A blog or "weB LOG" is a personal journal on the Web. Weblogs cover as many different topics, and express as many opinions, as there are people writing them. Some blogs are highly influential and have enormous readership, while others are mainly intended for a close circle of family and friends. Examples are the business blogs in this site (inclusion is not an endorsement of the sites. While this site is based on Joomla, classified as a content management system (CMS), I still consider this as a blog.

 

Blogs have grown separate from websites (which will be discussed in a separate post). Blogging may bring huge profits for some bloggers (including some successful Pinoy blogging entrepreneurs, which will also be dicussed later), but, at least for this site, it's more about the fun of knowing how the net works and seeing the site grow. Anyway, here are some tips to get you started in blogging:

 

Choose a blogging platform. There are a number of choices, depending on your preference. Social networking sites like multiply (see discussion on commercial sites), i.ph, funchain (check the blogs Bong Amora and Davao Councilor Peter Lavina) and friendster also have built-in blogs. It’s good to start with free blog platforms because, well, it’s free. Simply forget or delete the blog if it’s not working for you. However, once traffic starts trickling in and the page rank goes up, it’s a waste throwing away the site. An important factor crops up as readership increases - bandwidth. For instance, i.ph has a monthly bandwidth limit and a popular site may become inaccessible during the latter part of the month. Now, there’s an upgrade to a premium account, but it’s hard to pay for something that’s free somewhere - wordpress, blogger and blogsome. Wordpress is a great platform, which is the reason why the Philippine e-Legal Forum is on Wordpress. Another lawyer-blogger using Wordpress is Atty. Cortes (Philippine Theo Law Gee). Another good platform is Blogger, as exemplified by the blog of Dean Jorge Bocobo (Philippine Commentary). Unlike Wordpress, Blogger allows adsense, which is also true with another blogging platform - Blogsome. Major Tom (Citizen on Mars) is using Blogsome for his blog, which looks spectacular.

 

Select a physical theme. A “theme” may refer to your blog’s appearance. In my book, it should be minimalist - refreshing to the eyes and easy to navigate. The Atty-at-Work and the the Philippine e-Legal Forum use K2, a great Wordpress theme. You don't have to be an expert to tinker with your blog. Just refer to helpful tutorials such as Nektros (A 7 step guide to fixing your Wordpress sidebar in Internet [bloody] Explorer; parts one, two, three, four, five-a, five-b, six and seven), Paul Stamatiou (Customizing K2; parts one, two and three), Cory Holt (The K2 Diet; part two) and the K2 Community Forums (if you have the time and patience to read through everything).

Decide on the content theme. Theming is not just about how your site looks. I have to use “physical” theme above to distinguish it from the “theme” as it relates to content. I long grappled with the dilemma of sticking to a pure law blog, something which is partly solved by placing purely legal matters at the Forum and business matters here at the Pinoy Entrepreneurs.

Consider adding sitemeter and analytics. In the words of Google Analytics, this tool tells you everything you want to know about how your visitors found you and how they interact with your site. This is not only for probloggers. For those who consider blogging as a hobby, like me, it’s a cool way of following the growth of one’s creation. I tried to add Google Analytics to this blog’s Site Meter, but I still have to find a way to integrate it with K2. For a basic comparison of Site Meter, Google Analytics and Measure Map, check FatMixx.com (”Measure Map, Google Analytics, and Site Meter: A simple comparison”).

Blog syndication and aggregators. Syndication is creating a feed for an information source. There are a number of aggregators, some of which are bundled in a single feed management provider like Feedburner (it also has an e-mail subscription feature). Aggregators/bookmarking services include del.icio.us and reddit.

Submit to search engines and directories. Search enginer spiders will eventually find a blog with sheer lapse of time. However, there’s a way of expediting the process - submission to blog directories also help, although I understand there are limitations in some directories. For starters, proceed to submit your site at established search engines like Google and Yahoo. You could also do this with our very own, Yehey!. Also, try submiting your blog at MSN or at FreeWebSubmission (this claims to include Google and Alexa). On the other hand, if you try Alexa, you’ll still go through DMOZ, so better go direct to DMOZ.

Consider claiming blog at technorati. There are many reasons for claiming a blog at technorati, although I still have to find a way of showing technorati embeds here. Wordpress has instructions on how to put embeds.

This discussion is based on personal experience. Try tinkering with different blogging platforms and find out for yourself.  For more tips on blawgging, and blogging in general, I sugget problogger’s article on 31 Days to Building a Better Blog - Day 31 (I threw away the old title of this post and decided to follow this one).