If, like me, you've been avoiding the "blog" phenomenon, don't despair.
In this world of the 10-second attention span, you can fake your way through any conversation on blogs if you learn a few basics.
Read on and you will find out everything you need to know about blogs short of actually writing or reading one on a regular basis.
First of all, don't trust anyone who pretends they know all about blogs. There are just too many - and new ones are proliferating far too fast - for any one human being to keep tabs on the blogsphere.
If you don't believe me, Google the word "blogs." When I last did so in mid-January, I got 409 million results. (Yes, you read correctly, that's 409 million.)
When I first started investigating the blog phenomenon, I was surprised to find out my teenage daughters had been blogging for years, posting entries on the Web-based communal diary known as livejournal.com.
I knew about livejournal.com. I just didn't know it was considered blogging.
All of which left me confused. I then talked to a few people to ask how they defined blogging. In the spirit of the Web, I didn't rely on experts. I asked my brother, my daughters, a few friends.
Answers varied and, not surprisingly, showed a distinct gender breakdown.
My brother had what turns out to be a typical guy's response: a blog is on-line news written by political junkies and deals with current events. (Interestingly, most of these types of blogs are written by white guys. Even on the allegedly ultra-democratic Web, some perspectives get more play than others.)
There's another world of blogs, however -the self-help, personal diary, "stay-in-touch" blogs that are especially popular among women and that deal with issues such as quilting or surviving breast cancer or coping with spousal abuse.
Although political blogs have gotten the most media attention, they're just a fraction of the blog phenomenon. Using Google you can come up with what I suspect is a fairly accurate snapshot of who blogs and why.
- If you Google blogs + sports, you'll get 75.9 million results.
- Blogs + money, 68.7 million.
- Blogs + politics, 67 million.
- Blogs + women, 39.5 million.
- Blogs + drugs, 17.2 million.
- Blogs + African American, 13 million
In deciding to visit various blog sites, I knew I couldn't search the 409 million results that came up on Google.
So I did what everyone on Google does: I randomly selected a few good-sounding sites from the first 20 selections.
I was soon overwhelmed. I'd go to one blogging site, find something interesting, click on one of its links and before I knew it, I'd be in another world.
For example, I went to DailyKos.com, reportedly the most-viewed blog in the blogsphere.
I clicked on an intriguing headline: "Judge Compares Wal-Mart to North Korea," by a blogger named JR Monsterfodder.
I then got sucked into a hotlink about the USS Pueblo, which mentioned that the ship had been built in Kewaunee.
Since my sister lives in Kewaunee and I was visiting her in a few days, I clicked on that link to get news about Kewaunee. Before I knew it, I was miles away from Wal-Mart and North Korea.
Getting sucked in by obscure sites is clearly one of the big problems with the blogsphere. Indeed, by its very nature, the blogsphere is akin to quicksand. What's more, it's morphing and transforming at hyper-speed.
When blogs started, for instance, they were a distinct threat to traditional journalism. These days, newspapers are madly expanding into blogs.
Ten years from now, it's conceivable that the on-line versions of major media such as CNN and The New York Times may be the country's most popular blog portholes.
Historically, the term "blog" comes from the phrase "Web-logging," which is as it sounds: a log kept on the web. Like most logs, there are to be regular entries, with the most recent first.
Web logs also have hotlinks to related and referenced sites and, often but not always, ways for readers to post responses.
Historically, most blogs were done for love, not money, and most were done by individuals, not corporations or institutions.
But even as I write, the rules are changing. These days, every business with a smidgeon of Internet savvy is into blogging.
So how many blogs are there today? A study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project ( www.pewinternet.org ) estimated that by the end of 2004, about 8 million people had created a blog.
If you really want to be up on blogs, you should probably master blog terminology such as "splog" (a blog composed of spam).
One of my favorites is "blogswarm" -when those pesky bloggers unrelentingly attack mainstream media for not paying sufficient attention to a story.
According to Wikipedia, the free on-line encyclopedia, former Senate Majority leader Trent Lott was the first political victim of a blogswarm. It was bloggers who showed that his remarks honoring U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond's segregationist politics were not an isolated incident but part of a long-standing pattern of sympathy to white supremacist views .
And what if you're feeling left out of the blog phenomenon?
No need to worry.
Except for a few hard-core geeks who live and breath their blogs, a surprising number of people are like my daughters: They are blogging without even knowing it.
In the old days, we called it writing.
Barbara Miner is a Milwaukee-based print journalist whose articles sometimes appear on the Web.
