What does blog stand for
Short for web-log, these online diaries/personal columns have gained enormous popularity since 1999. Today they're a substantial part of the Internet, and serve many purposes, from the personal to the commercial.
What is a blog ?
Strictly speaking, a blog is a list of written entries (called "posts"), ordered from newest to oldest. Its original intent was to allow people to share their daily impressions, diary-style, over the Internet. With time it developed to include professional columns about every thinkable subject, fan sites, review sites, friendly mouthpieces for corporations, and much more.
Blogs are a specialized type of <Content Manage Systems (CMS)>. This means that the blog site itself contains special pages dedicated to its management (usually called "the backend" or "the admin area"). On these pages, user-friendly forms and links allow you to create new posts, moderate comments, configure the blog's appearance, etc., without the need to write <HTML> or upload pages to the site. All of the blog's content is created through the blog itself.
Blog vs. Website
A website is a general term for any Internet content that can be viewed through a browser. A blog is much more specialized. Every online blog is a website or part of one; not every website is a blog or even contains a blog.
Why blogging?
On a personal level, many individuals enjoy sharing their thoughts and impression with the wide world, in a way that allows both extreme intimacy and complete anonymity.
The commercial use of the blog was quick to follow its original concept. Many artists and self-employed people keep a blog about their profession, both to maintain contact with their client base and to draw in new clients.
A growing fashion in recent years is "blogging for a living": attempting to create highly-popular blogs that can provide for the owner, either through donations or through various methods of monetization, from displaying ads to promoting affiliated products.
Even large organizations have caught on to the importance of blogs in the daily Internet life. Many businesses keep a blog both as a ready news channel and as a means to style themselves as personal and friendly.
How to blog
Blogging has become so common that many websites now offer free blog services, chief among these are WordPress and Google's Blogger. This solution is ideal for a personal blog dedicated to sharing your worldly (and otherwise) impressions.
For blogs with a more commercial orientation, you will probably want to set up your own site and your own blogging software. The good news here is that excellent <Open Source> blogging platforms (including WordPress itself) are available for free. Most free blog platforms are written in <PHP> and use <MySQL>, so a Linux hosting plan will serve you well for this purpose. You'll need to purchase a hosting plan and a <domain name>, then upload the blog software, and follow its installation instructions (which are usually highly friendly).