Blogs

Blogs are an extremely popular form of website for a variety of reasons:

• There are lots of free ones


• You don't need to know HTML to update them


• Search engines really like them


• You can subscribe to them


• You can extract and aggregate information from them

One of the earliest popular blogs was Blogger. It is easy to create a new blog, it's free, easy to use, and owned by Google. And even lets you put Adsense ads on the free blog, so you can make money. But the free version only produces Atom feeds, not RSS, and they do tend to attract spammers comments.

Currently Wordpress is extremely popular. There are heaps of advanced software programs being sold that turns them into search-engine-friendly money-making websites. The actual WordPress software is free, although you generally need to have somewhere to host your blog. The default WordPress implementation is not optimised for search engines, so you will need to install some plug-ins, to maintain meta tags, and to make blog entries permanent URLs.

A free hosted version of WordPress is available at WordPress.com, as long as you don't mind having a name like fred.wordpress.com, as they currently don't do domain name forwarding.