What's so great about blogs?
Posted by Ryan Torma on Tuesday, December 15, 2009 1:23 PM
I admit it. I have some nerdy interests: photography, web technology, theology, media theory, & sci-fi movies, television and books. In the bad-old-days when there were only newspapers, books, and magazines, it was often hard for me to find out about the latest things going on in the areas of my interest. There just weren't enough people who shared my combination of nerdiness to justify the costs of printing magazines about this stuff in great quantities. But now in the era of blogs I don't have to go without news and essays in my favorite interest areas. People all over the world are using blog software to share their ideas, links, tips & tricks about all kinds of things they care about. Some of them even have my weird set of interests. Best of all it's basically free for me to read and almost free for people to write.
What is a blog?
A blog (or weblog) is basically a type of web site that allows people to easily post words, images, and video to a website. That website then applies a time and date stamp to that post and displays the posts in reverse chronological order. Authors can create tags which tell readers the topics in that post and make it easier to search for those topics later. Also, blog owners can enable comments so readers can write back to the author. Want to see what a blog looks like. Here's a few I read a lot. Sarcastic Lutheran, Free Range Learning, BoingBoing, A List Apart.
Subscribing to blogs
One of the great things about blogs is that you can subscribe to them through a technology called RSS. This means that instead of going to check each website for new content every day, I can use a reader to check for me and show me what is new. Google reader is one of the easiest to get started with. Here's a great overview of how this works.
Want to start a blog?
Getting started writing a blog is easy. There are several free services that will host your blog for you. Just sign up and start writing. Check these out to see which you like best.
Want more info?
Come check out our Tech Talks this week and find out more information about blogging.
Watch the recording of the Tech Talk
