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Blogging
Blogging is growing and for very good reasons, much like e-mail took off ten years ago. And like ten years ago when I found myself repeatedly trying to explain e-mail to people and why they really did need an e-mail address, now I'm explaining blogging and why it matters.
What Is Blogging? The act of producing a blog. What's a blog? That's a little bit harder to answer. The term blog is short for web log, a "log" of diary-like entries published on a website. This is how it started, people publishing their daily thoughts for all to read on their website. Sometimes new entries are produced every few minutes, and sometimes just once and a while. It all depends on the author and what she or he wants to express.
But blogging has evolved to mean much more than diary entries. Blogging is easy, almost instant, publishing of content to a website, where every entry is preserved in a database and is therefore categorizable and searchable. Content can be photographs, restaurant reviews, or anything digitally storable on a computer that you can categorize. One of my blogs is a group web log for book reviews. Several of my friends are authors on this site with the ability to post reviews of books they've read. The other blog is set up sort of like a journal, except that it is rarely personal. I use it mostly to park things (ideas, opinions, links, humor) that I find interesting or useful, and think others might find so as well.
The true power of the blog comes from its interactivity with visitors and other blogs. As an author, you can allow your web visitors to comment on your entries, the comments then being published along side or in a separate window of the entry. As you find other blogs that you like to read, you link to them on your blog site. And as others find your blog interesting, they link to you as well. All of this helps build a community of those who share a common interest in each other's content.
Why Does Blogging Matter? 1. It gives you a place to easily store interesting bits of information and ideas that you come across. Computer storage is cheap. Brain storage is unreliable. The computer is more efficient at searching than the brain is, and better at storage. We forget things. The computer doesn't. With a blog, the stored knowledge is on the net, accessible from any browser anywhere in the world.
2. Writing your thoughts down, on paper or computer, is a good mental discipline. It sharpens your intellect. It refines your thinking. It helps clarify your thoughts so that you communicate them better. And it puts you in the position of "creator" rather than passive consumer of content.
3. By opening up your blogs to comments, you invite the collective intelligence (hopefully) of your readers to add to your thoughts and to contribute to your knowledge. You've created a collaborative thought space.
4. Young people are blogging. Blog sites are replacing home pages because of the ease of publishing, the depth of functionality, and the connections with other bloggers.
5. If you produce a website, your website will score higher in Google rankings (search engine results) if your site is a biog. Google rewards sites for rapidly changing content and links outbound and inbound from other sites, which is the nature of blogs.
6. Now anyone can publish. The best content will get the most exposure as more blogs link to it and more people comment to it. The publishing and distributing of content will become decentralized, shifting power away from the major media companies.
How Do You Get Started? If you want to start a blog, you'll need blogging software to load on your server, or a blogging hosting service to host your blog for you. The easiest way is to use a host service like Blogger. corn or TypePad. Blogger. corn is free and ad supported, but you will need to know some HTML to get started and to make your site look good. TypePad is a new service that costs a minimum of $5 per month, but you don't have to know any HTML and the service is the most feature rich of all of them with gorgeous styles from which to choose the look of your blog.
If you want the most flexibility and customizable features, you'll need to go with blogging software that you load onto a remote server hosting your website. Movable Type (from the same company that makes TypePad) is the most powerful solution out there, with a free license available for personal, non-commercial use and licenses available for personal and commercial use that includes support. Movable Type requires a good knowledge of HTML and style sheets but the documentation is extensive and MT has an active user base and support forum.