I got an email late last week from my friend Bob, newly landed in Austin, TX. He wanted to start a blog and he wanted to know how?
This is one of those good news, bad news stories. The good news is, you can blog easily. The bad news is, if you take the difficult route you've got a lot more flexibility (and work). Since Bob isn't computer-iffic I recommended the easy way out.
Bob is now firmly established on Blogspot, the Google blogging tool. I've added these links to his site because that will help Google and the other search engines find it¹.
I'm pretty impressed with the ease at which his blog was created. I don't think he can do all the tricks I can do here - though I'm not quite sure if that's to my advantage or not. It will be interesting to see if he can continue to post on a regular basis.
In the meantime, in the more established 'blogosphere,' Arianna Huffington's new, mainly liberal, blog community has made its debut. Walter Cronkite, Larry David, Mike Nichols and a host of other luminaries are there. That's pretty impressive for a maiden voyage.
Again, like Bob's blog, it will be interesting to see how it looks in a few months and whether there is enough discipline among her unpaid writers to keep it up.
¹ - Getting links is good. I'm always appreciative when someone adds a link from their webpage to mine.
I've not only figured out how to get a picture onto my blog, but also now have linked to you. Thanks for the tout.