ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 offers an overview of the genre of blogs, and of blogging. The aim of the chapter is to describe the origin and development of blogs as a Web 2.0 genre in order to contextualize the sub-genre of food blogs investigated in the volume. This chapter also reviews research in media and communication studies that helps define the blog as a genre in which synchronous and asynchronous communication takes place between the blogger and the community of users that determine the blog’s popularity. The genre of blogs is also compared to, and contrasted with, other Web 2.0 genres such as Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram, which are increasingly used by the younger generations of Internauts to share content and communicate online with their peers.
