Blogging for Beginners
Word Count: 2393 words Category: Blogs
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Take the word Web. Now take the word Log (like in a ship's
log). Scrunch them together and you have Blog! Simple. A blog is
just a log on the web. Simple in concept but they can be
powerful in application. Blogs can be written by the girl up
the street, right after she does her homework--just a daily
record of how she feels and what she's up to. Blogs are also
written by staff people at powerful corporations, sharing news
and policies. They've even been written by somewhat ordinary
people but the effect has been so great they've made
corporations lose money! A blog is really just some software
(either on your own computer or maintained by a web company)
that makes it very easy to post words--profound words or simple
words or outrageous words--most often, daily. People do it for
many reasons:
~ to share their feelings
~ to share their thoughts
~ to share other people's feelings
~ to share other people's thoughts
~ to raise hell
~ to help folks get closer to heaven
~ to help other people learn things
~ to help other people change their thinking
~ to criticize ideas
~ to criticize people
~ to criticize companies
~ to praise ideas, people, or companies
Get the idea? A blog can be used to post (which just means put
on the web) words ( or, words and pictures, or just Pictures! )
that do many different things. Obviously, any given blog could
be doing a number of those things on any given day. Most blogs
have a theme (or, themes) that are used to channel what's
posted. Some of them wander all over the place. There are many
ways to start a blog. You can buy software and put it on your
computer and host the blog all by yourself. This method lets you
have a tremendous amount of control over how the blog looks and
what features it has. The other way to start a blog is to use
one of the many blog-places on the web. You may not have total
control over how it looks or what features it has but these
place give you quite a bit and it's free! Here's a short list of
web addresses where you can get a free blog:
http://www.blogger.com/start
http://www.typepad.com/splash/
http://www.livejournal.com/
http://www.blogsource.com/
These certainly aren't the only places to go, just some of the
more popular ones, and they all make it very easy to start
blogging! I'd go to all four places and compare what they
offer--get a feel for the place. Most blogs are published by
people like you and me--somewhat normal and with "something" to
say. By the way, if you think you wouldn't have much to say in a
blog, you might want to look at my booklet about blogging on my
site (See below. {In fact, this article is an excerpt of that
booklet.}) because it helps you find out what you have inside
that others would love to hear about! The daily-diary blog is
very common as far as types of blogs go but what people put in
those blogs can range from what may seem boring to what
positively shocks! Think of just about any topic at all and
there is bound to be a blog out there somewhere that talks about
it, even blogs about blogging! Even if only your family and
friends read your blog, there's a very important effect going
on. You're writing it. You're sharing what matters to you.
You're an author and a publisher. You are making sure that part
of you is in the Record--the vast amount of information that
humanity is creating every day.
( If you're interested in figuring out the best kind of blog
for you, visit my site for the inexpensive booklet, "Blogging ~
What It Is & How To Love It". It includes some exercises that
will help you range in on the best kind of blog for you ! )
The first important feature of a blog, and the most important,
is the place you put the words (and/or pictures). This is
usually just a box on the computer screen that you click your
mouse on and start typing away. One important part of this text
box (and people call it that even if you fill it with pictures)
is some easy way to make your words "pretty"--some bold, some
italic, maybe some in different styles of typeface (called
fonts). The places I listed in the last section all make it very
easy to put down and pretty-up your words (or insert pictures).
Something else that's important to many bloggers is an easy way
to insert links into the body of what they're writing. Many
blogs exist as channels for letting other people know what the
individual blogger is doing on the Web. Let's say the blogger is
an avid fan of sports in space (hey! Maybe not right now but
soon, huh?). They cruise the Web looking for interesting things
about sports in space and when they find something, *Ping*, it
appears in the blog. So, be sure the place you choose to host
your blog makes it easy to insert a link to another place on the
Web. If you start blogging in one place and find out it's a real
drag figuring out how to easily link to other sites, drop that
blog--let it die--and go where you can do it without hardly
thinking about it. If you've never read a blog, you may wonder
why I'm stressing this point. Go forth and read some blogs!
You'll quickly see why this feature is so important in the World
Wide Web...
Another important feature is called Comments. This usually
appears right at the bottom of each post to the blog as a link
that says, duh, comments... Why is this important? Well, imagine
that you're visiting someone else's blog. They've just said
something that you really like or really don't like. What do you
want to do? Comment on what they said. Comments are one of the
features of blogs that make people want to come back. Over time,
good bloggers (and I don't mean just the ones with fancy words
or stunning arguments) gather a group of regular readers who
love to comment on the posts. This, in turn, gives the blogger
ideas about what to put in (or, keep out of) the blog. They call
it interactivity and it can become one of the very best things
about blogging!
So, you have a place to put your content (words and/or pics)
and a place to let others comment. Next you want to be sure
there's a way to easily add links to past posts in the blog.
This feature is usually in a column to the right or the left of
the blog's posts and often has a heading that says something
like: Recent Posts. The reason this is important to have is
that, as you post, daily or weekly, to your blog, the individual
posts move down the web page and, depending on how you set the
preferences, they eventually fall off the first page. There will
be a link at the bottom that lets people read these old posts
but having a way to let them look to the side and click on a
link that has the title of the older posts is oh-so much better.
If you have a choice, pick a place that gives you control over
which posts end up in this column. You may not want every single
thing you've said so easy to get to. You can delete any post, of
course, but you never know when some old forgotten thought or
feeling could become important to remember. So, keep all the old
posts but be able to show on the front page the ones that seem
meaningful to most people or for most of the reasons the blog is
in existence.
Next comes the Titles of individual posts and a place to put
Links to Other Blogs. Both of these aspects of blogging are
important if you want a lot of other people to come to your blog
and read it. The titles of individual blogs are important
because they have the job of making people want to read what
you've written. They also have the job of letting the search
engines find key words that will make your blog show up on the
Web's radar. It often happens that a certain combination of
words in the title of a blog post has made a rather unknown blog
soar to the top of the search results page.
Having a place to put links to other blogs has a similar
effect--helping the search engines notice your blog. Both titles
(plus the smart use of keywords in the body of the blog post)
and links to other blogs help other people find you. But, if you
link to another blog, be sure you e-mail that person and tell
them you did it. Then, in the nicest way you can, ask them to
put a link to your blog on theirs! Cross-linking like this is
the best way to generate an audience for your blog, unless you
have a really huge family and thousands of personal friends...
The other reason to cross-link with other blogs is because it
can help you form a community of interest around your own blog.
Let's say your blog is about Space Sports. You go to Google and
put in the words "space sports" and "blogs". Up comes a bunch of
other blogs. You link to the ones you like and ask them to do
the same. Your life just became much more interesting--to
yourself and to a lot of other people! Let's say you don't have
a blog with something as riotously popular as Space Sports.
Maybe your blog is about quilting that uses cloth made from
reeds that grow on the banks of South American rivers. What?
Google choked?! No sweat. Link to blogs about cloth
manufacturing at home, or protecting plants that grow by rivers
in South America, or any ol' quilting sites. Who's to say how
you go about building a community of interest around your own
blog? Do what you feel is right. Do what you want. It's your
Place in CyberSpace !
To round out this section on the features and characteristics
of blogs, I'll leave you with some Web addresses of interesting
articles about blogs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog
http://www.rebeccamead.com/2000_11_13_art_blog.htm
http://www.cjr.org/issues/2003/5/blog-jensen.asp
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.05/mustread.html?pg=2
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/sci_tech/2000/dot_life/179999
8.stm
So... Let's assume you have a Prime Life Interest or a list of
Prime Life Interests and you've found a Place on the Web that
makes it easy to tell or show others about it or them.
Hopefully, you've already or will soon find other blogs that are
related to yours in some way. To help you do this, so you can
make your blog more visible (by cross-linking with them) and
start to create a community of interest, here's a list of
addresses that can help you find other blogs:
http://www.technorati.com/
http://blogsearch.google.com/
http://www.bloogz.com/
http://www.blogflux.com
Now, while you're finding those other blogs, you need to pay
attention to how they do their blogging! Even in the same
blog-space, different bloggers will choose different features of
the blog which will radically change the effect it has on its
readers. Then, there's the actual way the individual bloggers go
about putting their words and images into the blogs. This is
where a person's personality shines through the features and
content of the blog--this is where you can shine! There are two
basic ways to refine the style you use to create your blog:
A. Take some time to write a few trial posts, show them to a few
interested people, then start the blog.
B. Just Do It !
I highly recommend choice B ! Get in there and make mistakes.
Make them right in front of the whole world. If nothing else,
you can write about the mistake and make the correction in your
next post. Bingo ! Two posts for the price of one... I think
the supreme advantage in just starting right in and making
public corrections along the way is that you're letting people
see the REAL you. Especially if your using the blog to publicly
learn and share that learning with others, this is the preferred
method. Think about this: words without a voice to actually say
them can be boring. But words that are trying hard to say
something, something that deeply matters to the person writing
them, even if they take their time and wander around a lot, are
more honest and appealing. However, if you take out "something
that deeply matters to the person writing them", you're back to
just boring, along with aimless. (This argument also makes sense
even if your blog is mostly images.) By the way, something
that's coming on line as I write this are audio and video blogs.
Whoo Hoo ! ! Another experience that will improve the way you
let yourself shine in your blog is to make an effort to look at
blogs that are not in your list of preferred topics . Just
because you don't have an abiding interest in a topic doesn't
mean you can't learn something from a good blog about it. In
fact, the fact that you don't especially care for the actual
content will enable you to focus more on the way it's presented
! Just because your burning interest is Space Sports is no
reason to ignore what you may learn about presentation from a
quilting blog. That may seem like quite a stretch but the
farther away you get from your content the better you can
objectively see the way that content is presented, and learn
from it.
So, there it is. My humble, short guide to blogging and how to
love it. About the only advice I have left right now is to read
this article again in a few days. Never know what you may have
missed till you find it again, eh?
If you'd like to see what someone like me does with a blog,
look at these two:
http://www.lulu.com/amzolt
http://www.livejournal.com/users/amzoltai
Also, I'd love to hear from you with any comments or criticisms
you may have about this article. Everything can be improved,
right ? Write to me at:
amzolt@gmail.com