BLOGGING ON THE WORLD WIDE WEB

Having an open blog (web log or online journal) on the internet is like having your own column in an online newspaper.  All you have to do is sign up for a blog with one of the blog hosting domains, Word Press, Blogger etc., and off you go!  Where we once pasted a few photographs into an album or kept a written diary to record our existence, today everyman and his blog can now write and publish their opinions on anything and everything. 

We are able to share thoughts and photos, likes and dislikes, political opinions, shoot a home movie and post it onto our personal Blog.   We can take a photograph with our Smartphone or tablet and email it directly to our blog.  We can comment on the local elections, complain about a product we bought, rave about a new restaurant, rate movies or magazines and post comments on everybody else’s blogs for all the world to see. 

Of course, this also means that you have a potential world wide audience and any of the estimated 2.1 billion internet users worldwide can read your blog. They can also comment on the posts, which other readers can see.  So if you vent your frustration or anger on your personal blog and put other people’s backs up, don’t be annoyed when they comment on your blog posts!

Personal blogs are great for keeping in touch with family and friends.  If you are going on a holiday and you want to keep your friends and family up-to-date on how it is going, and you don’t want to be sending emails to everyone in your address book, a blog is a good way to keep in touch.  You write what you want to on your blog and family and friends can read your daily postings – and they can share your blog address with other interested people. But, if you don’t want every Tom, Dick and Harry to read your personal postings, then you should put restrictions in place on your blog.

Under the settings heading you can usually decide who will read your blog,:

‘anybody’ or only people who are invited.

You can decide who can comment.  On Blogger you have these choices.

Anyone - includes Anonymous Users

Registered User - includes OpenID

User with Google Accounts

Only members of this blog

You can decide to moderate the comments, so that not all comments appear on your blog.  This feature is useful to block out Spam.

Always

Sometimes

Posts older than a certain number of days

Never

Under Comments, you can delete a comment, or mark as Spam.

In June 2008 I wrote an article for the SA Freelance Association on blogs.  From 56 million blogs in 2006 there were 112.8 million Blogs worldwide (in June 2008) with over 100 000 new ones being created every day.  (www.technorati.com/www.technorati.com/)  By the end of 2011 NM Incite (www.nmincite.comwww.nmincite.com )  quoted 181 million blogs.

You can read statistics on the traffic to your blog, number of page views, which country the viewer is from and where your blog stands in the blog rankings.
You can check this on alexa.com 

This blog is ranked 19,499,231.  It has had 117,876 page views from 79,948 visitors in 178 countries since it started in 2006. 

When I started the blog I never thought that so many people would be interested in reading my opinions on walking in general, and on the Camino in particular.