author weblog for multi-user collaborations, but with markedly little success.

We will very shortly be making weblogs available in our sites, and for most sites will make the default view of a member's area a weblog. These weblogs will have a view option to show all the posts by that user, whether posted as discussion items or as standalone weblog posts. Because we will be sharing categories across users (and sites), it will also be possible to show weblog-like views of all posts and resources which fall within particular categories. This will amount to a very interesting new kind of experiment in collaborative weblogging, based on having shared content and categories across individual single-author blogs, and making the process of posting much more intuitive by including affordances for blogging through the sites' discussions and content. Later developments will allow users to maintain one weblog as a hinge for their posts across multiple sites, and even to maintain this weblog in a completely different system.