The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging

CHAPTER 1

Welcome to the World of Blogs

Blogging is the only addiction that won't make you fat, drunk or stoned. But it might make you so hungry for instant gratification that your books get shorter.
-- Erica Jong, novelist, HuffPost blogger

Yes, yes, we get the irony. We're writing a book about blogs. Where is the comments section? Where are the links? By the time you're thumbing through this at the bookstore several months will have transpired since we wrote these words. With no comments from readers. Or updates.

But believe it or not, a book about blogging fits neatly into this juncture in communication history. You see, printed books themselves were once a rather revolutionary idea. Six hundred years ago, if people wanted to share ideas, they had few options. We could shout our complaints from the barn rafters. Maybe a few chickens would hear us. We could scrawl or draw our musings and post them in the town square -- but soon the elements would take their toll. Documents were preserved, of course -- medieval monks specialized in hand-copying important texts -- but to justify years of a monk's time, these documents had to be privileged indeed. Few normal people could spare five years to hand-write their stories.

Then, in mid-fifteenth-century Germany, printer Johannes Gutenberg happened upon a discovery: By creating type pieces out of metal -- known as movable type -- and arranging them to form words, you could make multiple copies of a document far faster than a monk could write. Gutenberg's most famous creation was the Gutenberg Bible, but before long, people were using movable type to print science books, political commentaries, and other works that fundamentally changed the world.

Fast-forward to 2001. Somewhere in California, a twenty-something woman named Mena Trott, laid off from her dot-com job, started keeping an online diary of her life. She called it Dollar Short (as in a day late and a...). She wasn't happy with the available online publishing tools. So she and her husband, Ben, decided to create their own. On October 8, 2001, they released their contribution to the nascent blogging software industry. You could download it free of charge (though donations to the Trott rent fund were certainly welcome). With a wink at the past, they called the software Movable Type.

So there you have the blog/book connection: from movable type, to books, to books on Movable Type. Is blogging as big a revolution as what Gutenberg started? Only time will tell. But since we at The Huffington Post like to report on news and history in the making, we'd like to help you, dear reader, get started on making some history of your own.

What Is a Blog?

A blog at its most fundamental level is simply a "web log." That is, a regularly updated account of events or ideas posted on the web.

But calling blogs mere updated web diaries is a bit like calling poetry a pleasant arrangement of words on a page. There is an art to this. Those of us who work at HuffPost believe we are fortunate enough to be present at the advent of a new form of human communication -- one that is more interactive, more democratic, and just more fun than what has come before.

Blogs can bring down a Senate majority leader. They can show what a presidential candidate talks about in unguarded moments. They can provide stay-at-home parents with a little space to rant about the tragedy of colic (or maybe share updates on a local environmental issue -- and Brad Pitt -- during naps). They cut out the gatekeepers of information and shorten the news cycle. They give companies new ways to communicate with customers and shareholders -- and give customers and shareholders new ways to make their voices heard. Blogging gives you a feeling of satisfaction that writing a letter to the editor, or a letter to the "customer care" department of a corporation, cannot match. The public nature of blogs means that any of the billion people on this planet who own or have access to a computer can read what any of the rest of us is saying. That's true even if what we're saying is about a niche (for instance, issues germane to the mini off-road buggy community) that in the past would have gotten us labeled as freaks. In fact, because the potential audience is so huge, there is space for just about every topic you can imagine. As we link to each other, the marketplace of ideas sorts out who is worth listening to and who is not. A congressman's statement on an issue does not necessarily take precedence over a constituent's, the way it often does in a traditional news story.

It is this mix of the high and low, the personal and the political, that makes blogs so fascinating and so important in an open society. When we launched HuffPost in 2005, we knew we liked blogs, but even we underestimated how head over heels we'd fall. "Blogging is definitely the most interesting thing I've done as a writer, and I've been writing full-time since the late seventies," Carol Felsenthal, author of Clinton in Exile: A President Out of the White House and a HuffPost blogger, tells us. "I used to walk my dog, Henry, first thing in the morning. Now I'm often at my computer writing a post while Henry looks at me and wonders what happened to the good old days when his owner was compulsive but not hyper-compulsive."

It's the informality and the immediacy that make blogging addictive for many of us. No editor stands between us and the public. This leads to a lot of rumors and other fluff going up on the web. But it's also enormously liberating. You can put all kinds of ideas out there. "My thoughts don't all have to be fully baked," says Marci Alboher, who writes the "Shifting Careers" column and blog for The New York Times. She posts an idea and sees what her readers think. "They help me solve the problem and let me know if I'm going down the right path. It helps me figure out what the issues are very quickly."

It is this multidirectional conversation -- giving all of us a platform, expanding the scope of news, and making it a shared enterprise between producers and consumers -- that makes blogs so revolutionary. We have a lot of fun blogging. We're writing this book because we're pretty sure you will too.

The History of Blogs

For all that blogging is changing society, it's important to remember just how new it is. Remember Elin Gonzlez, the Cuban boy that the entire country was obsessed with in the spring of 2000? His story had the markings of a blogosphere sensation: memorable photos, passionate opinions on U.S./Cuban policy, a political hot potato for the Clinton administration. But it was only a mainstream media mainstay because the blogosphere as we know it today had not yet evolved. The linking, commenting, and annotating we find commonplace today was still to come.

The term "weblog" was coined in 1997 by Jorn Barger, the editor of Robot Wisdom (itself a blog, albeit one with some nasty anti-Semitism bopping around on it, so we don't recommend you humor him by visiting the site). The shortened word "blog" was coined by Adaptive Path founder and former Epinions.com creative director Peter Merholz on his website (peterme.com) in 1999.

The number of blogs was small at first. According to Technorati (a company that conducts a sort of blogging census), the one millionth blog came online in the fall of 2003. At that time, people were creating blogs at a rate of about five thousand to six thousand per day. But the rate soon picked up. The blog total hit four million in the fall of 2004, around the time that blogs really exploded on the national radar screen for their role in the flap about memos related to President Bush's National Guard service. By that time, twelve thousand new blogs were coming online each day. Like a colony of bacteria, the blogosphere continued to post a quick doubling rate through 2005 (fourteen million blogs in August) and 2006 (fifty-seven million blogs in October). These days, Technorati is tracking 112 million blogs. Web users create approximately fifty thousand new blogs a day. This being the web, about three to seven thousand of these new blogs are nothing but spam, spam, and links to more spam. The rate of doubling has slowed as the blogosphere has matured. But new voices are still coming online in droves.

The demographics of the blogosphere could be the subject of several blog posts in their own right. For instance, in late 2006, the most common language for blogs was actually not English.

According to Technorati, it was Japanese (37 percent). English (at the time) was a close second at 36 percent. About 8 percent of blog posts are in Chinese and 1 percent is written in Farsi (the language spoken in Iran and some of the former Soviet republics). According to a 2006 survey from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, more than half of American bloggers (54 percent) are under age thirty. Both men and women blog at equal rates, but bloggers are less likely to be white (60 percent) than other Internet users (74 percent) and more likely to be Hispanic (19 percent vs. 11 percent).

The majority of the 112 million blogs out there will never grab more than a few readers. That's OK; 37 percent of bloggers told the Pew survey that keeping in touch with friends and family was a major reason for blogging, and 52 percent said they blogged mostly for themselves rather than for an audience. On the other hand, the most popular blogs -- Boing Boing, Engadget, Gizmodo, TechCrunch, and HuffPost -- get millions of unique visitors every month.

Anytime you get lots of eyeballs in one place, there is money to be made. According to a 2008 report from the firm eMarketer, advertising spending on blogs reached $283 million in 2007. The company projected this would rise to $746 million in 2012. For comparison, companies, politicians, and others spend over $70 billion on TV advertising each year and $40 billion on newspaper advertising. We don't think these industries are going to disappear. Nonetheless, as mediums converge, and as online properties allow for better advertisement targeting, blogs offer one of the few revenue growth spots in the media world. Newspaper ad revenue fell 12 percent last year. Even the best newspapers are slashing newsroom jobs.

Why Blog?

I blog because I am.
-- Cali Williams Yost, Work + Life Fit blog, blogger for Fast Company

Why blog? Here's a better question: Why not blog? As you'll learn in the upcoming chapters, blogging is easier than smoking, can take less time and money, and isn't banned in restaurants. According to the 2006 Pew survey, 59 percent of active bloggers spend just one to two hours a week on their hobby. Unlike smoking, you can also quit whenever you want. Many people do just that. There may be 112 million blogs in the blogosphere, but only 7.4 million, Technorati tells us, have been updated in the last ninety days.

Fair enough, you say. But what do I write about? We'll cover this more in depth in chapter 2, "Getting Started," but in the meantime, here's some great advice from Penelope Trunk, a blogger and Boston Globe career columnist: "Pick a topic -- you can change it when you know what you're doing. This is like dating. Pick something that seems good, and if it isn't, try again. Don't get hung up on topic. As in dating, you'll know when you've found one that's the right fit. There are some obvious things, like pick a topic you have a lot to say about, pick something that interests you, pick something that will help your career. This is great advice, but you already know that if you look for a perfect match you'll never actually go on a date." Here's another reason to blog: Even if quit rates are high, with 2.13 million blog posts going up in the past seven days, chances are you know a lot of people who are blogging. Your colleagues may be blogging when they're "forgetting" to read your sales report. Your neighbors may be blogging instead of bringing in those unsightly trash cans from the curb. The old guy next door who spends a long time lingering at the window in his underwear? He's definitely blogging. Your children are blogging. In fact, they're probably blogging right now about your lame attempts to lose weight by drinking low-carb beer. We wouldn't rule out commentary from your spouse on your Cheez Whiz-for-breakfast habit either. So isn't it time you had your say?

More seriously, though, we find blogging to be a great opportunity for creative expression, whether you have many outlets or none at all. Nora Ephron -- who has multiple ways of expressing herself through books, movies, columns, and the like -- has said she loves the unique expression blogs allow. She's not the only ones who feels this way. According to the Pew survey, 52 percent of bloggers said that expressing themselves creatively was a major reason for blogging, and 54 percent said they had never published their writings or media creations elsewhere.

The main reason to blog is that you have something to say to the world -- and you want to see what the world has to say back.