Blogs and Blogging :: Explained

I’ve had a couple of people ask me just what the heck a blog is… so I figured there were even more people wondering and NOT asking, so I wanted to answer the latest inquiry I received here. Although I assume by the fact that you are reading this, you may already know much of this information. Maybe not!

If you don’t know what the heck a blog is, trust me - you are NOT alone. Even I had to do a ton of research to get mine up and running - and it has been my CAREER to stay on top of this stuff for the past two years…

A blog, or a Weblog, is kind of like an online journal. Some blogs are highly influential and have some of the largest readership on the internet while others are written for personal reasons to simply be shared with family and friends. Blogs are as unique as the people writing them, but tend at least to stay focused on one subject area.

An author makes entries, categorizes them, and posts them to their blog. It’s an easy way to create content and publish writings without having to know any coding or how to put up a site. At the same time, a blog is fairly simplistic (generally speaking. There’s very limited ways to lay the page out, and it’s not the kind of thing you would want to create a big eCommerce site with. But serious writers use the format frequently because it is an easy publishing tool.

The reason blogs are getting so popular is because they are also very social. Each entry made is open to comments by readers, so a blog is really more like a conversation. It?s a format that is starting to change the way people use information on the internet, turning passive readers into active participants.

Also, if you get what is called a feed reader, such as MyYahoo, My Google, NewsGator or MyAOL, you can “subscribe” to any blogs’ feed and pull updates from the blog to your news headlines (this is free). You can read more about feeds at FeedBurner or at All RSS Feeds.

The most useful thing about blogging is the way they are indexed. When an author updates their blog, they automatically let all of the blog search engines know that new content is posted. So blog search engines have REAL TIME blog information. Regular search engines like Yahoo and especially Google take a long time to index/update pages (Google took 2 months to index eSelfHelp.com, for example). Blog search engines include:

technorati.com
blogdigger.com
blo.gs
weblogs.com
bloghop.com

So if you want to do a search on a topic that just happened today, for example, searching what’s called the “blogoshpere” will yield a lot more results than on a traditional search engine.

And finally, here is a list of the current top 20 blogs. They do tend to skew a little towards the subject of technology, because early bloggers needed to know a lot about technology in order to create one in the first place!

Hope the information was helpful and now you feel a little more like you can hold a conversation with your geeky friends like me when the subject turns to the internet.

Feel free to Save This Page on del.icio.us, or forward it to your own friends who may want to know more about blogging as well!