Welcome to the Blogsphere

Yesterday, I got two people interested in my blog, with just one post, and a post which I thought wouldn’t appeal to too many people other than me. But this post seems to have struck a chord with both my Dad and another uncle; they seemed to have really liked the post.

But yesterday I was getting dad set up with bloglines to help him read and follow some blogs, during which I realised there a lot of people out there who still need to understand what blogs are and how they are helpful/painful.

This spawned off this post, I will start with the information of "what a blog is" and how people can go about setting up one and reading many.

Lot of bloggers have written what blogs are? Including why they blog and the tools and technologies that they use, This post will be an attempt to aggregate these posts being a single point of information for all the readers.

What are blogs?
"I think of my blog as an über home page. It's the web page that opens when I open my browser and it's the focal point for all my computing. What makes it different from a traditional home page is that in addition to containing links to places that I regularly visit, it:

 is a publishing environment that makes it very easy to add or edit items.
 is a living document that watches other parts of the Net and displays contents from or information about those parts (for example, when the last update was).
 feeds information about itself to anything that wants to listen. These other places can point to, publish, or run programs on the parts of my blog that they are interested in.
 enables different views of the items, for example:
o by date
o by category
o by popularity
o by rating
 Traditionally blog items are sorted by reverse date (newest first).
 allows people to post and read comments about a blog item. Comments can be either local or remote (e.g., in someone else's blog).
 makes it easy for others (both people and programs) to directly link to and/or criticize a blog item or blog property. "

"Blog is an instant publishing tool. Blog is freedom of expression. Blogs are fresh and and somewhat categorized as beginner's journalism. Blog is by real life people who face the real problems and in turn express their anger, joy, sorrow, light moments etc, and not experts in journalism. Blogs can be used as:-

 Universities for students
 Companies for knowledge management
 News source other then regular media
 Business blogs to communicate with clients and display new products
 A form of resume
 Chit chat
 Personal blogs
 Single theme blogs by experts and enthusiasts"

My View
"Blogs are great place to write/articulate things that you have in mind for your benefit later and others benefit today" In economy or world where knowledge is wealth/power. There is a huge need for people to have access to information/knowledge, before we could only get information from the web today, they are able to access knowledge, as bloggers don’t only state facts they put a context to it along with their opinion and critical analysis.

Knowledge is wealth/power the more we have access to the better we off we are. Blogs open whole new worlds to people, both on the professional side as well as personal side, I still haven’t heard of anybody meeting thru blogs and getting hitched, but for sure have heard of somebody getting a job/offer based on the blog.

The two anti's of blogging are

information overload
attention diversion to the not so important things,
loss in productivity

I can completely comprehend these points and agree with them to a large extent, it is very easy to get sucked into the blog world and get consumed by it, and we need to be careful that it not affect our work/personal lives.

Then not only would you hear about people meeting and getting married via blogs, you will hear of divorces because of blogs.

Now that you know what a blog is there are two important things you will need to know

1. How to read the blogs
2. How to Create your own blog

For both these there is already an excellent peice available at heather(microsoftie) blog - http://blogs.msdn.com/heatherleigh/archive/2004/09/24/233979.aspx