Personal web pages are World Wide Web pages created by an individual to contain content of a personal nature rather than content pertaining to a company, organization, or institution. Personal web pages are primarily used for informative or entertainment purposes but can also be used for personal career marketing (by containing a list of the individual’s skills, experience, and a CV), social networking with other people with shared interests, or as a space for personal expression such as family, hobbies, family genealogy, opinions, online journals, and diaries or other writing, examples of written work, digital audio sound clips, digital video clips, digital photos, or information about a user’s other interests. Many personal pages only include information of interest to friends and family of the author. However, some webpages set up by hobbyists or enthusiasts of certain subject areas can be valuable topical web directories.

A blog (a truncation of “weblog“) is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order (newest first), so that the most recent post appears first, at the top of the web page. Until 2009, blogs were usually the work of a single individual, occasionally of a small group, and often covered a single subject or topic. In the 2010s, “multi-author blogs” (MABs) emerged, featuring the writing of multiple authors and sometimes professionally edited. MABs from newspapers, other media outlets, universities, think tanks, advocacy groups, and similar institutions account for an increasing quantity of blog traffic.