Set up a blog Blog basics
What are blogs?
A blog is a webbased diary or journal, updated regularly. Generally, they’re text based although you can add pictures, video and audio and links to other web pages or blogs.
Ordinary people, just like you, are taking over the web through the explosion of the weblog or blog. More than 23% of online Britons have already posted a blog while 39% have read one, says research company Nielsen/Netratings.
The beauty of the blog is that it can be about anything you want; a personal account of your day or dedicated to your loves and passions. Some can be a little self-indulgent but there are plenty of examples of blogs that’ve received worldwide acclaim, notably The Homeless Guy and Salam Pax’s blog, a Baghdad resident’s account of the war in Iraq.
There are blogs about everything from buying goods in second-hand shops to politics; blog search engine Technorati lists over 55 million blogs. ‘Human nature is to engage, and interact with other people. Blogs are an online extension of that,’ says Alex Burmaster, analyst forNielsen/Netratings.
Setting up a blog is simple. There are dozens of sites dying to host your blog; we’ve used Blogger. It’s free to start a blog, so what are you waiting for? See 'Create your blog' for a simple step-by-step guide.
For more on creating a blog, see our book Internet Made Easy for the Over 50s.
