So let's say you've been reading all about blogs and blogging and bloggers, and now you're interested in trying it yourself — despite how ridiculous you feel when you say the word "blog," or when you try to imagine introducing yourself by saying: "I'm a blogger."
Don't feel bad. It is kind of a ridiculous word, when it gets right down to it. But it's really just a tool, like a typewriter, or a computer. The word "blog" is just a term for what happens when you use a piece of software to publish your thoughts about a topic (or topics) on the Internet for others to read. Try telling friends "I'm a publisher," and see how that feels.
But first, you have to decide two things, and one is what you want to write about. You don't have to pick a specific thing, obviously, but it often helps to focus on one topic or area, rather than just writing about what you did that day, or what you saw on television (although that works for some people). If you don't care whether you ever get any readers other than your immediate family, then go ahead and write about whatever you want.
Take billionaire Mark Cuban, for example. He likes to write about his basketball team, the Dallas Mavericks, and also about technology. New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell writes about, well... the same kinds of things he writes about in the New Yorker. Talk-show host Rosie O'Donnell, meanwhile, writes poetry, talks about her kids and pretty much anything else she feels strongly about — but then, she's already famous.
The other thing you have to decide is where to put your blog. If you're like a lot of people under 25, you might just want to post your thoughts to your Facebook page (or your "wall"), or to a MySpace page. In many ways, those have become the most popular blogging tools. But if you'd rather have a bit more control over what you publish and how, then you will need blog-publishing software of some kind. And there you also have a number of choices to make.
The easiest way to start blogging, apart from using Facebook or MySpace, is to use one of the many free blog-hosting services that are out there. One of the most popular — and with good reason — is Wordpress.com, which was started a couple of years ago by a guy named Matt Mullenweg when he was just 19. When you go to Wordpress, it asks you for a user-name and password, and the username then becomes the name of your blog, whose Internet address will be http://yourusername.wordpress.com. That's pretty much it. You now have a blog.
Wordpress makes it extremely easy not just to post (and edit) entries to your blog — which you do by just typing into a box and then clicking "publish" — but to configure your blog as well. For example, the service comes with a number of pre-formatted "themes" that include a variety of background images, layout styles (two column, three column, etc.), images for the top of your blog, and so on. You can change from one to another as easily as choosing a template and clicking the "Save changes" button.
The more recent updates to Wordpress, which is continually rolling out improvements, allow bloggers to easily add features — known as "widgets" — to their blogs, including lists of the most-read and most commented-on posts on your blog, tiny music players, video clips, an instant messenger tool that works through the Web browser, a series of your Flickr photos, and so on. Like most other blog tools, you can also add a calendar, a link to the archives of your blog (your previous posts), and the "feed" from various Web services such as del.icio.us.
In addition to Wordpress, there are several other prominent blog-hosting services, including Blogger — one of the first blog companies, bought by Google several years ago — as well as Typepad and LiveJournal, both of which are owned by a company called Six Apart (Typepad is the only one that doesn't have a free level of service). A newer arrival (also owned by Six Apart) is Vox, and one of its features is that it allows you to control who sees your blog, in the same way that MySpace and Facebook allow you to restrict your readers to only your friends. In fact, you can control who sees each picture, video or post.
If you use one of these hosted services to set up your blog, however, one thing to remember is that you may not always want to keep your blog with that service. At some point you may want to switch to a different provider, or you might decide that you want to have your own Web address or "domain name," and move your blog there. At that point, the most important thing will be how easy it is to export all your posts — and the comments — from your existing service to your new one. Wordpress and Typepad both make it relatively easy, but others do not.
One of the nice things about Wordpress is that they regularly feature posts and links from their member blogs on the login page, which is essentially free publicity for your blog. Who knows — you could catch people's eye with one of your posts, and then you might be proud to describe yourself as a "blogger."
