For those of you who have never heard of a "blog" before, I'll try to offer the following explanation. This explanation will be very simplified, which I'll correct at the end.

First of all, a blog is a specific type of a website. A blog allows the blog's owner to act as a bit of a non-professional journalist or pundit. The blog's author ("blogger" for short) posts observations about daily events in the hope that his or her observations find a wider audience and influence the way people think.

Let me give an example.

Let's say you're reading the New York Times one day, and you notice an article about snail darters (a type of endangered fish that was in the news 20-some years back.) And, let's say you're up on all things snail darter. You notice that nearly everything about the New York Times article is wrong: the reporter misunderstood the snail darter habitat, the reporter only interviewed scientists with one set of snail darter views, the reporter misrepresented the views of the scientists who hold opposing views, etc., etc.

Some people would just read this article and move on. Others would read the article, get angry, and make dispelling the NYT's misrepresentations their life's work. Let's say you're in the latter group.

To complicate matters, let's further say that it's 1979. What can you do? Perhaps you can write a letter to the editor, but there's no guarantee they'll print it, and it probably wouldn't change much anyway. Perhaps you could form a group of people who would raise money in order to print up brochures presenting the facts about snail darters. Other than those two things, about the only thing you can do is become a pamphleteer: print, xerox, or (yes) even mimeograph a small flyer presenting your point of view and pass it out. You certainly don't own a newspaper printing press or a TV station, so writing letters, forming groups, or pamphleteering are about all the options you have.

But, what if it's the 1980s? Well, the above applies, with the possible addition of public access cable TV which no one watches.

Now, in the 1990s, we had the growth of the Internet, complete with millions of Internet users. Instead of the difficult and expensive routes described above, now you can put up a web page presenting your view of snail darters, for all to read.

So, blogs are like that.

An additional feature that separates blogs from non-blog websites is that blogs are almost always arranged in a chronological fashion. As you can see by scrolling down this page, there are dates listed between the current date and the latter dates of June. For instance, everything south of "July 02, 2003" was written on that date; everything south of "July 01, 2003" was written on that date, etc. On the second of this month, I wrote two entries (called "posts:") "Today's Hillary-related news" and "Are L.A. Times reporters incompetent?"

In that way, blogs are similar to TV pundit shows. For instance, each day Bill O'Reilly appears on TV sets throughout the land to present his view of the events of the day. Unlike O'Reilly, however, I can post 100 entries in one day, and then not post anything for the next week. Just because the entries are in chronological order doesn't mean I'm compelled, like O'Reilly, to come up with something interesting each day.

As I said above, this is a simplified explanation. Not all blogs cover political or news matters. Some blogs are simply personal journals, in which the blogger describes what happened to them that day, or their views on general matters. Maybe they'll write about the occasional news event, but it's usually more of a personal journal. Other blogs are simply concerned with technical and computer matters, for instance, they might offer discussion of new computers or software, etc. etc. There are many blogs that cover other topics as well.

Now that you understand the fundamentals, how about checking out some blogs? Click this link for a list of blogs from the most popular to the least popular. It certainly doesn't include all blogs, but the first 20 or so are definitely the most popular blogs around. Check it out, but make sure to come back...

Now, you might be asking, is there some kind of licensure I need in order to start a blog, or do I need to pay someone money?

No, not at all. There's even a homeless guy who has a blog. He writes his entries on a library computer, and his blog is hosted for free.

So, how do you get your very own free blog? The easiest way is to go to blogspot.com Simply choose a name for your new blog, type its name into the box, fill out the resulting form, and you're on your way. When you want to comment on something, log onto your account using the instructions provided, type your text into the box, press the button, and, hey presto!, you're self-published.

Now, the problem comes in how to get people to visit your blog to read your pearls of wisdom. Others have written articles discussing that, but, for now, just concentrate on putting up a week's worth of entries to get the hang of things.

You also might be asking, isn't this just a self-indulgent waste of time? Well, I actually thought the same thing too, and sometimes I still think that. (You'll notice in the previous sentence that I included a link to something that I'd written before. We bloggers insert links like crazy. Why just reference something, when you can also provide a link to more information or the original source?)

As I said, sometimes I think I'm wasting my time. However, I think that to a certain extent I'm able to at least make people somewhat more aware of different aspects of a news story, and to have somewhat of an effect. The basic idea I and others hope to achieve is that our ideas will percolate upwards to a wider audience.

For instance, at the same time as the L.A. Times and other newspapers were presenting a rather benign view of the anti-war protesters, I was out there taking pictures of their swastikas, Nazi tableaus, little-red-book stands, etc., etc. I posted my pictures and reports, other bloggers linked to them, and pretty soon tens of thousands of people knew that the LAT, the NYT and others were presenting a sanitized version of these protests. For a while, bloggers going out and taking pictures of anti-war protests was the rage. This percolated upwards to the "real" media. It wasn't long before Janeane Garofalo was being asked on national TV about a picture of a particulary disturbing anti-war sign.

Now, of course, I didn't write everything above just because I'm a nice blogger. No, one of the goals of the foregoing is to get links from other bloggers. You see, when someone links to me, it brings me hits, which, in TV terms, is like having someone switch the channel to my station. Hopefully, if a blogger wants to point to an introductory article on blogging, they'll link to this post, and those who read this post will read the rest of my blog and perhaps consider linking to my other posts as well. They should also click on the Amazon link at the start of the page and buy a few books.