Web 2.0 for Dummies index page here
We have covered various aspects of social media already in this series, such as video sharing and photo sharing, but one of the great activities going on online during the Web 2.0 era is blogging.

You could probably argue that blogging and Web 2.0 developed separately and blogging started well before ‘Web 2.0′ did but they are becoming increasingly intertwined.

So what is blogging? The definitions, like Web 2.0′s, are pretty fluid but generally it’s a website which displays articles written by ‘real people’ (as opposed to professional journalism that’s seen in magazines and newspapers) which are displayed in a reverse chronological order. The terms ‘blogging’ and ‘blog’ comes from ‘web log‘.

There are many ways of setting up a blog; some sites offer blog hosting and some offer scripts that you host yourself. Blogs provide a good way of connecting with your family, sharing a hobby or making new contacts (or indeed all three!) .

Hosted blog providers

WordPress.com: WordPress.com is a hosted blog provider which is built on the popular WordPress blogging software. Sadly, the free package WordPress.com offer limits the ability to customise your site’s appearance (you can only choose amongst a selection of templates). You can, however, pay for an upgrade which allows for editable templates.
Blogspot: Blogspot (aka Blogger) is Google’s blog hosting service. It offers a reasonable amount of flexibility but doesn’t allow for things such as plug-ins. Also, Blogger doesn’t use the popular RSS standard for people subscribing to your blog but instead uses Atom. You must subscribe to a service like Feedburner to add an RSS feed to your Blogger account.
TypePad: TypePad is hosted blogging software based on MovableType, a competitor to WordPress. Unfortunately, TypePad do not offer any free hosting and their cheapest package comes in at about $50 a year!

Blog scripts
If you have your own web hosting you might want to consider hosting the blog yourself; generally hosting a blog yourself gives you much more flexibility and also more freedom over what you post (WordPress.com for example forbids its users for being paid to write reviews whilst if you host WordPress yourself generally no such restrictions occur).
WordPress: WordPress is the script behind WordPress.com. It is PHP-based and is open-source (and also free of charge). There are a large number of template available for it and they may be edited or alternatively people can make their own. Also, there’s many plug-ins which boost WordPress’ functionality!
typo: Ruby on Rails-based typo is a less known blogging which is very heavy on Web 2.0 elements such as Ajax commenting by default (meaning the page doesn’t reload when a comment is sent), tagging and syndication with popular sites like Flickr and del.icio.us. Not all shared hosting accounts will support typo though due to its use of Ruby on Rails which is an upcoming web technology. A demo typo blog is here.
MovableType: Perl-powered MovableType is the blogging engine I used prior to WordPress. It has just launched its fourth version and is going to become at least partially open-source. At the time of writing a licence is required for commercial use of the script. .

Tags: web 2.0 for dummies, web 2.0, web2, web 2, web2.0, blogging, blogs, blog