Blog among friends

A blog is a great way to get your message out to the world, to shout out the real story that you have to tell. It is a platform where no one can hold you back, limit you or tell you that you can’t. Blogs can be very powerful in their ability to get a message out; some even claim that blogs are responsible for getting the first Black President elected. So what is blog and what makes them so great?

In very basic terms a blog is just a website. It is a website however that does not require the user to know anything about websites, all you need to know how to do is type your message. Really, it’s that simple. Blog is short for weblog and they were originally used by developers as a way to rapidly update websites with text content. Later on blogs grew in function to allow all sorts of content from pictures to music and video.

In the past few years blogs have moved from the realm of the developers to the mainstream population. Basically a full website template is provided for you and you just need to fill in the title and the content. Facebook and MySpace are basically just spinoffs from blogs. They added a lot more to them and made them clique` but some feel that being part of such a large social site takes away from the individuality that blogs have become known for. And the search engines give less weight to social site pages because the posts entries tend to be one or two sentences rather than the several paragraphs needed to expand on a topic. This is important if you want to be found based on what you are writing rather than whom you know and what you look like.

There are quite a few choices for setting up a blog and getting your presence on line. One of the most popular ways is to use a blogging service like blogger or BlogSpot. With these guys you just set up an account and you are online in minutes. The downside is less flexibility in what you can do with your blog and having to use the services name as part of your blog name. Most bloggers probably don’t mind these things. If these things do matter to you is to purchase a domain and a hosting account and then install wordpress on your account. You will have complete control over your blog settings and a name that you picked.

Posted in: Blogger