In This Chapter

• Starting a free Blogger account

• Creating a Weblog and selecting a template

• Posting, writing, and publishing to your blog

• Formatting your blog

• Changing templates

Weblogs (blogs) have been steadily growing in popularity for years, and now represent a massive, unstoppable online trend. Many people have heard of blogs, but not many can quite describe what they are, and even fewer people know how to get their own blog started. A company called Pyra operates a service called Blogger.com that makes it almost ridiculously easy. Google snapped up Blogger.com in February, 2003, and Blogger.com is now a Google service.

Blogs make it easy to operate a Web site that’s updated frequently. Most bloggers update their sites at least once a day and sometimes several times during the day. And night. (Bloggers instinctively shy away from sleep.)

Blogs are popularly regarded as online journals, and rightly (if incompletely) so. Blogging tools are perfect for divulging the minutiae of your daily existence for the world to read. Well, part of the world. A small part. A few friends. Your mother. But who knows? Many an amateur blogger has attained virtual fame in online society by hitting a unique blogging angle, or by designing the blog cleverly, or through excellent research and linking, or simply by having something worthwhile to say.

Blogs are also used for less personal projects than diary publishing. Any site that updates its content frequently uses something similar to a blog or a blogging program. For example, anyone interested in MP3 and digital music can get the latest industry news at the Digital Songstream site:

www.digitalsongstream.com/newslog

That was a shameless plug — the site is mine. It illustrates how a relatively impersonal, newsy site can deliver fast-changing content through blogging.

It’s a fine line between journaling and journalism, and professional journalists have joined the blogging ranks with differing degrees of enthusiasm. In some cases, they have felt forced into blogging by the amateur journalists who use blogs to link to news articles on the Web, commenting on them — with quite a bit of vitriol in some cases. The authors of those articles take to blogging to defend themselves in some cases and to provide their readers with a less formal, less edited, more personal interpretation of the news. During the 2003 war in Iraq, some journalists traveling with the troops used blogs to fill in the gaps of their official reporting. At least one news organization (CNN) forced one of its reporters to discontinue his unofficial blogging.

So Weblogs are controversial, influential, increasingly popular, and definitely fun. Google, with its Blogger service, makes it easy to get started.