by Carolyn Henry

Created on: August 08, 2009

Simply put, photoblogging is blogging, or online journaling, with photo images instead of text. Photography has long been a popular hobby, and today the widespread use of digital photography has made taking pictures easier and more fun than ever. And blogging, we know, is a popular and easy way to communicate our daily stream of ideas, gain an audience, and make connections with others who share our interests. So it comes as no surprise that many photographers, both amateur and professional, have seized upon blogging as an excellent way to gain an audience for their images.

Thousands of photoblogs exist already, and new ones are being created every day. Photoblogs cover a wide variety of themes and interests: urban, nature, travel, black and white, etc. Another popular theme is a photo a day, where the blogger posts one interesting photograph taken every day of something new and interesting. Photoblogs may include text descriptions of the pictures or even the full stories which accompany them, but really, words are not necessary and the images often stand alone, or with a simple title.

In addition to digital cameras, the advent of the camera phone has provided nearly everyone with a reliable, portable and ever present camera. This has made for a whole lot of casual, mostly unobtrusive and sometimes highly interesting photographs of scenes that would otherwise never be captured by a camera. And this has led to the phenomenon of mobile blogging, or moblogging. Basically with this kind of mobile photoblogging, pictures taken with a camera phone can be sent to a blog immediately and easily, by pressing a few buttons, so that blogs can be updated with a stream of photographs taken onsite, seconds before. Because of the lower quality of these images, mobile photoblogging is useful for bloggers interested in getting out pictures of news and social events as these are taking place, and not for serious and artistic photographers.

Common blogging platforms, such as Blogger and Wordpress, can be used for photoblogging, although these were really designed for text. Other free platforms, such as Fotolog.com and Fotopages.com, exist specifically for the purpose of blogging with photographs. Yahoo's Flickr is also used in this manner. It's fun and it's highly popular.

There are also many photoblog communities, where bloggers can list their own sites and browse through listings of links to hundreds of other photblogs. Photoblogs.org is a popular community site. A visit to this site give you a good idea of the different kinds of photoblogs that exist.

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