The Everything Blogging Book

Publish Your Ideas, Get Feedback, And Create Your Own Worldwide Network

Aliza Risdahl

• Publisher: Everything
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781440538216
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Writing
• Index: Business

If you have access to a computer, you can start your own online journal, or blog--if you know how to do it right. With your own blog, you'll have a voice in the exciting world of the Internet. This one-stop resource shows you how to publish your ideas, get feedback, and create your own worldwide network!With this book you'll learn how to:

• Create buzz marketing for your business.
• Get amateur poetry, short stories, and prose published.
• Create a worldwide network of people.
• Share unique hobby ideas with thousands of other hobbyists.

This easy-to-use guide will help you to create and maintain a creative and unique blog that readers the world over can enjoy. With The Everything Blogging Book, you'll learn how to make your mark on the World Wide Web—and beyond!

chapter 1

Welcome to Blogging

Blogging has become a social phenomenon, taking Web site publishing to a new level and allowing anyone to become an instant online publisher. Web sites are often used for one-way content publishing, such as communicating a marketing message or serving as a virtual store. Blogs are Web sites with a twist. Anyone who can read and write can publish a blog—no programming experience needed. Anyone can be the star of his or her blog and build an online community. Blogging makes basic Web sites look static by comparison.

What Is a Blog?

In the simplest terms, blog is short for Web Log or Weblog. A quick definition of a blog is an application that creates date and time-stamped posts that appear on a basic Web page and are generally accessible to the public via the Internet, often allowing visitors to the Web page to comment on the published posts. Most blogs are created with special blog-publishing software or tools.

This is an example of what a TypePad blog could look like. Used by permission of Aliza Sherman Risdahl.

Blogs can be personal, taking the form of diaries or journals. Blogs can also be more media oriented, such as the rantings and ravings of writers and other well-known or unknown personalities. Blogs can be used to publish information, but it is more likely that content leans more toward opinion than fact. There are news-oriented blogs that publish original news stories, and ones that compile information from other blogs and Web sites. Blogs can be based on original content, compiled content, linked content, or a combination of all three. When it comes to blogs and blogging, the blogger’s imagination is the only real limit.

Many sources agree that the term weblog was first used in December 1997 by Jorn Barger (www.robotwisdom.com/) to refer to a Web page containing a list or “log” with links to other Web pages that the Web logger found interesting. Barger is often credited with creating one of the first Web logs.

Internet Communication

The Internet and the Web are great environments for communication, whether it is one-to-one, one-to-many, or many-to-many contact. Understanding what a blog is requires an understanding of the nature of online communication on the Internet. Some of the most common communications tools online include:

• E-mail. Electronic mail can be sent and received through an e-mail program, which can be Web based such as Hotmail.com, through an online service such as America Online (AOL), or through freestanding software such as Eudora or Mail.
• E-mail lists. A subscription to an e-mail list enables a member to send a single e-mail to the list’s e-mail address. A copy of that e-mail is then broadcast to all list subscribers, who can respond by e-mail to either the original sender or the entire list.
• Web sites. A Web site is technically a database of many files, such as text files that are linked together to form the framework of the site, as well as image, audio, or video files that are embedded into the pages.
• Bulletin or message boards. A bulletin board or message board is a feature on a Web site that contains Web pages that allow visitors to the site to post comments and engage in discussions that are published and archived on the site. Message boards can also exist within online services such as AOL.
• Guest books. In the early days of Web sites, guest books were commonly used to allow visitors to a site to post a message on a Web page, which would then appear on a long scrolling page along with posts from other visitors. For the most part, guest books were for leaving a comment, not for interactive communication.

E-mail is most often used for one-to-one communication. It can also be used as a one-to-many communication tool when more than one e-mail address is entered into the To: field, the Cc: field (carbon copy), or the Bcc: field (blind carbon copy). Another example of one-to-many e-mail broadcasting is with e-mail lists.

Web sites are what could be considered the multimedia portion of the Internet. Web sites are generally used for one-to-many communication because the Web publisher is putting his or her information on the Web for many people to access.

An example of many-to-many broadcasting online is a Web site that contains a bulletin or message board that allows anyone to post or respond to a post and then makes those posts accessible to the public or to site members and archives them on the site.

This is an example of a blog created on the AOL Journal site. Used by permission of Aliza Sherman Risdahl.

Understanding Online Communities

One dynamic social phenomenon of the Internet and Web is the formation of communities of like-minded people who find one another online and communicate on a regular basis, most often about a specific topic.

In the early days of the Internet, communities formed on technically primitive message boards called Usenet Newsgroups to discuss a wide range of topics and with names such as soc.women and alt.travel. Communities were mostly open to the public but could be private (accessible to members only).

In the 1960s, the military developed the foundation of today’s Internet as a communications tool that could withstand a nuclear attack. The Internet generally consisted of computers networked via communications lines that were mostly buried underground. Eventually, the academic world learned about the network of computers and began using it as a communications tool.

Communities could be fully moderated, meaning that someone was in charge of screening every post before it appeared on the board, or partially moderated, meaning that a moderator was in charge to help keep discussions on track and to settle disputes between community members. Boards without moderators meant a chaotic style of group discussion. Over time, as visitors turned into regular community members, they learned the unwritten and written rules of behavior within the community.

Nonmoderated communities are often considered “self-policing,” meaning that community members help maintain order and generally polite discourse. When discussions digress into personal attacks, those outbreaks are called “flame wars,” and the inappropriate and attacking posts are called “flames.”

The general dynamics of an online community are not limited to message boards but can also be experienced on e-mail lists and on blogs. If visitors to a blog are allowed to comment on the blogger’s posts and then begin to comment on one another’s posts, sparking discussion, a community begins to form.

Communities on blogs are considered partially moderated because the blog can allow comments to be posted freely to the site (at least, this is a feature that most blog-publishing tools offer). A blogger, however, also has the ability to delete any post she deems inappropriate, and because it is her blog, her rules apply. Therefore, a blogger is a moderator of her own blog if she allows visitors to make comments and then chooses to edit those comments in any way.

This is what a blog created using Blogger could look like. Used by permission of Aliza Sherman Risdahl.

Blogs Versus E-mail

Both blogs and e-mail are online communications tools. Some of the ways that blogs can be similar to and different from e-mail include:

• Both can be Web based, which means their functionality is based within a Web site and on Web pages.
• Both usually (but not always) originate from one person.
• E-mails are considered messages. Blog posts are considered entries on a page.
• E-mails originate from a sender and are sent to a recipient or recipients. Blog posts originate with the blogger and are “sent” to the blog and then posted on a blog’s Web page.
• E-mails are generally considered private messages between the sender and recipient(s). Although blog posts can be private between the blogger and a specified group of visitors who have been granted access, they are more often public messages posted by the blogger.
• E-mails are most often meant to be one-to-one communication unless the sender is using an e-mail list, which is then one-to-many. Blog posts are most often used for one-to-many communication, although the many can also be limited to one or to a few others.
• E-mails are typically archived on a person’s computer within his email software program. If he is using Web-based e-mail, then the archive exists on the Web. Blog posts are usually archived on the Web. Sometimes a blogger may archive his posts on his computer, but this is not a common practice.

Simply put, e-mail is sent to one person or to many people via the Internet. A blog post is not sent away; it is sent to the blog, appears on the blog, and remains within the blog in an archive.

Blogs Versus Message Boards

Web sites in the mid-1990s did not have bulletin or message boards. In those days, message boards were more likely to be found on the Internet in the form of Usenet Newsgroups or on self-contained online services such as small Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs) or larger commercial services such as America Online, CompuServe, and Prodigy.

Before Web-based message boards were developed, Web sites had a simple feature called a Guestbook, where a visitor to the site could fill out a Web-based form with a message, hit a Submit button, and then see her comment posted on a Web page on the site. Web site owners encouraged people to “sign my guest book” as a way of getting feedback from visitors and of showing other visitors that the site was popular.

Just how popular is blogging?
On May 14, 2005, the total number of identified blogs was 10,914,099. The total number of new blogs in the last twenty-four hours on that date was 43,653. (Source: Intelliseek’s BlogPulse.com)

As the Web became increasingly popular, some creative people began to use simple guest-book features to co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• The Everything Blogging Book
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Top Ten Reasons to Blog
• Introduction
• 1 Welcome to Blogging
• 2 chapter 2: Blogs as Useful Tools
• 3 chapter 3: Popular Blog Topics
• 4 chapter 4: Who Is Blogging?
• 5 chapter 5: Why Build a Blog?
• 6 chapter 6: Understanding Online Publishing
• 7 chapter 7: Planning Your Blog
• 8 chapter 8: Finding Your Blog Host
• 9 chapter 9: Deciding on a Blog Host
• 10 chapter 10: Starting Your Blog
• 11 chapter 11: Blog Designs
• 12 chapter 12: Blog Content Development
• 13 chapter 13: Building Blog Communities
• 14 chapter 14: Popular Blog Tools
• 15 chapter 15: Bloggers Beware
• 16 chapter 16: Secrets of Successful Blogs
• 17 chapter 17: Outside the Blog Box
• 18 chapter 18: Blogging for Business
• 19 chapter 19: Marketing Your Blog
• 20 chapter 20: Maintaining Your Blog
• 21 chapter 21: Measuring Blog Traffic
• 22 chapter 22: Beyond the Blog
• 23 chapter 23: The Impact of Blogging
• appendix a: Additional Resources
• appendix b: Glossary
• Index