What is blogging

What is it?

It seems like every time you turn around, you hear about the latest and greatest thing on the internet. Podcasting and RSS feeds are one of them. Blogging is another recent one.

Blogs bring an exciting new development to the internet.

Blogs are like ongoing journals. They are often more personal and interactive than a website and by their very nature they are short “sound-bytes” usually in reverse order. (The older one is at the bottom of the webpage and the most recent one is at the top). Often, they are date and time stamped and sometimes there is an option for others to leave comments… making them interactive.

The thing that makes blogs such a powerful tool is that they are usually associated with links, opinion, images, and ideas are not necessarily meant to perform the typical functions that a website performs.

What do we mean? When you start a website, you often have a purpose or goal in mind: Perhaps you want people to leave their email address and subscribe to your opt-in newsletter. Maybe you are an e-tailer and you want people to click the buy-now button to purchase your merchandise. Maybe you offer information to people (for example, like a site for a non-profit organization who wants to keep people appraised of their cause).

But blogs are different. Blogs are there to simply tell people about something. They often add insight and opinion to the mix, which makes them more of a personal expression than most commercial or non-profit websites can get away with.

Why are blogs so powerful? They tie the internet together. Think of a web page as a post sticking up out of the mud. Each time you link one web page to another, you create a strand of rope. But many commercial sites are not interested in sending people away from their site so they don’t link very many times.

However, blogs are ways that you can link from one post to another, many times. With all these links, the rope between the posts ends up forming a bridge that you can walk across.

Blogs really turn the internet into a net!