Wednesday, December 22, 2004

What is a Blog?

The term Blogs (not my favorite word) is slang for web log. It allows rapid content publishing. They are only a couple of years in the making in its current form, but have been with us since the beginning of the web with Tim Burners Lee. They became popular during the last gulf war and were catapulted to legit journalism status during the recent elections.

A blog gives the writer the ability to say exactly what they want to say the way they want to say it without an editor censoring their thoughts. The political blogs during the elections exceeded traditional news sources in readership. The traditional news sources were caught off guard by the popularity of the blogs. It puts a whole new meaning on the meaning freedom of speech. Now there are millions of blogs on just about everything that you can imagine and some that you don’t want to know about.

The current blogs are very easy to start by anyone and do not require any technology knowledge. Content is king that is why Google bought Blogger.com and set it up for free.

Administering a site like http://security.efsnm.com is a blog site and a lot of work. It runs on a Linux server and uses the server config’s to maintain the mySQL server that is the database engine for the site. That site took minutes to setup and start using. However, you can spent days learning their syntax and modifying the site design. So you may spent more time on site design and navigation than on composing the content.

At blogger.com http://technutz.blogspot.com/ setup up this blog took minutes. I used one of their templates and tweak the site settings. I already had the content from class that everyone has read. Form the time I setup the site, edited and posted the content that it currently there only took me about 3 hours. I am sure others would take longer, but I was really please with the blogger.com blog site.

The blogger.com site has everything I was looking for as it is easy to use, very nice templates (that are able to be changed) and it is FREE.

As a business one would think how could Google offer all that for free? Easy, they would like you to use their Adsence product. It is not required, but I already had the account and post it as a way to get a pay back for the content. Content is king, otherwise why would someone come to your site…

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