What is a blog?

"To Blog or Not To Blog? That is the Q?

A blog is like an online journal.  You can make entries as often as you like and post them for visitors to read.  Most blogging platforms will allow for visitors to leave you comments or questions.  A blog can be within a website or it can stand alone. 

Blogs are usually viewed in reverse chronological order.  Most blogs follow a specific topic or company.  For example, a personal blog may be about a persons family or a specific topic like photography.  Professional blogs would be about products, company information, news or anything pertaining to your business or field.

How popular is blogging and who is blogging?

In 2007 a company named Technorati tracked blogs and found more than 112,000,000 blogs.  With growing popularity the numbers have undoubtedly gone up. 

Everyone can blog no matter of age or business type.  Blogs can be for personal use, to network with friends and/or family or they can be professional. 

Types of blogs:

We already discussed personal, family, specific interest and professional blogs.  There are also blogs devoted to video or other multimedia formats. 

There are also blogs for different devices.  Most blogs are done on a personal computer but with new technology people can blog from PDA’s, smart phones and other devices. 

As blogging continues to find more and more popularity we see sponsored blog posts and a lot of advertising on blogs.  Some find this to be a controversial matter but the blogger simply needs to disclose if they are being compensated for a post so that readers are aware. 

The bottom line is that blogging is here to stay for a while.  It is most often free to do and it does not take great technical skill so it appeals to the masses.  A few of the most common blog platforms are Blogger, WordPress, Edublog, blog.com, TypePad and Blogspot (just to name a few).

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WordPress Welcomes its New Community!!!

Welcome to my WORLD!!!

Windows Live Spaces users will find that over the  next six months things will take a big shift.  Microsoft is shutting down its Live Spaces in favor of the WordPress platform.  Microsoft recently made this major decision and will send about 7 million blogs and the revenue generated by ads over to WordPress. 

This is a huge step for Microsoft as they will be giving up quite a slice of the web.  Microsoft says that they have over 7 million blogs and about 30 million visitors to these blogs so it is not hard to see how much ad revenue this could take in.  Naturally WordPress is thrilled to be obtaining these accounts but one has to wonder why Microsoft is choosing to not compete in the blogging arena.

WordPress is powerful and very successful.  Most users will be glad for the switch because WordPress is so user friendly.  Users have six months to switch over to the WordPress method or the accounts will be gone.  This gives users a few months to decide if the switch is a good thing for them or if they just want their blog to fall by the wayside.

WordPress does have the upper hand as far as controlling spam goes.  They keep spam bloggers to a minimum as well as spam comments.  This is a relief to those that surf the web looking for valuable content as well as saving bloggers time on moderating comments.  WordPress trumps even Blogger in spam control.

Overall, it is obvious that competing in this market takes a huge amount of money.  It is also hard to compete with the two giants:  WordPress and Blogger.  There are some easy to use platforms out there for the free bloggers but most of us are still choosing these two great companies because they offer such great ease and options.

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