Everybody’s blogging nowadays, so if you’ve got left behind and aren’t yet part of the blogosphere – which is the world of blogs, bloggers and blog posts – read on. If you decide to set up your own blog, all you need is an email address and something to write about. There are loads of free blogging services and you don’t need any technical expertise or knowledge to get up and running.
But maybe you don’t even have a clue what a blog is!
What Is A Blog?
Blogs are one of the best known examples of what we now call “social media”. Essentially they are like journals that are published on the Internet and then regularly updated. Most allow readers accessing the blog the opportunity to post comments.
Believe it or not, blogs have been around for more than a decade, although it is only in the past few years that they have really taken off.
The earliest blogs were called weblogs. Then in 1999, somebody called Peter Merholz coined the term “blog” when he added a comment to his web site (peterme.com) stating: “For What It’s Worth I’ve decided to pronounce the word ‘weblog’ as wee – blog. Or ‘blog’ for short.”
Stokes’ eMarketing: The Essential Guide to Online Marketing is licensed under Creative Commons (go to www.quirk.biz/emarketingtextbook) – which means you can share and distribute the work as long as you don’t use it for commercial gain. It’s worth reading because there’s loads of information about every aspect of eMarketing, including blogs.
While the early weblogs were created by web builders, normally using HTML (HyperText Markup Language), developers soon began creating tools that would make it easy for anyone to start their own blog. Technorati, a blog and social media tracking engine, was launched in 2002, and within five years it was tracking 112.8-million blogs. By 2007 Technorati noted that 1.4-million blogs were being created every single second! It doesn’t mean that they all still operate. Stokes maintains only 55% of blogs survive beyond the first three months. But new ones are being created all the time.
How To Blog
A typical blog will contain text, images and links to other blogs and other web sites that relate to the blog topic. Some also continues videos, like YouTube. They are immensely powerful tools that allow anyone the opportunity to publish and share ideas.
The essential elements of any blog post are that someone must write it and maintain it. It must have a title, usually with a unique URL or permalink that points to the permanent location of a single blog post, its comments, and TrackBacks (the mechanism that shows a list of entries in other blogs that refer to a post on the first blog).
There may also be an RSS feed (Really Simple Syndication) that allows you to receive and publish information without constantly opening new pages in your browser. There may be various categories to which blog posts are allocated and a blogroll of links to other blogs or web sites. This is usually situated on the home page. In addition there may be archives of previous posts that visitors can search through and read.
Setting up a blog with free software is not difficult. But for your blog to be successful, you will need to make sure you write regular posts and reply to comments from visitors to your blog site. If you want to use it to market products or services, you’ll be well advised to learn about search engine optimization (SEO) which will being more people to your site.
Here are some popular free blog hosts, in alphabetical order.
- Blogger (from Google)
- LiveJournal
- WordPress
- Moveable Type
- TypePad
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