One of the great things about blogging is the ease at which you can get your content up on the web. Usually a blogger goes to a web page, logs in, writes their post and presses publish. But what about some other ways to get your blog content published? Read the rest of this entry »
In the past year Micro-Blogging has been on the rise. Rather than a standard blog it uses small less than 200 character posts similar to a status update. The size is usually small enough to be sent via SMS text message. While this may seem a bit silly to a power blogger but it can be a powerful tool to inform people of a new blog post or simply a way to get a quick message to a large group of people.
Since you can have many followers/fans you can quickly get your message to multiple people from a web browser, email, text message or mobile application.
With the immense popularity of people micro blogging about simple things like eating a cheese sandwich some of the sites have been brought down by overloading.
As providers scramble to keep up with their success the micro-blog is quickly finding it’s place in the Internet as a way to share every detail of your work and life with your friends and the world.
If you’re interested in checking out some microblog sites try these.
There are many ways to write a blog. Many social websites (e.g. myspace, yahoo360) offer a blog feature on their site. While these included features are great they are lacking in the fact that they do not really let you feature your work but rather as a facet of your social connections.
Rather than go through the extensive list of blogging platforms and review each I’m going to give you an idea of what to look for.
The biggest question to start with is if you are going to have a Hosted or Self-Hosted blog. This question is usually overlooked as many will just use what they know and that is often a Hosted solution.
Blogger and Wordpress.com are examples of of a hosted solution. While they have great features for your blogging needs they are often restrictive in your use of advertising and customization(i.e. plugins and themes) The benefits of a hosted solution is that you pretty much only have to write blog posts and not worry about anything else. The negative is that you can limit your creative and earning capabilities. If you’re just starting out, not technically savvy and don’t have an existing website, a hosted solution may be the best way to go.
A self-hosted solution is not without it’s pitfalls. In addition to paying hosting fees (usually a little less than $10 a month) you can get stuck with installing and supporting your blogging technology. Many out of the box solutions are simple enough to setup and modify but if something goes wrong you could be in over your head in a minute. The benefits are that you can customize your blog to your hearts content. Personally I prefer wordpress.org
When selecting your platform make sure that it will work with what you want to do. Check on things like:
While this is not a complete list it can be a good starting point for selecting a blog. Many will have a free version if they don’t have a trial. Test it out and take it around the block before you invest a lot of time and effort into your blog only to find out the platform you chose doesn’t fit YOU!
Blogging is a way of communicating to the world pretty much anything. While there are a lot of things that seem like blogging I like to think of blogging as simply a method of self(or group) publishing. Not much more than that but even that is a mouthful.
Blogging usually uses a blogging platform (e.g Wordpress, Blogger, TypePad) but can also be done with static HTML or some other method. The benefits to using a blogging platform is that things are organized and syndicated rather quickly and without much fuss on your part.
Some people might feel that using twitter and similar services is a kind of blogging but I like to call that micro-blogging as it’s not really designed to communicate more than a single simple thought (e.g. I ate at McDonald’s) while blogging allows you to explore subjects a bit more. (e.g. McDonald’s has the best french fries. )
While blogging may seem like publishing newsletter. Unlike a newsletter I think that a blog post should only cover one topic at a time unlike a newsletter which can cover multiple topics. Short concise and on topic is what a blog post should be.
The subject of each blog post can be pretty much anything. As blogging is so simple and easy the cost of a post is next to nothing outside of your time and effort so that the subjects can be a wider range then if you were limited by printing and mailing costs (i.e. magazines, newspapers).
Well after surfing the net continually for a few years now I’ve read a LOT of blogs. Some good and some shall we say not so good. Here I’ll showcase some of the more interesting and noteworthy blogs that I’ve found. I may even throw in a few tips and hints on how to blog successfully.