I gave a speech sometime last week discussing blogs and spent a good nineteen minutes trying to convince my classmates to pick up blogging. Well, I hate talking, but I managed to spend 9 more minutes than the allotted time.
I’ll spend the next few posts discussing blogs and hopefully educating us on the blogosphere and what makes it tick, using excerpts from my speech. [I’m only doing this because there’s nothing interesting going on now].
While chatting with a friend online last week, he asked me, “I’d like to have a blog but I don’t know where to start.” When I asked him what he knew about blogging, he had no clue — he simply knew most of his classmates had one and didn’t want to be left out. He’s not the only one — I get a lot of questions like that from people who want to start blogging.
This presentation article is for those who don’t blog but are either curious about blogging, or have reservations about it. I’m going to be speaking informing you today about how to carve your own niche for yourself on the Internet through a blog.
We’re going to discuss blogs and blogging in general, the features of a blog, why you should blog, and the problems you’re likely to face while blogging.
Now, what is a blog?
The Encyclopaedia Britannica Online defines a blog or weblog as ‘an online journal where an individual, group, or corporation presents a record of activities.’
Blogs have been in existence since the beginning of the Internet — in fact, Tim Berners-Lee, often credited as the creator of the Internet, created what may have been the first blog.
At first, blogs were used by so-called computer geeks as a communication tool. Blogs evolved, the way computers, the Internet and email did so that you didn’t have to be tech-savvy to have one. It became as simple as login, type and post. Using services like Blogger and WordPress, one can be up and blogging in less than 20 minutes.
The blogosphere which is basically a subset of websites on the Internet has grown tremendously in the past decade. Technorati, a website dedicated to tracking blogs, as of October 2006 put the number of blogs tracked at over 57 million blogs, with over ten thousand getting started everyday, and the total number of blogs on the Internet doubling every 230 days. Of course this is hardly representative of the number of blogs that exist and estimates are as high as 100 million blogs.
If you’re not a blogger I’m sure you’re wondering what all the hype is about blogging and why blogging has replaced e-mail as the hottest fad among the young. According to The Baltimore Sun (the article has been deleted, but it’s available for a fee), among teenagers, blogging is a medium which teens have found helps them in asserting their identity, proclaiming their individuality or even rebelling. It’s not just teens who’ve been caught up by the fad — the owners of most of the blogs I read are between the ages of 20 and 30.
I’ve introduced you to what blogging is about. In my next post we’ll take a look at some of the features of a blog.
Article Index
- Part I — Introduction
- Part 2 — Features
- Part 3 — Blogging basics
- Part 4 — Advantages of blogging and problems
- Part 5 — Advanced Blogging
- Part 6 — Conclusion