The Scoop on Blogging

Blogs (short for “weblogs”), in the decade or so they have been around, have had tremendous impact as a way to communicate. Blogs are web sites, with content added as frequently as desired, and arranged in reverse chronological order. Blogs are simple to build, update and manage. Requiring no special tools other than the web itself and an email address, it’s no wonder that there are currently more than 75 million blogs!

TechTips uses blog technology. We chose to blog because it’s free and easy. Two popular blog sites that offer blogs are Blogger and WordPress.com. Both sites offer a number of templates from which you build your blog. Blog templates let you easily add:
• comments
• images
• search boxes
• subjects
• bulleted lists and text boxes
• font and color variations
• PowerPoint and Excel pages
• multiple authors or limit your audience
• … and more

In addition to blogs for business purposes, there are millions of “people” blogs that serve as online personal journals. Blog have also found a niche as an important tool for journalists and politicians. In short, blogs are everywhere and, yes, there is a term that describes the vast blog community: it’s called the blogosphere. Blogs really are a community as they aren’t just one-directional; the ability to post comments and supply links from one blog to any number of other blogs form an important part of the ever-evolving collaborative nature of the web.

Technorati is the most popular internet search engine for searching blogs.Technorati also tracks blog activity, and reports that more than 175,000 new blogs are created daily. Over 1.6 million blog updates are posted to existing blogs every day. If you subscribe to a number of blogs and want to keep track of updates, that’s easy with another tool called RSS Feeds.