How Blogging Can Help Your Online Presence

A very short history of blogs and blogging.

According to Wikipedia.com a blog is a user-generated website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in a reverse chronological order. The term "blog" is derived from "Web log." "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

The modern blog evolved from the online diary, where people would keep a running account of their personal lives. The term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger on 17 December 1997. The short form, "blog," was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase we blog in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in April or May of 1999.

A blog often provides commentary or news on a particular subject, such as food, politics, or local news; some function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic.

Blogging is a natural progression or evolution of online trends such as Usenet and forums. It is claimed that the modern blog evolved from the online diary, and early weblogs were simply manually updated components of common websites.

Today, there are many blog platforms with two of the most popular being Blogger and Wordpress. Wordpress has their own site as does blogger at which you can post your own blog. Wordpress however has software which you can install on your own web domain and therefore have a totally unique "blog" address.

Blogging is a great way to keep your website readers updated on what's happening with one's website. Individuals set up blogs for many reasons. One is to keep their family and friends updated about what is going on in the blogger's life. Another is to make business associates aware of meetings, ongoing trends in a business, advice on business building and much more. Bands could easily use a blog to tell their fans information about the band members, how the band got started, where the band is going to play next, and much more. A blog for a band could also contain audio clips that someone could listen to when going to the blog. Blogs that are nothing but sound or sound and video are known as podcasts.

Blogs have become major components of online networking sites such as MySpace among others. Much of the reason for this is that blogging can help increase your SEO or Search Engine Optimization. In fact it is one of the methods of promotion that I mention on my lens How To Become Famous.

There are many ways to use blogs and I personally have several used for various subjects and purposes. In fact I have one blog which I am linking here which is a blog about blogging. It has just recently been rebuilt from the ground up as I have changed the address of the blog from an index on the blog to the main url. The url for this particular blog is http://www.blogsmart-resources.com.