So how does this blogging thing work?

I've been spending the past couple of weeks devouring some books on blogs -- Blogging for Dummies by Brad Hill and Blogging in a Snap by Julie Meloni. I'm a bit of a techhead, so I love reading these kind of books occasionally.

Thanks to these books I now understand a bit better about what blogs are -- weblogs (to use the full name) are nothing more than easily changed web sites. They have evolved to be primarily personal journals, travel diaries, venting spaces, and writing practice; but the bottom line is that they are just websites.

What makes the blogs so different from "just another website" though is the blog community that arises. Whenever I write a blog entry, I assume (sometimes rightly) that I have readers out there reading what I have to say. The comments section on my blog shows that I usually arouse at least one reader, sometimes more, to comment. When I respond to those comments, we have a conversation and thus, a community is built.

Get enough conversations going and the community is really going strong.

Another example is links to other blogs. Here's a prime example of what I mean:

Because of Bloglines (thanks to Lissa's great tutorial!) I have a list of blogs where I can peruse new postings without having to manually visit each blog. From here, I saw that one of my favorite blogs, The Bookworm, had posted about "pegs". In her post, she mentions Lissa's original post -- Nuts, Bolts and Pegs. Now, not only do I have great information about applying Leonie's idea about "pegs", I also have a great understanding of how two different women would implement this system. And I've built a community with these women by commenting on their blogs and back-tracking to their postings.

Pretty cool, huh?