Blogs and Blogging

Make money online blogging

Make money blogging

Make money blogging online!

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Blogging Terms:

What is a blog?

A blog is basically a website, with a few unique features that set it apart. A blog lets you write content easily and have share it just as easily. Blogging programs make the task of writing to the web very easy indeed. Much easier than putting up a web site, in fact!

Some blogs are simply online diaries or journals of someone's every day thoughts. Some blogs meant simply for friends or family while others are blogs written by businesses that want to communicate online with customers. Even the mainstream media is blogging today in addition to their traditional pulpits and experts are sharing their knowledge online with fellow experts and the general public at large.

What is a blogger?

A blogger is simply someone who writes on a blog. Bloggers are a diverse group. Among the ordinary online bloggers you will find hobbyists, journalists, grandmothers, aunts, sisters, business analysts and on and on. One very important thing connects all these online bloggers: they simply love what they do and they love to write and tell about it.

What is the blogosphere?

The word blogosphere is used to describe the interconnected world or community of blogs and blogging. Bloggers read other blogs, they link to them, they make reference them in their own blogging, they post comments on each others' blogs. Blogs and bloogers have, in effect, created their own unique blog culture.

What is a blog post?

A blog post is generally anything written to a blog. You have a comment regarding your favorite sports team and you "post" it to your blog for everyone to read.

what are Comments?

This is one of the key features and facets of any blog...comments. Readers can read your post and then leave their own comments on the blog about what they think. Its like a conversation in cyber space. These comments are a big part of what makes blogging into a community. You have social interaction or networking and relationship develop as comments and blog posts are bandied back and forth. The comment areas are usually found at the bottom of a blog post.

One of the real problems through 2005 and 2006 is "comment spam"! Instead of simply comments being posted, you also get links back to another person's blog or web site for the sole purpose of generating traffic from your blog to their site for profit only. Software has sprung up that can post thousands of spam comments across the community in a very short time. In fact, you may look at the comments to your last post and find dozens of comments left overnight that contain duplicate content and the spamming links over and over again! Advance blogs now require commenters to enter a code manually before they can post in order to cut down on spam comments.

What are Trackbacks?

TrackBack is a method for communicating between blogs. Blogger A writes a new post commenting on a post found at blogers B blog. Then the blogger A can notify blogger B with a "TrackBack ping". Blogs B will display summaries of and links to all the commenting entries below the original entry. This method allows readers to easily follow the conversation going back and forth over several blogs.

Once again, some individuals and companies have abused this TrackBack feature and insert spam links on some blogs. This is similar to comment spam but avoids some of the safeguards designed to stop the latter practice. As a result, TrackBack spam filters similar to those implemented against comment spam now exist in many blogging systems. 

What are blogrolls?

A blogroll is a collection of links to other weblogs. Blogrolls are found on most weblogs.

Permalinks

A permalink is short form fo the phrase "permanent link" and is a type of URL designed to refer to a specific piece of .information It can be a news item, an online story or blog post made by you! So each blog entry you make has a "permalink", a real link or URL that can be bookmarked, linked to, and most importantly found and indexed by the search engines. This link is permanent and unique for each piece of information and givies each blog post its own unique identity on the web. And since blogs are updated frequently [often every day if not more often] and this permanent identity not only benefits search engines, but allows for blog readers to scan older posts no longer shown on home pages.

Content Organization

When someone writes something on a blog, it is shown at the top of the page - this is known as reverse chronological order.

Each time something new is written on a blog, it is posted (meaning it appears on the blog) at the very top of the main blog page, and the pages for each category archive, pushing the previous articles down. This unique way of sharing information and thoughts, organizing them with "new" at the top sets blogs apart from websites. Just like websites, however, the content is usually organized. Each new post is assigned to one or more categories, making it easy to find later.

Tags

Tags are the latest innovation on the Blogosphere. Tags are a way for authors to to put special links within a post that categorizes the content. Blog search engines like IceRocket (http://www.icerocket.com/) and Technorati use (http://www.technorati.com/) these tags to help searchers refine and find content on the topics they are most interested in quickly. Qumana has a sophisticated tagging ability that allows bloggers to describe via tags what is in the content of their blog posts and insert the tags with one click. This helps search engines and blog directories to find that content. Better tagging means better visibility on the Web.

What is a feed? What is RSS?

A feed is a computer generated file that is created with each and every blog post - this file is sent onto the internet and allows anyone to read it using an aggregator (see below), rather than visiting the website. This gives great power to individuals and companies to easily share (or 'syndicate') their blog posts. The feed is very much like the information inserted into a newspaper and distributed around the world - the only difference, this newspaper is online, and contains an infinite variation of personal feeds all read together.

Every time a blogger posts new content, the file is updated that gets sent out to the Internet, can be searched, and can be read by other bloggers in Aggregators or even delivered as email.

There are three facets of blogging that remain constant:

Linking

Commenting

Relationships (between bloggers)

Linking

Linking to other blogs (via your blogroll or your posts) is the hallmark of blogging. It is this network, this mesh of thoughts and ideas, that makes blogging what it is. Linking is also what makes blogs search engine magnets - each link you get is a 'vote' for your blog in search engines, making it more powerful. Linking then flows into the next facet of blogging, comments.

Commenting

As mentioned already, comments from others to your blog posting is a halllmark of the blogging world. You can't do this on an ordinary web site unless the web master runs some type pf forum. With blogs, interaction is vital to the proliferation of these conversations in cyberspace.

Relationships

Blogging is truly a global social network. Thousands of friendships are made every day. The process of reading other people's blogs, leaving comments, linking to them, inevitability starts the process of forming friendships and relationships. Of course, there are spats and squabbles, and even cliques, but by and large it is these relationships that make blogging what it is.

Markets are Conversations

These relationships have an interesting facet when it comes to business. Markets are conversations in the truest sense in the blogosphere - employees, customers, investors all talk and participate in the blogosphere. Most likely, your company has been talked about by someone - customers are taking a more active role now than ever in actively participating in buying decisions and company feedback. Businesses now have a unique opportunity to get in, listen, and react to this commentary, and to take lead on their own blog if they so wish. This conversation, this dialogue, is emerging as an important shift to business communications.

Number of blogs

As of November, 21.2 million blogs are being tracked by Technorati, the largest blog search engine. This is growing at a rate of 1 blog per second - with over half of those blogs continuing to be active, written chronicles by bloggers around the world.

Source: Technorati

Number of blog readers out there

More than half of the population in North America knowingly read blogs - with millions more reading, interacting, and clicking on ads in blogs.

The number of new blogs created per day as of March 2005

What are the demographics of blogs?

Young or old? Who is blogging?

Blog Demographics
Age Range	Blogs Created by Age	Percent
10-12	55,500	1.3%
13-19	2,120,000	51.5%
20-29	1,630,000	39.6%
30-39	241,000	5.8%
40-49	41,700	1.0%
50-59	18,500	0.4%
60-69	13,900	0.3%
Total	4,120,000	100%
Source: Perseus Development Corp.