"Woah, you don't know what a blog is? What a n00b! EVERYONE has a blog..."

If you clicked this link because you aren't sure what a blog is, don't worry because you have a lot of company. While it sometimes feels like everyone has a blog, I get asked all the time what a blog is and the answer is rather anti-climactic. A blog is just a website with a cooler name than "website".

Many (most?) of the blogs you will find out there are simply repackaged diaries or journals that are posted on the Internet. They go something like this:

Dear diary,
Today I had cereal for breakfast and I met a boy at school who is really cute. I wrote about this and then I posted it on the Internet for children in Borneo to read. blogging is so kewl!
-XOXO me

Some people have taken the idea of a blog to create really interesting and useful websites that relate stuff they know or things they are doing. You can learn a lot from these blogs which occasionally get noticed in the media or politics, like the Drudge Report or HorsesAss.org. Good blogs let information move much faster and more freely than traditional media does. They will also say things that traditional media never will in terms of both content and diction.

For a more technical answer (on anything), the Wikipedia knows all:

A weblog or blog (derived from web + log) is a web-based publication consisting primarily of periodic articles (normally, but not always, in reverse chronological order). Although most early blogs were manually updated, tools to automate the maintenance of such sites made them accessible to a much larger population, and the use of some sort of browser-based software is now a typical aspect of "blogging".

If it's just a website, what's the big deal?

That's a good question. I think the answer revolves around the tools.

Creating a website is a fair amount of work, both technical and creative. A few years ago, several people started making tools that made the creation of a personal website much easier.

By lowering the bar of difficulty, they let a lot more people through the door of self-publishing creating an explosion now called the "blogosphere". Today just about anyone with a few bucks and some time can create a website that says whatever the heck they want to say.

Really Simple Syndication

Now that you know what a blog is, you should also know about RSS and newsreaders.

Let's say that you find three blogs that you like to read. Every day you click on those websites and look for new entries but most of the time there isn't anything new there. It would be nice if you could go to one place and get any updates from the blogs that you enjoy rather than having to check them all on the chance that there might be an update.

RSS was created to solve this problem. RSS allows blogs to basically announce to whoever is listening that they have new entries. An RSS reader listens for those announcements and posts the results.

You tell your RSS reader (my.yahoo.com is the simplest one) which blogs you want to read, and it will show you entries when they are created. An RSS reader is kind of like a personal newspaper which gets updated with new articles when your favorite blogs publish them.

It may take you a while to get the hang of the blogosphere and its tools but this is pretty powerful stuff once you do.