Blogging is a new phenomenon that's growing quickly. It's really just a web site, and everything I've written so far about web site design and promotion applies to blogging. However there are unique features to blogging which I will cover in this section.
Generally a blog is a series of web pages or posts, where the newest post is put at the top. That's it. Nothing magical.
What makes blogs powerful is a couple of things.
One is the direct immediateness of blogging. For example I think of a blog post as a thought that wandered by concretely enough to be written, and you spend 20 minutes putting it together. Okay, so not all bloggers do this, but that's the general stereotype of what blogging is. Another example is what happens during disasters or other big events. The current one is the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina (August 2005) which has done great damage to the Gulf coast and turned New Orleans into a lake. Some bloggers are following the situation very carefully posting snippets as they go. Reading the blog then is like watching the unfoldment of a story, told in quick moment by moment reports.
The other thing that makes blogs powerful is the RSS feeds. RSS is a very powerful feature easily allowing software to retrieve and index postings to web sites, not just to blogs. I've written more here about RSS.
