What Is a Blog, Really?

One of the wonderful things about people is that we are all different. We each have our own likes and dislikes, fears, and aspirations. We definitely all have our own opinions. One of the significant advantages—some would say it’s a disadvantage, but we’re going to take the positive spin today—of the Internet is that it allows us an easily accessible platform for expressing those opinions, and sharing them with people we love as well as complete strangers.

The word “blog” is an abbreviated form of the phrase “web log,” or online journal. Over time, people just said the two words together so often that they became conjoined, and then said them so fast that “weblog” became “blog”. Now “blog” is its own word, very much a part of our growing technology vocabulary. It can act both as a noun—“Welcome to my blog!”—and as a verb— “He blogs actively, posting almost every day.”

A blog is basically a tiny bit of Internet real estate that, once you register it, you can use in just about any way you like. There are a number of hosting sites you can use to start a blog: Wordpress, Blogger, and Tumblr are just a few. Usually all you need to start a blog is a valid email address. Once you sign up with a hosting service, you will have your own little corner of the Internet to write whatever you like and put it out into space for the world to see.

“Why would a person do such a thing?” you may ask. One use for a blog is to keep those you love up to date. You can set the privacy settings on your blog so that the only people who see its content are people you invite—or you can let your blog be open to the public. I have quite a few friends who use blogs to keep their extended families and friends aware of the latest news in their kids lives: birthday parties, baptisms, dance concerts, school awards. It’s easy to write text and upload photos to a blog. And while it’s nice to get a letter in the mail, it can be expensive to print and mail lots of photos, especially if you have a large family scattered across the country. With a blog, you can post photos to your heart’s content, and mostly for free.

If you like to watch TV or movies or read books, you could use your blog to publish reviews of the latest things you’ve seen or read. If you are an artist or photographer, you can use a blog to put your work out in the world so that people can see it. If you would like to write a novel, you could give yourself a deadline and post chapters or parts of chapters to your blog. If you just have thoughts that are of interest, or you want to keep an online diary of the latest things happening in your life, you can post those musings to a blog.

One of the best things about having a blog is the fact that, after some time, you will have a bank of entries, all dated and organized, and all easily accessible. Just like an actual diary, it’s fun to go back and have a look at what you wrote a year ago or, eventually, even 5 or 10 years ago. And since it’s online, you can access your blog from any computer anywhere. If you want to share your blog with your friends, all you need to do is email them a link. They can even subscribe to your blog: every time you post a new entry, your readers will get an email telling them about the new post.

Do you have a blog? Have you considered getting one? What do you think about journaling online?