Welcome and thank you for taking the time to read our first entry in our new blog. I thought it was appropriate to make the first post about blogging. What do you know about blogs? Do you already have one of your own?

Blogs are becoming more and more popular for individuals, businesses and other organisations. Anyone can have a blog. Blogs can be used like a diary, just making a simple entry every day or every week or they can be full of in depth and technical data.

Wikipedia’s description of a blog is:

“A blog (a contraction of the term “Web log”) is a Web site, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (artlog), photographs (photoblog), sketches (sketchblog), videos (vlog), music (MP3 blog), audio (podcasting), which are part of a wider network of social media. Micro-blogging is another type of blogging, one which consists of blogs with very short posts. As of December 2007, blog search engine Technorati was tracking more than 112 million blogs. With the advent of video blogging, the word blog has taken on an even looser meaning — that of any bit of media wherein the subject expresses his opinion or simply talks about something.”

So there you are, you can write about anything (well almost anything), as much or as little as you like, you can add media to it or simply leave it as text. Of course you must be careful when writing a blog that you are not offensive or do not use strong racial or discriminative remarks as this could land you in hot water. Also it has been know for people to get sacked from their job for writing negative comments about there employers and also reasons included using confidential data and releasing sensitive information. So do be careful what you write and how you say it.

Where will blogs move on from here? Is there any bounds? With the web usage increasing day by day and ever advancing technology there are endless possibilities for bloggers. Whatever, I can see blogs been around for a long time yet.