Blogging in technical words simply means logging of events. A blog gets its name from 'weblog', which again is a blend of two words, 'web' and 'log'. A blog is a series of posts usually stored in ascending order of dates. So if you write a new post that one would come on top and so on and so forth. Anyone one who maintains a blogs is called a blogger and is said to be blogging. Articles posted on a blog by a blogger are called blog posts.

The reason blogging became so popular is because it gives people a way to create an online diary, or a live journal. All that a blogger has to do is log on and give his opinions about various issues. They can write fresh topics if they own the blog or give comments on existing posts on their blog or any other blog. Thus bloggers can also build their own community or a small discussion group. A blog is also a fast way to get your business advertised, or to quickly spread the word about any major event. Their words become live instantly for anyone to see and respond to. A blog typically revolves around a particular topic or a set of related topics.

Most popular blogs are available for free. So in a very short time blogging started to grow like anything and there was a need for bloggers to reach out to a much wider audience. Hence they wanted the ability to add images, photos and extra pages along with their usual posts and comments. They started to make their blog more visually appealing by designing new themes which reflected their business or personality. There are now many websites which offer Free Blog Themes. So a blog started to look more like a well designed website. Nowadays people also have interesting things like sponsored ads and affiliate links on their blogs. This is really a nice way to earn some money and at the same time enriching the readers experience. Around that time open source blogs like WordPress came along and programmers started developing various blogging plugins to enhance blogging. So blogs and their possibilities simply seem to grow all the time.

With this popularity constantly growing web hosts did not want to be left behind either. Popular blogs like WordPress can be installed easily with just a few mouse clicks, using CPanel and Fantastico. After that simply upload them to your web folder via FTP and start posting articles, comments or add pages to your blog. All this can be done in a few minutes.

Because of this ability of WordPress to add extra pages - just as you can with a standard website, they have slowly started becoming more popular than websites. Also, it is free as long as you want. The programming is already done for you and the blog can be further enhanced by adding extra plugins. The possibilities with plugins are simply endless. You can upload photos, block spam, add adsense blocks to monetize your blog, and ping search engines to inform them of your newly added content among other things.

Even though WordPress is one of the most popular blogging software, it is not the only one around. Other popular blogs include: Blogger.com (Owned by Google), TypePad, LiveJournal, etc. You also get blogs of different types like Vlog (Video Blogs), Linklogs (Comprising of links) and Photoblogs (for displaying photos). Do check out all of them and many more which are available online and soon you will find yourself creating and maintaining your very own blog.

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