It used to be that we spent time in chat rooms and forums. From there, we graduated to web sites. And now? Now, everyone who's anyone seems to have a blog.
Do you blog?
If you're like the majority of Internet users, I'm betting you do. Officially called a "web log", the blog has become the latest form of self-expression on the Internet and everyone - from your grandmother to your ten year old - is jumping on board.
So, what exactly is a blog? And more importantly, why should you have one?
Think of a blog as an electronic journal. You post your thoughts, ideas, concepts or whatever strikes you and the blog keeps them all in a nicely categorized list. People that visit your blog will see your most recent post first and can browse through your categories to find the topics that they want.
But blogs aren't limited to just personal diaries. No, no, no... big business has caught on and started implementing blogs into their once-static websites.
And that's really the big attraction with a blog: the interactivity. Readers can add comments to your posts (or not, depending upon your preference) and your home page suddenly becomes a dynamic with always-changing content (assuming of course, that you post often). In fact, blogs have become so popular that most blog software has "widget" capabilities - allowing you to add on cool little features such as polls, surveys, guestbooks, tag clouds and even RSS feed icons.
So, are you ready to build your first blog?
Here's some tools to get you started:
Hosting/Development
Widgets, Tools and Other Cool Stuff
- MyBlogLog
- StatCounter
- Technorati
- Digg
- Feedburner
- Aweber
- Intellicontact
- Pingomatic
- Del.icio.us
- TagCloud
- YouTube
- Favicon Maker
