notes on blogging

it has come to my attention that some of you may never have seen a blog before, so here is my brief description and some notes:

a blog is basically a journal or opinion piece by a writer or group of writers. wiki has a great explanation, where i just learned that its short for web log (one of those things others probably realized, but i had not). blogs can be about specific subjects or just ramblings and mine will be a personal blog used to keep people up to date with where i am and what i'm thinking (at least an edited version of my thoughts - hopefully). so far, i have been updating fairly frequently, but i'm not sure how long that will keep up. once abroad, i am hoping for at least weekly updates, which will be easier now that i have this shiny new laptop and fancy new ipod touch (which, btw, i heard people complain on other blogs that its not called an itouch - its an ipod touch. i dont know how i feel about this yet).

if you have a gmail account, you can leave comments on my blog (hopefully they are nice - if they are not, i have the ability to delete them [mental note: figure out how to delete nasty comments]). i will be putting polls on the right column of my blog homepage, and you do not need to have a gmail account to participate in these. for the most part, i imagine i will put up quizzes or polls where you can select more than one answer, so always try to do that if you so fancy. again, if you're not familiar, all this means that people can see who has commented (because you have to sign in) but cannot see (including me) who has participated in the poll.

further, if you are really into blogs, or want to be into blogs, there is this fancy new device called google reader. basically, the idea behind google reader is that, say you read my blog and a blog about movies and maybe another blog about sports (who likes both movies and sports, i dont know, but its possible...). rather than constantly clicking on a link to each blog to see if there is a new posting (and invariably forgetting about the blogs), you can set up an account on google reader that acts like an inbox for all your blogs. so, anytime someone writes a new post, or another person comments on a blog you like, you will get a litle message in google reader (or some other indication - i have not yet set up an account, so am not 100% sure how it works). the wiki link above gives a good, technical description, but i like it because in the top right corner of the page you will see a screen shot of the google reader interface. i'm sure there are other programs that do the same, but since i am blogging on blogger.com, google reader is easy to use (since blogger is owned by google). so, google reader will do all the work for you and you won't have to click on blogs again only to discover disappointingly that there are no new posts.

[side note: am i afraid of google taking over the world - yes, but i'm not sure i will be around to see the aftermath, so i promote them for now.]

i hope this little rambling helps anyone who is new to the blogging community. questions?