the blogosphere will teach you all you ever wanted
to know about blogging. You'll learn how to set up a blog
(also called a weblog), and how and where it all began.

What is a blog?

A blog is a frequently updated website of personal ideas, thoughts,
musings, news, information, or discussions on perhaps what one
has eaten for breakfast, or who is winning the war. More succinctly,
a blog is a frequently modified web site with entries in reverse
chronological order.

Weblogs frequently link to articles elsewhere on the web and many
have an area for comments. They are a kind of a continual tour,
with a human guide who you may soon get to know. There are
many guides to choose from - they often develop an audience -
and comraderie often grows between the people who run and
read weblogs.

Today there are hundreds of thousands of weblog sites. Naturally,
the market for tools for managing such sites is growing rapidly.

	Check out this Weblog Handbook by Rebecca Blood. Of interest to Communication Theory learners, this book places blogs into a larger cultural and media context. It explores the weblog's relationship to journalism, discusses the cultural context from which weblogs emerged, and examines the ways in which the community defined itself in relation to pre-existing online culture.
Blogging by Biz Stone explains how to create a blog, compares blogging service providers & programs and offers suggestions for generating income via a blog. Stone also explains how to create group and corporate blogs for more efficient teamwork and dynamic communication.

Read more of how it all began on our history page.

Of course nothing is free, but some of the most popular sites to
get you started blogging include: blogger.com, blogspot.com, and
typepad.com. These sites will walk you through the blogging maze
until you feel confident to navigate on your own. Neil McIntosh of
the Guardian has an excellent explanation here.

Because weblogs were built to simplify publishing for the web,
you can do all your publishing through a WYSIWYG (what you see
is what you get) browser-based editing environment, such as
Dreamweaver. You don't need to be a programmer to use a
weblog, as all management is done through a point-and-click
editorial menu.

If you feel you need more help, you can sign up for a course for a mere $99.00; or better still, purchase Radio, an easy-to-use weblog tool that runs on your desktop. It will automatically build your weblog, organize and archive your posts, and publish to the web.

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References and Suggested Reading:

Blood, R. (2002). The weblog handbook: Practical advice on creating and
maintaining your blog. New York: Perseus Publishing.

Bausch, P., Haughey, M., & Hourihan, M.(2002). We blog: Publishing online
with weblogs. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Stone, B. (2002). Blogging: Genius strategies for instant web content.
Indianapolis: New Riders.

________________________________
Content author: tricia timmermans

E-mail: photo-j@shaw.ca

Last updated: 17/04/04 17:01