The Radiant Star

Let’s Blog

Posted on November 15th, 2005 in Wow! Web.

everything you need to begin blogging

Blogging is hobby; blogging is journalism; blogging is simple; blogging is easy; blogging gives you opportunity to tell the world what matters to you; blogging gives you satisfaction; blogging gives you a different identity; blogging is free - how many more reasons you want before you start blogging.

Start blogging right now, otherwise a friend of you will ask you to visit his blog giving you an URL and you would rue yourself for not starting it earlier (if this is made into a television advertisement, he will take along with him the girl you have crush on to show the blogs).

Wouldn’t it be better if you tell your friends you have started blogging and after a discourse on it, you tell them how to blog. At the end when you see those enough praising eyes, you tell them, Let’s Blog.

Why Should I Blog?

For your satisfaction and that’s all. It’s a pleasure to write your heart out. If somebody reads your blog and comment on it, more satisfaction. If your blog became famous, even more satisfaction. If you start getting hundreds of hits per day, even more satisfaction and probably chance to earn some $$$ through Google AdSense.

What Should I Write?

Anything. Blogs isn’t strictly anything, its loosely everything. You see CNN interviewing a blogger who blogs about her household choirs; you find somebody blogging about his girlfriend hogging the limelight; you hear bloggers giving interviews; you hear bloggers being jailed for their revolutionary writing (don’t worry Committee to Protest Bloggers is there!) and laugh at blogger who loses job for blogging about his company incentives.

How Often I Write?

You decide there is no rule. But once you start writing, if you get time, you want to write many times a week, for sure.

I Can’t Write English?

Write in Nepali. Someone has earned good name being the first Nepali blogsite.

Then Help Me!

Read all pages listed below and if you still want help, there is Nepal Bloggers Society (don’t google the term, its not there, it means simply ask any Nepali bloggers to help you out ‘particularly those from United We Blog! and MeroSansar.)

Okay, I want to blog. But how?

Here is a list of sites that offers blog hosting, many of them are off-course free. No money, its as simple as opening an email account, even easier than that.

If you want blog on your own url, then there are a good number of blogging scripts free to download, install, and modify. Easy for little knowledge webmaster.

Further Reading

weblogs: a history and perspective by Rebecca Blood
Ten Tips For A Better Weblog by Rebecca Blood
Weblogs: The Cyber Journeyby AskMen.com
History of Weblogs by Userland.com

Published in 2005 by Reporters Without Borders (RSF), the Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-dissendents is a very good resource for blogging beginners and geek alike. This contains chapters on blogging, good blogging, language of blogging, blogging ethics and experiences from the bloggers around the world.

Click on cover to download the book in pdf.

Some Chapters from the books:

Into the blogosphere
The online, edited collection explores discursive, visual, social, and other communicative features of weblogs. Essays analyze and critique situated cases and examples drawn from weblogs and weblog communities.

Essay titles include
Power Surge: Writing-Rhetoric Studies, Blogs, and Embedded Whiteness
Introduction: Weblogs, Rhetoric, Community, and Culture
Visual Blogs
Blogs as Virtual Communities: Identifying a Sense of Community in the Julie/Julia Project
The Spirit of Paulo Freire in Blogland: Struggling for a Knowledge-Log Revolution
Remediation, Genre, and Motivation: Key Concepts for Teaching with Weblogs
Culture Clash: Journalism and the Communal Ethos of the Blogosphere
Promiscuous Fictions
Weblog Journalism: Between Infiltration and Integration
Women and Children Last: The Discursive Construction of Weblogs
The Labyrinth Unbound: Weblogs as Literature
Battlecat Then, Battlecat Now: Temporal Shifts, Hyperlinking and Database Subjectivities
Imagining the Blogosphere: An Introduction to the Imagined Community of Instant Publishing
Moving to the Public: Weblogs in the Writing Classroom
Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog
Personal Publication and Public Attention
Weblogs and the Public Sphere
Geography of the Blogosphere: Representing the Culture, Ecology and Community of Weblogs
Parody Blogging and the Call of the Real
Links, Lives, Logs: Presentation in the Dutch Blogosphere
Common Visual Design Elements of Weblogs
Formation of Norms in a Blog Community