Blog your world to the world
While no longer really new, still, a blog is one of the newest methods to communicate using the Internet.
Its staggering popularity has quickly transformed it into a top-five Internet attraction. The blog, short for web-log, is a journal or a diary that its author updates more frequently than not. Typically, it contains opinions, comments, reviews, tutorials, or recipes. You can sum up the basic blog recipe as: whatever the author’s fancy. Usually, blog entries are organized in reverse chronological order.
What makes blog so attractive? It’s a community-driven vehicle, that’s what. Authors update their blogs regularly, often daily. Visitors leave their comments. If a topic is of particular interest, you can read entire conversations between the visitors and authors. Many use their blogs even as sources of news and information, feeding RSS sites and personal start pages.
There are more technigues and strategies, of course.
Many Internet users bookmark blogs just as commonly as they bookmark web pages.
With the advent of Web 2.0, there is more emphasis on user-driven and user-contributed content than on corporate content and news headlines.
Web sites such as blogger.com and wordpress.com offer free templates and accessories to help you start building your own blog. They offer these services free of charge, and require little or no HTML programming experience.
This form of communication has turned into a source of income for many: advertisers pay to have their products mentioned in blogs. This, by the way, has triggered intensive debates among journalism scholars on the need to create an ethics code for bloggers. Thus far, there is none, so, blog readers have to depend on blog authors’ honesty. Popular blogs garner thousands of hits to their pages every day, and often sell their content to RSS providers, who in turn resell their content to other businesses.
Regardless of your interests, you can definitely start your own blog and have fun. You may want to visit a few blogs to get a feel for what tickles your fancy, then dive right in.
