CT Biz Blogs

A lot of bloggers begin with a free service, and there’s nothing wrong with that (that’s how I began). The one I’m most familiar with is Blogger, Google’s free, hosted blogging tool.

I’ve created a quick demo showing just how easy it is to start a blog. You’ll need to have Flash to view it, which you can download from Macromedia, here.

It’s a 1.9 MB file, so if you’re on a slow connection and you’d rather download it to view later, off-line, I’ll have a way to do that shortly.

There’s some controversy around Blogger at the moment, because it is so easy to create blogs, that people trying to game the system have been creating them like crazy. They use them to create blogs that consist of nothing but links and keywords, either in an effort to raise their page ranks so they’ll rise higher in a search engine’s results, or, to serve as placeholders for Google’s own Adsense program, which pays sites a small amount for each ad clicked on.

Because of that, some of the specialized blogging search engines are starting to omit blogs from Blogger from showing up in the results. But Google is trying to clean up those blogs, so the story isn’t over yet. And I still believe it’s a good way to learn about blogs.

Another alternative is to use the Blogger service, which has a very user-friendly interface, but host the blog somewhere else. That’s a bit more complicated, and a post for another day. I’ve done that, and it’s not too hard, but you do have to have a web host provider, or someplace to put your blog. We can do that for you at CT Biz Blogs, if you’re interested.