by Kenneth Andrews

Created on: November 10, 2009   Last Updated: December 24, 2009

In the last decade, blogs have quickly established themselves as an exciting new communications medium. In the early days of the Internet, people had to rely on personal home pages, often constructed through the sadly defunct Geocities, and make do with a 'Latest news' section to let people know what they had been up to recently. Blogging changed all that, with even the most untechnical Internet user now able to use their own little corner of the web to share news, pictures, music, videos and their innermost thoughts. Anyone now has the potential to become a columnist or a critic, and if you're clever with a Google adsense account, it can be very profitable as well.

Blogs are easy to update, interactive, flexible and fun. People enjoy reading them, and search engines enjoy indexing them. Any company without a blog presence of some kind in 2009 is missing a valuable trick, possibly a fatal error in the current climate. But what have been the blog highlights of the last twelve months? There's only one way to find out... in no particular order, naturally...

101 Reasons to Stop Writing

There's a man with a mission out there, and his mission is to stop you from writing. By force if necessary. Sean Lindsay has been trying to convince his readers to stop writing for several years now, although only a handful of his 'reasons' have been posted, with a current estimated completion date of 2024. Railing very wittily against self-publishing, NaNoWriMo (national novel writing month, where you have to write a 'novel' of 50,000 words during the month of November, for those lucky enough to be uninitiated), and probably sites such as Helium as well, Lindsay and other contributors make a good case for you to put your pen down, uninstall Microsoft Word, and learn to play chess instead. There are those who claim the blog plays a kind of devil's advocate role which aims to encourage you to write even better prose through its damning words, but Lindsay very sensibly denies this to the hilt. The site's FAQ even has this as its first question:

"Q: This is all a gag, right?
A: I'm deadly serious. I'd break into your house and steal all your pens if I could."

Is he serious, or is it 'tough love' writing advice? Either way, it's hilarious stuff.

Neil Gaiman

Writer Neil Gaiman has been blogging for a long time indeed, and his blog is required reading for any Goth or pretentious English student worth their salt. Gaiman's career has blossomed across most media since his early success with

• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next Page >>