I need your help answering this question and the definition of blogging?

I need your help answering this question and the definition of blogging?

1. I need help addressing the features, functions of a key statistics for BLOGGING.
2. Can you give examples of the growing use of BLOGS for politics, education, or other domains.

Solution Preview
Hi there,

Here is some info on Blogs for you:

A weblog or blog is a web-based publication of periodic articles (posts), usually presented in reverse chronological order. It is an online journal with one or many contributors.

A blog is website that contains written material, links or photos being posted all the time, usually by one individual, on a personal basis. The term is a shortened form of weblog, although the latter term has since fallen into disuse.

Blogs differ from traditional web sites in that, rather then being composed of many individual pages connected by hyperlinks, they are composed of a few templates (usually Main Page, Archive Page, and Individual Article/Item Page), into which content is fed from a database. This provides many advantages over traditional sites, including:

-it allows for easy creation of new pages, since new data is entered into a simple form (usually with Title, Category, and the body of the article), and then submitted. The templates take care of adding the article to the home page, creating the new full article page (permalink), and adding the article to the appropriate date or category-based archive
-it allows for easy filtering of content for various presentation, like by date, category, author, or one of many other attributes
-most blog platforms allow the administrator to invite and add other authors, whose permissions and access are easily managed

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog

Blogs do two things that Web magazines like Slate and Salon simply cannot. First off, blogs are personal. Almost all of them are imbued with the temper of their writer. This personal touch is much more in tune with our current sensibility than were the opinionated magazines and newspapers of old. Readers increasingly doubt the authority of The Washington Post or National Review, despite their grand-sounding titles and large staffs. They know that behind the curtain are fallible writers and editors who are no more inherently trustworthy than a lone blogger who has earned a reader’s respect.

The second thing blogs do is – to invoke Marx – seize the means of production. It’s hard to underestimate what a huge deal this is. For as long as journalism has existed, writers of whatever kind have had one route to readers: They needed an editor and a publisher. Even in the most benign scenario, this process subtly distorts journalism. You find yourself almost unconsciously writing to please a handful of people – the editors looking for a certain kind of …