What is Blogging?

All about blogging.If you are twenty-something or younger, you probably don’t need to be reading this. You’ve probably been happily blogging away for what seems like years, all your friends blog, you read their blogs, and they yours. But for those of us over forty, or with families to care for and busy jobs to do, or perhaps our attention has just been someplace else for the last two years, we may not have even heard the term, or if we had, it sounded like "flogging" and not wanting to go there, we just ignored it.

But blogging is growing and for very good reasons, much like email took off ten years ago. And like ten years ago when I found myself repeatedly trying to explain email to people and why they really did need an email address, now I’m explaining blogging and why it matters.

What is blogging? - the act of producing a blog. What’s a blog? That’s a little bit harder to answer, but bear with me. The term blog is short for web log, a "log" of diary-like entries published on a web site. This is how it started, people publishing their daily thoughts for all to read on their website. Often the blog entries occur as short, quick snippets – a link to something cool found on the web, an opinion, an idea, a rant. And sometimes they are longer, thoughtful essays. Sometimes new entries are produced every few minutes, and sometimes just once and a while. It all depends on the author and what she or he wants to express.

But blogging has evolved to mean much more than diary entries. Blogging is easy, almost instant, publishing of content to a website, where every entry is preserved in a database and is therefore categorizeable and searchable. Content can be photographs, recipes, restaurant reviews, or anything digitally storable on a computer that you can categorize. One of my blogs is a recipe site, with my family’s recipes sorted by ingredient (beef, chicken, lamb) or menu item (brunch, main course, dessert). Another is a group weblog for book reviews. Several of my friends are authors on this site with the ability to post reviews of books they’ve read. Another blog is set up sort of like a journal, except that it is rarely personal. I use it mostly to park things (ideas, opinions, links, humor) that I find interesting or useful, and think others might find so as well.

The true power of the blog comes from its interactivity with visitors and other blogs. As an author, you can allow your web visitors to comment on your entries, the comments then being published along side or in a separate window of the entry. On your blog, you can keep track of when other blogs reference one of your entries. You can have their references to your site be automatically published on your site. Your website is no longer an island visited by anonymous people only known to you by the page view statistics your web host gives you about your site. Your visitors, at least those who either comment on your blog, or make a comment about your blog on their blog have a name, an email address, a website – an identity. As you find other blogs that you like to read, you link to them on your blog site. And as others find your blog interesting, they link to you as well. All of this helps build a community of those who share a common interest in each other’s content.

What makes blogging different from writing to any other kind of web site? For one thing, the tools. Even with great web development tools from Adobe and Macromedia, building a web page is a pain. It just takes time, a lot of work, too much time if you are just going to say a sentence or two. And once you’ve made a page, updating it takes time too. The blogging tools that are freely available to the public have changed the nature of web publishing. It’s easy. You log in to your weblog control page, you type in your entry, you click on Save and presto! Your entry is now published to your website. The default templates that come with these services are professional looking enough, and customizable if you know how to do that sort of thing in HTML.