Share your Ideas with a Blog [Director's Cut]

Blogging isn’t rocket science; that’s why it’s growing at an astronomical rate. Since the beginning of the web, people have been sharing ideas more easily, but with blogs the communicative properties of the web have been harnessed for us mere mortal’s. Truly the idea of a personal webpage has come to the masses.

Sharing ideas is a piece of cake with blogging, especially so with some of the tools I found for this month’s review. With them you can write down your thoughts and post photos to your cubbyhole on the World Wide Web. As with every web industry these days, some of the tools you have to pay for, and others are free. Below I’ll cover a few of the best FREE tools available for new bloggers.

Blogger
One of the easiest blogging services around today is Blogger (www.blogger.com) by Google. Through Blogger you can create a free user account, pick a sub-domain for your blog, (e.g. sinkroutine.blogspot.com) and then pick a title for the page. From there it’s incredibly easy to begin posting to your blog using a WYSIWYG editor or straight html. Blogger features a good number of standard templates with an excellent variety of colors. Each one is very well “polished” and is something most people would be proud of displaying. For those eager to customize their blog, Blogger.com allows advanced manipulation of content through tags and CSS style sheets. Once your blog is online Blogger makes it easy to start sharing your ideas with the world by allowing you to make yourself public for other users to find. Public blogs are searchable through the various blogging indexes, and Blogger.com blogs can even be found on Google.com if you search hard enough. Blogger’s big downfall is this same public availability. “Un-public” blogs are not locked down by user (their just not indexed), so if someone randomly stumbles across your blog they will be able to read it. Overall Blogger.com is a very user-friendly blog host, which covers all the basics of blogging.

Movable Type
Movable type is a product of Six Apart (www.sixapart.com/movabletype), a company looking to master the art of blogging, in more ways than one. Movable type is a blog tool which can be downloaded by advanced users in order to setup a blog on a user’s own host, rather than using a free (and often times, ad-based) blog host. Movable Type is the leader in custom-developed blogs which accomplish exactly what a user wants, with more features than can be listed in most articles. Movable type is available to individual users; and a limited version (1 author/ 3 blogs limit) is available for free, so long as you don’t expect any sort of customer service for the product. Movable Type is a product worth looking at if you know what Perl scripts are and aren’t scared of installing something on a web server.

Flickr
Flickr (www.Flickr.com) started as a community to efficiently share your photos with the rest of the world, in addition to your own circle of friends. Through Flickr you can post your photos, organize them, comment on them, and allow comments from others. Plus their still in beta which means they haven’t “gotten all corporate” yet. Their service currently allows you to share your 100 most recent photos or you can pay a service fee to share an unlimited number of photos if you wish. The reason Flickr is discussed here is because it’s become a popular way of posting photos to your blog. Their tools work with a majority of blog hosts, and even if you’re not quite ready to start blogging, it’s a fantastic place to start sharing your photos with others, and enjoy a community truly built for idea/ photo sharing.

LiveJournal
LiveJournal (www.LiveJournal.com) is another popular product of Six Apart. As the name describes, it’s aptly suited for bloggers who wish to post journal entries to the web. The LiveJournal community of users is truly built around interacting with people on a personal level; allowing users to post lists of their favorite things and share them for other users to find. It promotes friendship development, and in addition to Blogger.com’s standard feature set, has the added ability to lock-down your blog like Area 51. For each post, an author can decide who in the LiveJournal (and general web) community can see that post, and private pages will not be found without user approval. LiveJournal is originally based on an open-source project, and now offers low-cost premium options for paying users. It might not be open-source ideology; however it does cost money to serve 6 million user’s blogs.

Blogging is ready for the masses, and whether you wish to share your plans for world domination, or simply break up the monotony of the web with the sound of your voice, a good place to start is the services mentioned above.

Sean Rekhi is webmaster for DashingMan.com, and also authors a business and technology blog at www.SinkRoutine.Blogspot.com.