To Blog or not to Blog

To blog or not to blog, that is the question. Blogging, as it is known is one of the biggest things ever to hit the Internet. It comes from the term “weblog” when people joined forums and discussion groups and the term eventually became the verb, “blogging”.

Blogging is like on online diary where you can leave your thoughts and opinions on numerous subjects for other people to see. People can comment on your blog and your views and blogs can often lead to other people’s blogs.

Blogging Can Lead You Astray

As a consequence you can find yourself traipsing round wherever the trail leads you, probably after viewing various messages, stories, videos and live chats. You never know where you might end up once you start, and it can be addictive.

In the early days, it was just about creating your own web page, but now it is about creating your own blog, it’s that good! Blogging is so popular in fact, that it is now a mainstream marketing medium and is used frequently to advertise new products and services. Sometimes this is subtly done, so as not to make it obvious what is taking place. Subliminal advertising does take place in blogging every bit as much as it does in the mainstream media.

Get to the News First With Blogging

Another aspect of blogging is the news. For those of you who do not do "blog" and pick up the newspaper on a morning those front page revelations are probably old news on the latest blog, which has probably been cross-referenced and indexed with thousands of similar stories!

If you need the latest information on something you don’t rely on mainstream media you look at the latest information in the blogs, although you need to know that the information is accurate so you need to be careful as to which blogs are factual and reliable. Over time and with experience this becomes second nature.

The most useful aspect of blogs is that they can use almost any type of media and you can access them on your PC or your mobile device. Blogs can include a plethora of things, such as text, art, photographs, sketches, videos, music, documents and audio.

A blog need not be a long post though; there is now the concept of “Micro” blogs which simply means a very short post on a particular topic.

Blogging is Popular

Blogging is popular and there are 112 million blogs stored on a special search engine named “Technorati”, created in 2007. Although blogging can consist of a number of different types of media a typical blog will usually only contain a mixture of text, images and links to other blogs.

In order to be a successful blogger you need to make regular entries which are hopefully interesting and informative. This helps to build up readerships and if you are good enough, a fan base. It helps if you know what you are talking about and you have something interesting to say.

If you are interested in blogging, there are a number of sites you can visit to get you started. One of these is Blogger.com. Google also has its own blog and can be found at googleblog.blogspot.com. There are numerous blogging sites and most of these are all free to join. The paid sites usually offer additional features, should you require them.