Welcome to the world of blogging! Blogging in a nutshell, is basically an online diary. Anyone can set up their own blog and you do not even have to use your own identity! Blogs can be about anything and usually contain text, images, maybe videos and perhaps links to other blogs too. Another great feature about blogs is that they can be interactive, allowing viewers to comment and post messages.

There are so many different types and genres of blogs. There are corporate blogs, where companies can use them for marketing and PR purposes. Societies and clubs set up their own blogs to keep members up to date with club news, events and suchlike. Then there are personal blogs, where individuals can choose to share their innermost thoughts, experiences, imaginations, views and ideas, basically anything they wish to talk or start conversations about!

If you wish to create a blog you can either set up your own website or use a site that offers free blogging, such as (Google) Blogger, Wordpress or LiveJournal. That’s the easy part!

The hard part is deciding what to talk about! However if you feel that you haven’t much to say you could always try micro-blogging. This platform allows users to write brief posts, usually under 200 characters. The most popular micro-blogging sites are Twitter and Tumblr. Both of these allow users to share text, photos, quotes and links. Updates for these sites can be posted via SMS, email or web browser.

Anyone can randomly read a blog on the internet or you could choose to join a blogging site. Blogging sites themselves create communities where bloggers can follow, ‘like’ and link to other bloggers and be kept up to date with their latest posts. If you want to find a blog about a particular issue or simply browse others people’s blogs you can use ‘blog search engines’ such as Technorati. This useful site collects, highlights and distributes global online conversations. It indexes more than a million blogs and offers the ‘Top 100’ most popular blogs.

Social networking can connect and alert online users to bloggers and popular blog posts. With a simple click of a button, you can join, follow and share your favourite blogs and be alerted when a new blog is posted. You can even ‘dislike’ too!

Whatever your interests are you’re guaranteed to find a blog that would be of interest to you. And if you don’t then hey, looks like you’ve just found your first topic to start blogging about!