A Short Description of Blogging

Anyone who has had their eyes and ears open for the last year has witnessed the explosion in blogging. News programs on TV have even added blog post to their sources of news. It’s a phenomenon that's hard to ignore.

What is blogging?
Simply put, it’s a daily posting of someone's thoughts on a web page. Postings are like small articles from the Blog's author. The subject matter of these postings is as varied as human beings themselves. Some are trivial - some of more substance. This is our first blog so it probably tends more toward the former than the latter.

Blog Syndication
A primary feature of blogs is that they are syndicated. They are available for others to use. In other words, if someone wanted to use what I've written here, they are free to do so as long as they give me attribution.

Blog technology even makes it easy to do that. Users can subscribe to blogs they like. Any new postings on those blogs are automatically retrieved by the user’s computer to be read at their leisure. In other words, they don't have to search each day for new stuff - it's automatically sent to the user.

RSS Feed Aggregator
The technology used to perform this miracle is something called RSS (Remote Site Syndication). The software on the user’s computer that fetches the various blog postings is called an aggregator or feed reader. In other words, it aggregates all the new stuff (daily postings from the various subscribed-to blogs) and presents it to the user neatly organized in topic folders. A popular blog aggregator can be had from Pluck.com. And it’s free.

Blogs are a great way to keep informed and up to date on the various topics you're interested in. From politics to science, technology to commerce, blogs provide a wealth of information for free.

If you have your own website, you can even use this information on your own websites to keep your visitors coming back for more. So if you're not already a blogger, you should seriously take a look. It’s easy to do and fun to boot.

Take care.

Mike Tyler