| There are some people who like to stay on top of every new thing that comes along. These are the people who just love being associated with the "cutting edge" and they are technological risk takers of sorts. They have no problem with those things that fail because the "next big thing" is right around the corner. For example, when blogs first came along they never asked themselves "what is blogging"; they charged ahead and just did it.
Okay, you are reading this, so we will assume that you fit into a different category. Perhaps you are not wary of new things, but you prefer to have some idea of whether they are going to benefit you first. This is, in a lot of ways, the smarter approach. You don't have to jump on everything new, but you are willing to incorporate technology into your life if it can help you in some way...and now you are at the point where you need to know what blogging is.
A good place to start is with the definition of what a blog is. The word 'blog' is actually a contraction of 'web log', which can also be thought of as a journal. That's way most of the early bloggers started out; they would post regular updates to their blog and the better ones generated large-scale interest.
While many people still use blogs in this way, a segment of bloggers started using them in other ways. Now blogs are used as more of a framework for all kinds of websites. In fact, you could visit a website that is really a blog, and you would never know it.
WordPress is perhaps the most-used blogging framework. It is easy to install and it can be used free of charge. The real beauty of it though is all of the plug-ins that are available for it. Plug-ins are applications that give additional functionality to the basic WordPress set up. You can find plug-ins that help you to process payments, set up membership sites, schedule posts, change the look of your site, and much, much more.
The question of what is blogging used to have a simple answer, but as mentioned, blogging is evolving. But when talking about blogging in its purest form it all comes back to making regular updates to a website. You can have a blog that is about some aspect of your life (your job, being a parent), a topic that interests you (political beliefs, hobbies), or your opinions on just about anything (pop culture, news).
If you are just blogging for yourself, then you can do it however you want. If you want to get a lot of people reading your blog then you need to provide fresh and interesting content that gets people to spread the word about your blog. You can also use your blog to make money if that is something that you are interested in. |