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If you've never visited a blog you're in for a treat.
Blogs are perhaps one of the most important and revolutionary innovations in human communication since the development of the printing press.

Blogs are content rich, user driven and jam packed with the kind of detail it is hard to find in other media. Reading
blogs can open an entire world of information and interaction that would be impossible in to get in traditional print or broadcast technologies.

Bloggers organize themselves in to virtual communities built around their professions, hobbies or other interests.

These communities are vibrant lively places filled with ideas and information. They are places where people come to get informed, interact and share with each other.

Intrigued? Then please read on, this article opens the door into the world of blogs. However, because blogging is such a huge ever expanding subject it can only serve as the jumping off point for your further exploration.

What's a blog? At their core blogs are simply an interactive digital journal or diary where authors, also called Bloggers, can post articles and, readers can post comments.

But there's more to blogs than just that, lots more.

If you've actually never visited a blog you might get a little taste of what's out there by visiting Bloggers Blog http://www.bloggersblog.com/

Th is site bills itself as "Blogging the Blogosphere: reporting on blogging news and trends". On this one site you'll find a list of blog listed by category in a menu.

What makes blogs so interesting and popular? What makes them different from books newspapers or magazines?

Blogs are a digital medium, which means that Bloggers can post new articles very quickly. This makes blogs a very responsive and very current format.

In addition, Blogs by their very nature are intended to be highly personalized, individualized and opinionated.

The author is entirely responsible for the content and can make comments which directly reflect their personal bias on any given subject and, get feedback directly from readers.

In other words blogs foster a sense of entitlement, participation and community which other kinds of media do not.

Here's a quick example of how you can find blogs on most any topic.
Simply go to a blog search engine like ice rocket http://www.icerocket.com/ as one example. Enter a word or phrase in the search form, hit enter and the results will tell you what blogs are out there with current articles related to your topic.

If as an example you have an interest in science, enter that word in the search form and bingo, you'll get a search result of 1,012,328 blog articles, more or less depending on the day you search.

Blogs often contain information related to very specific topics. A Search on "worm farming, as an example, revealed 492 recent posts. How about Alpaca ranching? Another search turns up 18 hits on that topic.

The world of blogging has become so much a part of internet culture that it is sometimes referred to, often disparagingly, as the "blogisphere". Blogging accounts for a huge percentage of daily internet activity, perhaps only out paced by email in terms of volume.

Blogs range from the serious to the silly and everything in between.
They've matured and moved from a fledging technological novelty to a serious and legitimate media tool and often a commercial enterprise.

From a business perspective Blogs are an increasing important interface between businesses and customers. From small independent operations to huge multinational corporations, all types of businesses now use blogs as communications and marketing tools.

Blogs are also, charities, journalists and of course the news media. Governments too have blogs, As an example the US
government website has a page that contains a long list of official government blogs.

http://www.usa.gov/Topics/Refe rence_Shelf/News/blog.shtml

Speaking of the media, want to see what's current at MSNBC, check out their blog at http://dailynightly.msnbc.msn. com/ , how about CBS? http://www.cbsnews.com/section s/publiceye/main500486.shtml or CNN http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/

The re are many different blog rating sites which you can visit to find the most popular blogs. One of the best is eBizMBA http://www.ebizmba.com/article s/popular-blogs

This site lists the top 30 most popular blogs by using a combination of statistics.

Here's the top 5 blogs on their listed in order of popularity.

Gizmodo (techno gadgets

http://:www.gizmodo.com

TMZ (From the TV show)

http://www.tmz.com/

Engadget (More gadgets)

http://www.engadget.com/

Life Hacker (tips and downloads for getting things done)

http://www.lifehacker.com/

The Huffington Post (The Internet News Blogs Video Community)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

Blogs often cover niche topics which are not large enough or news worthy to be of interest to a wide audience. These are often topics about which both reader and author have common, often strong feelings. What makes blogs work is they offer everyone a chance to be heard.

There are entire blogging communities built around a single topic or area of interest. Joining such a community gives users a chance to connect with others from anywhere in the world, virtually.

As an example, Blog catalog is a social network for Bloggers and one of the largest blog directories on the internet http://www.blogcatalog.com/

Let 's not forget about famous or infamous celebrity blogs. Perhaps not surprisingly, many celebrities have the own blog and some actually write their own posts.

As an example the actor Alex Baldwin has a blog at the Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ alec-baldwin/ as does the comedian Bill Maher http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ bill-maher/

As you might expect Paris Hilton has a blog on Myspace http://www.myspace.com/parishi lton and William Shatner, the very same Captain Kirk of Star Trek fame, hosts his own blog at http://www.williamshatner.com/

If you'd like a list of celebrity blogs, just pay a visit to the following page at Bloggers Blog http://www.bloggersblog.com/ce lebritybloglinks/

Chances are good there more than one famous name in the long list of celebrity blogs you'll want to check out.

After visiting a few blogs you might decide to start one of you own.
It's dead easy to do, even for a novice and best of all it can be done for free.

So why the heck would you want to start blogging? Perhaps you'd like to share family stories, information, pictures or videos with other family members. Some people blog about their travels, others just want to sound off about a specific topic. Some actually earn a living blogging professionally.

Whether you take up blogging as a hobby, or as a means of earning a little money on the side, perhaps even as a profession, you have to begin with getting your own site.

Following are some of the blogging platforms and blog hosts where you can get stated.

Many people set up their first blog using Blogger.com https://www.blogger.com/start This free blogging platform is sponsored and hosted by Google and has everything a novice needs to begin. Another popular free blogging platform is called Wordpress http://wordpress.com/ , which, according to their statistics host an incredible 4,944,020 blogs.

Other blogging platforms included LiveJournal http://www.livejournal.com/ Hubpages http://hubpages.com/ Movable Type http://www.movabletype.org/ TypePad http://www.typepad.com/ and Squarespace http://www.squarespace.com/ It's important to note that not all of these are free.

Simply put: Blogging is a popular and powerful communications and information tool in history. Blogs put the power of publishing directly into your hands. Whether you want to read or write, blogs offer something for everyone.

Learn more about this author, Marvin Double.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.

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