What is blog and why would you want to become a blogger?

I was at a meeting at the University of Utah last night (the names and places have been changed to protect the innocent) and I used the word "blog." It didn't occur to me that "blog" is a word that could be jargon to some people. So to those of you who want to know, let me give you my 10-cent definition of a blog, tell you why blogs are the most important phenomena on the internet right now.

I will also give you some excellent blogs from which you can learn.

The word "blog" is short for "weblog" which is short for "user editable weblog." What is a user editable weblog? You are reading one, right now. ryannagy.com is a blog - a website that can be created and modified with virtually no technological skill. Writing this post required me to log into my website, click a "write post" button and then happily type away as if I was using a word processer. If I want to emphasize some words I click the "bold" button. If I want to link to another site, I click the little "link" picture. That's it. When I am ready to share the ideas on my post I click the "publish" button.

So what?

For better or worse (better in my opinion) the internet is now a publishing medium to hundreds of millions of people who formerly had to go through a gatekeeper - such as a website creator or internet programmer - to get online.

Who blogs?

Well, how about a couple of corporate bloggers:

The CEO of Sun Microsystems, their corporate attorney and 1000's of their employees.

The CEO of General Motors

How about some scientist's who blog: Check out Nature's list of the top 50 blogs written by Scientists.

Business Week has an excellent article on some top Blogs and why you should care about Blogging: Blogs Will Change Your Business.

Do you want to get your own blog in less than 5 minutes? Go to WordPress - it's free.

cheers - Ryan