What Is A Blog & How Does a Blog Benefit You? Are Blogs Free? What's Involved in Blogging?

A few months back, at the ITEA conference I saw this guy sitting next to me typing constantly into his wireless laptop.

He was making notes on what the speakers had to say, was finding relevant links and then hitting the send key - instantly updating his Web site. No sooner the site was updated; he would get responses back from readers around the globe. He was a blogger.

About Blogs, Blogging and Bloggers

Several years ago, internet surfers started collecting information and interesting links they encountered in their travels through web space.

As the time passed they started creating logs of the information they collected and soon they started creating their own web logs. The web logs enabled them to update the information and links as often as possible.

This is exactly what the blogger at the conference was doing. Blogs have improved over the years. Google and Wordpress are perhaps the number blog service providers in the world and its easy to sign up for a free Blog.

You can upload your posts and the advances in web design and development have made uploading and updating the Weblogs much easier. In South Africa, Ananzi has also set up a free blogging service but its not as advanced as the one Google or Wordpress has.

Blogs have a lot of advantages when compared to the old postal method as they allow you to post information that can be read anywhere in the world. There are also much more dynamic than the older-style home pages.

They are more personal than traditional journalism, and definitely more public than diaries. A blog is often a mixture of what is happening in a person's life and what is happening on the Web, a kind of hybrid diary site. So, there are as many unique types of blogs as there are people.

These are a few common characteristics of a blog, but blog types may slightly vary. Some blogs provide succinct description of judiciously selected links. Some others contain commentary and links to the news of the day.

Few are endless stream of blurts about the writers day. Few others are - political blogs, intellectual blogs, some are hilarious and some topic driven. They are all - Weblogs.

More than a list of links and less than a full-blown zine, weblogs may be hard to describe but easy to recognize. A blog can be recognized by its format: a webpage with new entries placed at the top, updated frequently.

Often at the side of the page is a list of links pointing to similar sites. Some sites consist only of a weblog. Others include the weblog as a part of a larger site. Even though there are so many different blogs, there is one thing common about all the bloggers: most are noncommercial and are impassioned about their subjects.

Weblogs tend to be personal and immediate but they are more simple and straightforward. People can publish their thoughts, even for the first time, with almost no training. Within these constraints.

Blogs & The Worldwide Web

Both personal sites and lists of links have existed since the web was born. Indeed, the ability to link one document to the other that existed on the global network drew early enthusiasts to the Web. They published pages and eagerly perused the pages published by others.

That was the time when the accessibility to the pages from any computer with a modem and a browser was more important than the content of that page. For a while, webpages became an interesting addition to the cyberspace.

Then the space got crowded. As a result the web grew at an exponential rate and search for the required information became difficult and simultaneously more time consuming.

Until, a few of these enthusiasts decided to put the links they collected daily onto a single webpage. These people placed their stuff descriptive text and link/s, for example: their travel records, on the web. The text enabled the reader to know why they should click the link and wait for the page to download. And so a particular type of website was born.

The New York Times article about a website named LemonYellow, published in July 1999, didnt say a word about weblogs, but affirmed the notion that webloggers were onto something.

Most of the early weblog editors designed or maintained websites for a living. Few of these editors just knew HTML - the simple coding language used to create webpages.

With Weblogs becoming popular, the personal websites became extensions of their day-to-day lives. Webloggers started rolling personal journals ongoing links-laden riffs on a favorite subject. Soon they linked to general interest articles to online games, and often to Web-related news.

Take a look at Tony Roocroft's blog.This blog was created using Wordpress although the actual Wordpress theme used on this blog was bought.