For those of you who don’t know, there is a revolution underway — and it's underground. A movement of would-be journalists, reporters, and creative thinkers are publishing article after article, (some of them read by thousands of people a day) on the internet. These online writers are called “bloggers”, and the columns and articles that they write are called "blogs."
If the mainstream news is provided by the more traditional sites along the information superhighway, (CNN.com, MSNBC.com, etc.) blogs are the frontage roads which enable the reader to go just as fast and reach the same destination all while getting the feeling of traveling the "road less traveled."
The word “blog” comes from two words, actually; “web” and “log.” A blog is an online journal (web log) of sorts, except that the blog is shared with the world, not just future posterity.
It is easy to set up a blog. A person with the appetite to communicate his or her message with some electronic savvy, signs up for an account with a free online blogging service, such as Blogger.com, Radioland.com, or Livejournal.com. Once a username and password are assigned, the user then logs in to his or her account, and starts their first blog.
There are hundreds of thousands of active bloggers and subject content ranges all the way from “War with Iraq” to “sugar-water.com”, a college girl’s web log. If you have heard anything in the news or seen it in a movie, it’s been blogged. Some who blog do it solely for the purpose of establishing their own voice in the underground press. It’s a favorite pastime for many online users and has caught on so much recently that it’s been widely reported by such sources as CNN.com, Washingtonpost.com, and Foxnews.com.
There are also several notable celebrities who blog. Some of them include Anna Kournikova, William Shatner, and Sheryl Crow.
About eight months ago, I signed up with Blogger.com, and started my first blog, called “Innate Perspectives.” I soon learned that my articles could be organized by date, and that my older posts were “archived” with links to them from the homepage of my blog’s site. That blog has grown in size and scope, and I’ve since moved to a service called Movable Type (movabletype.org), which is slightly more complicated to set up and run, since it’s usually hosted locally (that means that you do the programming to keep it running, unless, of course you have some website-literate friends that can do it for you.) No matter what blogging service you use, it’s still pretty much the same thing; journalism from your personal computer.
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