All About Blogs

I've been an advocate of online journaling since about 1998. I had a website I crafted that I called 'iURL' (or 'You are your URL'). It was an attempt to create a virtual record of myself, a record of links to websites I liked or found useful, and a way to keep up to date with friends and family. I did it manually at first updating the raw HTML, then when Blogger came along I switched to that system. I never had many readers and only updated occaisionally. But it was a good experience.

Elise, at Elise.com (boy am I jealous of her domain name), has just posted an excellent roundup of weblogging tools. It includes a look at the various kinds of blogs, the reason they're used, and approximately how many of each there are. It's a good introduction to the various choices out there. If you or your company is thinking about blogging this is an important article to read.

I did notice one short coming - Elise fails to mention that many people have more than one blog. Often on more than one platform. I myself have four active blogs (two typepad, one livejournal, and one blogspot), two inactive blogs (both blogger.com but hosted on my website), and at least one dead blog (on Diaryland). Each blog serves a specific purpose for me. I'd like to combine them all into one, probably using MT or TextPattern, but both are still outside my range of ability right now. But I'm hoping that if I wait just a little longer either they software will get easier to install and manage, or I will find more time to learn them to the point I need to.

I could also hire someone to do it for me, I suppose. I imagine there is a growing field of blogging professionals who will do this sort of thing for a fee. If not, there definately should be.