Anyway… the post actually turned into an about Blogging post. Someone (minicoopers) asked:
I frequently read people who state “my blog this” or “my blog that” but I have absolutley no idea what blog is.
So here are the basics:
Some excerpts from that thread (there’s more comments from others if you go to the actual thread):
A Blog is essentially an online journal. BUT the content is on a website…
You post about whatever you want. Kind of like posting here…
There are literally millions of Blogs on the internet. They take many different shapes and forms… The software I use is WordPress.org. I host it on my own website…
BUT their are also free ones out there like Blogger.com (owned by Google)…
I Blog possesses many benefits.
First they are easy to set up… You could literally be blogging in minutes from now.
Second it acts as a CMS (content management system). You don’t have to upload anything or use FTP. You simply post like we do here… The information is automatically organized for you.
Some are highly customizable like WordPress… where you actually could use it simply as a CMS if you wanted and modify it to do many, many things…
The possiblities are limitless…
The other perk is that you can ping…. You hook it up with a service like PingOMatic.com and it will let dozens of services know you’ve updated your site and increases traffic to your blog. Essentially it helps draw the SEs to you…
That’s why mine gets indexed so fast. I ping and the search engine crawls another site and follows my link back to me!
Also you can allow RSS feeds….
So that’s basically it… there is a lot more to it, but that’s the jist.
They are the rage because of the quick indexing and also the can be monetized with Adsense or affiliate marketing or ? The skies the limit.
More about Pinging:Each time your blog pings, your post is picked up by these services that will list a link to your site… A search engine will then come along and follow that to your Blog and index you.
This doesn’t guarantee traffic… you do have to Blog about something that someone might query about. Still need the right keywords.
If You use Blogger.com, it actually pings WebLogs.
Goto: Settings/Publishing/Choose Yes to Notify Weblogs.com/Save Settings…
That’s it! Now it will ping each time you post.
Blogging is powerful. Is it here to stay? Maybe, maybe not… although, it really does provide what the internet is all about. Content… fresh content.
