Heard of the concept of having a "homepage" on the Web? Now imagine that homepage had a little bit of freely available technology behind it and read more like a semi-public journal. That's the essence of what a blog (slang for "web log") is -- an informal, personal journal of thoughts and musing kept publicly for the Web. Someone who posts to a blog is a "blogger," and the act of posting to your blog is "blogging."

Blogs tend to have some other common characteristics as well. They tend to be more frequently updated than homepages. They often offer commentary on other news coverage on the Web. They usually (but not always) allow visitors to append their own thoughts as comments to the journal entry.

There are blogs that are read by hundreds of thousands of people each day and, at the other extreme, there are blogs that are only read by a small group of intimate friends. There are blogs that treat their coverage as "journalism" and those that treat them as personal diary, and everything in between. Some blogs offer fascinating insight served up multiple times a day, while others offer only the occassional brief update.

With the most recent estimates suggesting that 2.5 million U.S. Internet users already have a blog, they are also becoming a bigger and bigger part of the Web media landscape.

So, What Do I Do With Blogs?

Given the number of blogs (let alone daily blog postings), seperating the ones you might want to read from the mass of new content is the biggest challenge to becoming a "blog reader". You're likely to stumble upon people's blogs when searching on the Web with major search engines like Yahoo! or Google, but if you're looking for what the buzz among blogs is you might want to try an occassional search on topics that interest you in specialized blog search engines like Technorati. Eventually, you're bound to find at least a handful of bloggers that you find yourself checking in on time and time again, the way you might search out a publication because of a particular commentator or reviewer.