A Guide To Blogging
Find out what a blog is, how to blog, and the most useful websites.
A blog is an online diary or journal. The term is a slang abbreviation of ‘web log.’ Most blogs take place on a dedicated blogging website. They are user-generated, and entries are usually displayed in reverse chronological order. Blogs are widely used as diaries or to provide commentary on news on specific subjects. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs or related web pages. An important feature of blogging is that readers are able to leave their own personal comments in an interactive format. There are now thought to be around 60 million active blogs in existence across the world.
The Early Days
The blog as we know it today evolved from the online web diary. Here, as the term suggests, people would keep a running account of their everyday personal lives. One particularly well- known example of an early news-based blog was the Drudge Report. Founded in 1994 by maverick political reporter Matt Drudge, his website consists largely of links to political news stories from the U.S. and international media. It isparticularly noted for being the first news source to break the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal to the public. Matt Drudge himself, however, is thought to dislike having his famed site referred to as a blog.
The first web logs were simple websites that were updated manually. However, soon tools began to appear that were able to facilitate the production and maintenance of articles posted in reverse chronological order, which opened the blogging process to a larger, nontechnical group of users. Ultimately, this resulted in the creation of the browser-based software that now predominates.
Evolution Of Blogging
As in often the case in any field of endeavour, there is no clear agreement as to who invented blogging. Certainly one widely quoted candidate is Justin Hall, who, in January 1994, while a student at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania, created Justin’s Links from the Underground. Starting as an early guide to the internet, it gradually evolved to incorporate intimate details of Hall’s own everyday life. In December 2004, New York Times Magazine referred to him as “the founding father of personal blogging.” However, it was several years before blogging started to take off in a big way. To give an illustration as to how things developed, within a year of its launch in 1996, the website Xanga had only 100 online diaries; by the start of 2006 there were well over 20 million.
The popularity of blogging rocketed when the first hosted blog tools began to appear in the late 1990s, with OpenDiary being credited as the first blog community where readers could add comments to blog entries written by others. In August 1999, Pyra Labs launched Blogger, a free service that provided for the first time an easy set of tools for any nontechnical person to set up a blog.
The first blogs to make a big impression were political in nature, with names such as Andrew Sullivan, Ron Gunzburger, and Taegan Goddard coming to prominence. Indeed, in 2002, blogging was largely responsible for forcing the resignation of U.S. senator Trent Lott from a leadership post, when a speech honouring former presidential candidate Strom Thurmond was interpreted by some as support for racial segregation. The mainstream media only started reporting the story after it had arisen from the blogging community. This gave a boost in credibility to the idea of blogging as a serious medium of news dissemination.
Blogging evolved further during the recent war in Iraq, with Iraqi bloggers such as Salam Pax gaining widespread readership in the West. Additionally, many ‘warblogs’ were created by serving military personnel, giving readers new perspectives on the realities of war, as well as alternative viewpoints from official news sources. Blogging is now more popular than ever, a recent study estimating that well over 30 million Americans were now regular readers.
How To Start Blogging
A blog can be a deeply personal document. You could think of it as bring a cross between a personal telephone call and a newspaper column. You can share your favourite recipes, make public your most intimate thoughts, or, if so inclined, go off on the wildest of political rants. Of course, with millions of blogs now fighting for attention, yours will have to be something special to gain public attention, so it’s worth putting some thought into what you are about to do. Here are some steps to getting on the blogging ladder.
Decide On Your Theme There are two general approches to blogging. You can write on whatever subject happens to interest you at any moment in time - rather like a diary - or select a single theme and stick with it. If you want your blog to develop a following, the latter approach will be better - people with similar interests are more likely to keep returning for more.
Choose Your Service There are many developer-hosted blog sites from which you can choose. Among them are Xanga (http://www.xanga.com), Blogger (http://www.blogger.com) and LiveJournal (http://www.livejournal.com). These are all free to use. Other more sophisticated sites, such as BlogIdentity (http://www.blogidentity.com) and Bubbler (http://www.bubbler.com), charge for the service. Anotehr possibility is to use a downloadable offline blogging client. This is in essence a word processor for blogging – you can write when you’re not online and then upload your post when you connect to the internet. BlogJet and Ecto are two such examples.
Customise Your Space Most blog spaces give you some control over the way they look. For example, you can decide on the colours, number of columns, and the overall look of your page. You may also want to consider other media, such as images, sounds, or video clips.
Get Writing This is the difficult part. The best advice for novice writers is to keep posts brief, and write about what you know. If you have specialist information your blog is more likely to gain a following. Many bloggers begin with an introductory post, telling prospectivereaders why they have started their blog and the kinds of things they intend to write about. Be confident; if you’re taking the trouble to create a blog, it’s presumably because you want others to read your work.
Develop Your Persona Before you finalise your blog, take a look at as many others as possible. See what your rivals are doing, and note the things you like and dislike. You’ll see quickly that there is more to most blogs than just the posts themselves. Many blogging applications allow you to add your own lists to your page. Here you can note the books you are reading or music you are listening to. You can also incorporate third-party services into your blog, enabling your readers to subscribe to your site.
Going Public When you choose your blogging services, try to establish if it automatically ‘pings’ the most important weblog tracking sites – most of them will do this automatically. This means checking if your service (or offline software) sends notifications to tracking sites to alert them that you have posted a new entry. This will open your blog to search engines. If your services does not do this automatically, you could use a third party such as Pingomatic (http://pingomatic.com), which allows you to choose which tracking sties you wish to update. You can also manually enter your pings - a list is shown below.
Manual Pings
Here is a list of websites where you can manually 'ping' the most imporant weblog tracking sites:
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://publisher.yahoo.com/sell/DriveTraffic.php?loc=USYPN0005
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
Build a Relationship With Your Readers There’s only one way to gain a following and that’s by making frequent postings. If people like what you write, they will come back; if there’s nothing new to read, they will soon lose interest. At some point, it comes down to making a commitment and sticking to it. And don’t forget, the more you blog, the better you’ll become at it.
Other Blogging Sites
The more you encounter Web 2.0-style applications, you'll see that there is a vast crossover in many of their features. For example, many of the best-known social networking sites, such as MySpace, have blogging facilities of their own. The list shown below concentrates on those sites that are primarily aimed at writing or editing blogs. They are all what is termed 'developer-hosted' sites, meaning that they are all web-based applications.
BattleBlog http://www.battleblog.com
Bitty http://bitty.com
Blip http://www.blip.tv
Blog.com http://www.blog.com
Blogburst http://www.blogburst.com
BlogCity http://www.blogcity.com
Blogcode http://blogcode.com
Bloggersnap www.bloggersnap.com
Bloggoggle http://www.bloggoggle.com
Blogladder http://www.blogladder.com
Bloglet http://www.bloglet.com
Blogniscient http://www.blogniscient.com
Blogs http://blo.gs
Bloxor http://www.bloxor.com
Blurb http://www.blurb.com
Cocomment http://www.cocomment.com
Feedblitz http://www.feedblitz.com
Freevlog http://www.freevlog.org
LifeType http://www.lifetype.com
LiveJournal http://www.livejournal.com
Measuremap http://measuremap.com
Qumana http://www.qumana.com
Textamerica http://www.textamerica.com
Talkr http://www.talkr.com
WordPress http://www.wordpress.com
Xanco http://www.xanco.com
Xanga http://www.xanga.com
Offline Blogging Software
Here is a list of some of the most useful offline blogging software. They all have their own websites where they can be downloaded for free. Type the name of the software into any search engine and you should be able to find them easily.
Apache Roller http://rollerweblogger.org
B2evolution http://b2evolution.net
BBlog http://www.bblog.com
Beta-Blogger http://www.umsu.de/beta-blogger/
Blosxom http://www.blosxom.com
DotClear http://www.dotclear.net
Drupal http://www.drupal.org
Geeklog http://www.geeklog.net
Horizon http://www.edgedrive.com
LifeType http://www.lifetype.net
LiveJournal http://www.livejournal.com
Mephisto http://mephistoblog.com
Nucleus http://www.nucleuscsm.com
Pivotlog http://www.pivotlog.net
Serendipity http://www.s9y.org
SimplePHP http://www.simpleohoblog.com
Slash http://www.slashcode.com
Subtext http://subtextproject.com
Textpattern http://textpattern.com
WordPress http://www.wordpress.com
This extract is taken from Your Life Online by Terry Burrows, published by Carlton Books, available at all good bookshops or online from Amazon
October 2007
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