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Take the word Web. Now take the word Log (like in a ship's log). Scrunch them together and you have Blog! Simple. A blog is just a log on the web. Simple in concept but they can be powerful in application. Blogs can be written by the girl up the street, right after she does her homework--just a daily record of how she feels and what she's up to. Blogs are also written by staff people at powerful corporations, sharing news and policies. They've even been written by somewhat ordinary people but the effect has been so great they've made corporations lose money! A blog is really just some software (either on your own computer or maintained by a web company) that makes it very easy to post words--profound words or simple words or outrageous words--most often, daily. People do it for many reasons:

~ to share their feelings

~ to share their thoughts

~ to share other people's feelings

~ to share other people's thoughts

~ to raise hell

~ to help folks get closer to heaven

~ to help other people learn things

~ to help other people change their thinking

~ to criticize ideas

~ to criticize people

~ to criticize companies

~ to praise ideas, people, or companies

Get the idea? A blog can be used to post (which just means put on the web) words ( or, words and pictures, or just Pictures! ) that do many different things. Obviously, any given blog could be doing a number of those things on any given day. Most blogs have a theme (or, themes) that are used to channel what's posted. Some of them wander all over the place. There are many ways to start a blog. You can buy software and put it on your computer and host the blog all by yourself. This method lets you have a tremendous amount of control over how the blog looks and what features it has. The other way to start a blog is to use one of the many blog-places on the web. You may not have total control over how it looks or what features it has but these place give you quite a bit and it's free! Here's a short list of web addresses where you can get a free blog:

http://www.blogger.com/start

http://www.typepad.com/splash/

http://www.livejournal.com/

http://www.blogsource.com/

These certainly aren't the only places to go, just some of the more popular ones, and they all make it very easy to start blogging! I'd go to all four places and compare what they offer--get a feel for the place. Most blogs are published by people like you and me--somewhat normal and with "something" to say. By the way, if you think you wouldn't have much to say in a blog, you might want to look at my booklet about blogging on my site (See below. {In fact, this article is an excerpt of that booklet.}) because it helps you find out what you have inside that others would love to hear about! The daily-diary blog is very common as far as types of blogs go but what people put in those blogs can range from what may seem boring to what positively shocks! Think of just about any topic at all and there is bound to be a blog out there somewhere that talks about it, even blogs about blogging! Even if only your family and friends read your blog, there's a very important effect going on. You're writing it. You're sharing what matters to you. You're an author and a publisher. You are making sure that part of you is in the Record--the vast amount of information that humanity is creating every day.

( If you're interested in figuring out the best kind of blog for you, visit my site for the inexpensive booklet, "Blogging ~ What It Is & How To Love It". It includes some exercises that will help you range in on the best kind of blog for you ! )

The first important feature of a blog, and the most important, is the place you put the words (and/or pictures). This is usually just a box on the computer screen that you click your mouse on and start typing away. One important part of this text box (and people call it that even if you fill it with pictures) is some easy way to make your words "pretty"--some bold, some italic, maybe some in different styles of typeface (called fonts). The places I listed in the last section all make it very easy to put down and pretty-up your words (or insert pictures). Something else that's important to many bloggers is an easy way to insert links into the body of what they're writing. Many blogs exist as channels for letting other people know what the individual blogger is doing on the Web. Let's say the blogger is an avid fan of sports in space (hey! Maybe not right now but soon, huh?). They cruise the Web looking for interesting things about sports in space and when they find something, *Ping*, it appears in the blog. So, be sure the place you choose to host your blog makes it easy to insert a link to another place on the Web. If you start blogging in one place and find out it's a real drag figuring out how to easily link to other sites, drop that blog--let it die--and go where you can do it without hardly thinking about it. If you've never read a blog, you may wonder why I'm stressing this point. Go forth and read some blogs! You'll quickly see why this feature is so important in the World Wide Web...

Another important feature is called Comments. This usually appears right at the bottom of each post to the blog as a link that says, duh, comments... Why is this important? Well, imagine that you're visiting someone else's blog. They've just said something that you really like or really don't like. What do you want to do? Comment on what they said. Comments are one of the features of blogs that make people want to come back. Over time, good bloggers (and I don't mean just the ones with fancy words or stunning arguments) gather a group of regular readers who love to comment on the posts. This, in turn, gives the blogger ideas about what to put in (or, keep out of) the blog. They call it interactivity and it can become one of the very best things about blogging!

Next comes the Titles of individual posts and a place to put Links to Other Blogs. Both of these aspects of blogging are important if you want a lot of other people to come to your blog and read it. The titles of individual blogs are important because they have the job of making people want to read what you've written. They also have the job of letting the search engines find key words that will make your blog show up on the Web's radar. It often happens that a certain combination of words in the title of a blog post has made a rather unknown blog soar to the top of the search results page.

Having a place to put links to other blogs has a similar effect--helping the search engines notice your blog. Both titles (plus the smart use of keywords in the body of the blog post) and links to other blogs help other people find you. But, if you link to another blog, be sure you e-mail that person and tell them you did it. Then, in the nicest way you can, ask them to put a link to your blog on theirs! Cross-linking like this is the best way to generate an audience for your blog, unless you have a really huge family and thousands of personal friends...

The other reason to cross-link with other blogs is because it can help you form a community of interest around your own blog. Let's say your blog is about Space Sports. You go to Google and put in the words "space sports" and "blogs". Up comes a bunch of other blogs. You link to the ones you like and ask them to do the same. Your life just became much more interesting--to yourself and to a lot of other people! Let's say you don't have a blog with something as riotously popular as Space Sports. Maybe your blog is about quilting that uses cloth made from reeds that grow on the banks of South American rivers. What? Google choked?! No sweat. Link to blogs about cloth manufacturing at home, or protecting plants that grow by rivers in South America, or any ol' quilting sites. Who's to say how you go about building a community of interest around your own blog? Do what you feel is right. Do what you want. It's your Place in CyberSpace !

To round out this section on the features and characteristics of blogs, I'll leave you with some Web addresses of interesting articles about blogs:

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

http://www.rebeccamead.com/2000_11_13_art_blog.htm

http://www.cjr.org/issues/2003/5/blog-jensen.asp

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.05/mustread.html?pg=2

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/sci_tech/2000/dot_life/1799998.stm

So... Let's assume you have a Prime Life Interest or a list of Prime Life Interests and you've found a Place on the Web that makes it easy to tell or show others about it or them. Hopefully, you've already or will soon find other blogs that are related to yours in some way. To help you do this, so you can make your blog more visible (by cross-linking with them) and start to create a community of interest, here's a list of addresses that can help you find other blogs:

http://www.technorati.com/

http://blogsearch.google.com/

http://www.bloogz.com/

http://www.blogflux.com

Now, while you're finding those other blogs, you need to pay attention to how they do their blogging! Even in the same blog-space, different bloggers will choose different features of the blog which will radically change the effect it has on its readers. Then, there's the actual way the individual bloggers go about putting their words and images into the blogs. This is where a person's personality shines through the features and content of the blog--this is where you can shine! There are two basic ways to refine the style you use to create your blog:

A. Take some time to write a few trial posts, show them to a few interested people, then start the blog.

B. Just Do It !

I highly recommend choice B ! Get in there and make mistakes. Make them right in front of the whole world. If nothing else, you can write about the mistake and make the correction in your next post. Bingo ! Two posts for the price of one... I think the supreme advantage in just starting right in and making public corrections along the way is that you're letting people see the REAL you. Especially if your using the blog to publicly learn and share that learning with others, this is the preferred method. Think about this: words without a voice to actually say them can be boring. But words that are trying hard to say something, something that deeply matters to the person writing them, even if they take their time and wander around a lot, are more honest and appealing. However, if you take out "something that deeply matters to the person writing them", you're back to just boring, along with aimless. (This argument also makes sense even if your blog is mostly images.) By the way, something that's coming on line as I write this are audio and video blogs. Whoo Hoo ! ! Another experience that will improve the way you let yourself shine in your blog is to make an effort to look at blogs that are not in your list of preferred topics . Just because you don't have an abiding interest in a topic doesn't mean you can't learn something from a good blog about it. In fact, the fact that you don't especially care for the actual content will enable you to focus more on the way it's presented ! Just because your burning interest is Space Sports is no reason to ignore what you may learn about presentation from a quilting blog. That may seem like quite a stretch but the farther away you get from your content the better you can objectively see the way that content is presented, and learn from it.

So, there it is. My humble, short guide to blogging and how to love it. About the only advice I have left right now is to read this article again in a few days. Never know what you may have missed till you find it again, eh?

If you'd like to see what someone like me does with a blog, look at these two:

http://www.lulu.com/amzolt

http://www.livejournal.com/users/amzoltai

Also, I'd love to hear from you with any comments or criticisms you may have about this article. Everything can be improved, right ? Write to me at:

amzolt@gmail.com
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