How Do I Blog?

That’s a common question. Blogs and blogging are growing in popularity, and people of all ages, from kids to seniors, are getting into the blogging craze. So let’s take a closer look at blogs and blogging and see if we can answer the question: “How do I blog?”…

What is Blogging?
A “How Do I Blog” Guide for Beginners

More than a decade ago the words “blog”, “bloggers”, “blogging” and “Blogosphere” barely existed in the common vocabulary. But the growth of the Internet combined with the demand for information on almost every topic under the sun has brought about a massive increase in the popularity of blogs.

A Brief Look at What Blogs are All About…

Ask three tech-savvy experts what the exact definition of a blog is and you are likely to get three fairly different answers. This is due to the fact that over the years, the scope of blogs have expanded from being as simple as a personal online journal to as complicated as a series of archived posts offering the author’s expertise on a particular subject.

However, the simple definition of a blog can be derived from its parent term, which is “Web log”.  A Web log is a collection of the “logs” of someone’s thoughts, ideas, feelings and information about a particular topic.

Before we answer the question “how do I blog?”, let’s take a look at the other characteristics of blogs:

1. Blog entries or blog posts are usually arranged in reverse chronological order, with the newest post placed at the beginning of the web page.
2. The word “blog” is also used as a verb, which refers to the act of adding content to a blog.
3. Aside from the text content of a blog, you can also add photos, music, videos, and other forms of media to your blog.
4. Previous blogs are archived by topic, by date or by author for easy reference.
5. Once you have created your blog, you can join a community of bloggers called Blogosphere, which is composed of bloggers who read, quote and link each other’s blogs.

Some search engines like Google include a particular tab which allows you to search for information within blogs instead of Web sites as the main source. Technorati.com is another site which allows online users to search for blogs.

So we’ve told you a little bit about the basics of blogs, but we still need to answer the question: How do I blog?

The How Do I Blog Challenge: Starting Your Very Own Blog

Now that you have a basic idea about what blogs are all about, are you ready to start your very own blog? There are a lot of free sites out there which offer the services for creating your own blog, including free blog service providers like Blogger and WordPress.

After creating an account from these sites, you can create a “Welcome Message” for those who will visit your blog and have fun as you start creating entries and wait for your blog to grow!