A blog or web log is simply a web page where an individual or group posts their ideas, thoughts, quotes, links to other pages, and pictures.
A blog can be a personal journal or it can be more like the opinion columns that you read in the newspaper. Some blogs are more like a collection of short news items with links to other sources on the net. Your blog can be what ever you want it to be.
The elements of a blog are 1) software that provides an easy interface to type in text and transform it into a nicely formatted web page. and 2) a “space” on the internet for the blog to be hosted with an url that allow people to access it. Both the software and the space are available free through a variety of sources.
Bloggers range from ordinary people to famous people.
Ordinary people blog about politics, about their favorite movies and TV, about celebrities, about their families, and everything else that interests them. There also are blogs for people who crochet, for people who garden, for people who are amateur astronomers, for people who like cats or horses or lizards, basically if some one has an interest in it, there is a blog about it. To find out what ordinary people are blogging you can search http://blogsearch.google.com/ and plug in any topic you wish.
Many music, television and movie celebrities maintain a blog on their official websites to satisfy the curiosity of their fans or to promote their shows or to support a cause they support.
• Barbara Streisand's blog is very political: http://www.barbrastreisand.com/
• As is that of Bruce Willis: http://www.brucewillis.com/
Many people write blogs on a wide variety on politics. Some are just ordinary people, some are professional journalists, some are elected officials.
Yahoo has a great directory of political blogs: http://dir.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Internet/World_Wide_Web/Weblogs/Politics
• here's a conservative blog http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/browse
• and a liberal blog http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/
• Live reports from Iraq by a journalist: http://michaelyon.blogspot.com/
A place where you can track what's in other blogs, news sources, comics and other things on the web. http://www.bloglines.com/
Two sites from which you can get started free in the world of blogging.
For a very basic blog that is simply a way to post your thoughts in a nice format on the web for free try the site maintained by Google. http://www.blogger.com/start
For a free blog and a way to organize a lot of information from the web just the way you want (for free) try: http:///www.bloglines.com