amateur blog |
THE BEGINNING OF BLOGGING |
Think back to the Internet circa 1997.personal collections of favorite links. Not many people recognized it, but the Web was a revolutionary force of self-expression and global connection. Yahoo! emerged to catalog all those personal pages and was itself pretty revolutionary. More upheavals followed: e-commerce, instant messaging, MP3, Google. And now, blogging.Blogging is throwing the Internet forward and backward at the same time.
Forward into a new era of consumer empowerment, and backward to the grass-roots spirit of the early Web. The popularity and influence of Weblogs have stolen the spotlight from established media powerhouses.
Blogging has taken back the Web. One of the most influential online research organizations estimated in mid 2005 that a new blog was created every 5.8 seconds. Fortunately, there’s no such thing as missing the boat (or the rocket), so if you haven’t yet created your first blog, now is the perfect time. Blogging is the perfect antidote to highly commercialized, blandly consolidated Web sites. You can have a great site, be part of an amazingly dynamic global community, and, if you play your cards right, attract a devoted audience.
Understanding exactly what a blog is Knowing how to get a blog.Being aware of the potential pitfallsFinding an effective blogging style.Smoothly joining the blogging community Searching for blog content and tracking topics Detailing specific blog programs and services Trying fancy blogging techniques such as moblogging and podcasting Using RSS to be a master blog reader Possibly making a few dollars with a blog.
Many people, even those who think they know all about blogging, are astonished to learn what a wide-ranging subject it is, laden with possibilities.New bloggers have innumerable choices. No single resource can illuminate all the blogging programs, Weblog services, and feed aggregators, as well as the wide assortment of related technologies. In narrowing the choices offered in this book, my criteria were quality and popularity, with an emphasis (perhaps surprisingly) on the latter. Most new bloggers get their feet wet in one of the popular social networks or one of the big-name hosting services. People follow the advice of friends and acquaintances, so to some extent we follow along those paths. Naturally, the popular services are usually popular for good reasons. Regretfully, I could not find space to describe some great resources, programs, and services that have not yet gained widespread usage.