The document discusses blogs and microblogging services. It defines a blog as a website with regular commentary, descriptions, or other content that is usually maintained by an individual. Blogs commonly display posts in reverse-chronological order. The document also provides statistics on the size of the "blogosphere" and discusses why people blog and how to set up a free blog on Blogger.com. It concludes by listing and briefly describing various microblogging services including Twitter.

1. THE BLOGOSPHERE ; AN INTRODUCTION

2. The image on the first slide shows the CONNECTIONS and INTERCONNECTIONS of BLOGS . CLICKING ON THE WORD, BLOGOSPHERE, links to a definition of the term.

3. What is a BLOG . A BLOG is the concatenation of two words...we B and LOG A BLOG is a Web site, usually maintained by an individual, with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog (9/25/2008)‏

4. How big is the Blogosphere? Stats, above, as of November, 2007 26.4 BLOGS in US – March, 2008

7. Why Do you BLOG - Survey

8. BLOGGING topics; Survey

9. How to get a FREE BLOG. 1. Get a FREE gMail account. Go to http://gmail.com and sign up You may already have a gMail account. With an account, you can sign up for a BLOG in a few minutes.

10. Creating a BLOG in a few minutes. It's FREE. Go to http://blogger.com [email_address]

13. Note the publish post button http://spcugtest.blogspot.com/ http://spcugtest.blogspot.com/

14. This is what we see AFTER we PUBLISH our post. This is the BLOG as seen with your browser when you point your web browser to: http://spcugtest.blogspot.com/

16. LOTS OF SETTINGS

17. LAYOUT CHOICES http://sequimpcs.blogspot.com/

18. The SPCUG BLOG BLOG

19. MICRO BLOGGING ?? -Brief updates in text, to be viewed by anyone or a restricted group chosen by the user. -Updates can be submitted by messaging, email, or the web. -The most popular service is twitter at: http://twitter.com . Pownce at http://pownce.com is another micro blog.

20. A BLOG bonus . You can email posts to your blog. After you create a BLOG, you can use settings to set up a BlogSend address. This will allow you to use a special email address to send postings to your BLOG. The special email address for our test BLOG is: Just send an email, including picture, to the email address ABOVE. ATTACH pictures to the email file.

21. YOU CAN ALSO SEND TO YOUR BLOG FROM YOUR BROWSER WITH THE TOOLBAR

22. Visit a couple of BLOGS by SPCUG MEMBERS: http://stevescomputingandrvtravels.blogspot.com/ http://willowsbasket.blogspot.com http://spcug1.blogspot.com/

23. Thomas Pitre, September, 2008-January, 2009 Copyright, T. Pitre, Sequim, WA Credits: Graphs: http://technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/the-what-and-why-of-blogging/

24. Comeks - A microblogging service based around adding comic book style word balloons to images to make comics. You can then email these images, share them, make postcards or send them to social sites such as Bebo, Facebook or Friendster. FoneSonar - Update friends with where you are and what you are doing and this will post to your FoneSonar profile as well as Facebook and Twitter if you so desire. GPSTwit - GPSTwit allows you to send location information along with your status update to your Twitter account. Gyazickr - A Twitter client that is all about taking a photo, writing a caption, and posting it. That’s it, and not a comprehensive Twitter client by their own admission. JustUpdate - A Twitter client that does nothing but give you an update field and a characters remaining counter. KoornkUpdate - An updating application for Koornk that gives you an update field and the number of characters remaining. NatsuLion - A Twitter client based on NatsuLion for Mac OSX. Has separate tabs for replies, unread Tweets, timeline and several more features. Rejaw - Allows you to read messages and send shouts to the Rejaw network. Summizer - Search Twitter for just about anything you want, save searches for later use, disable avatars when you are on an EDGE network for faster loading and more. Tweeter - A very minimalistic Twitter application for updating your account. Twitfire - A Twitter client with a unique way of erasing a tweet if you want to start over: shake your device like an Etch-A-Sketch. Also has a built-in web browser, URL shortening, Google Map insertion capabilities and more. Twittelator - A Twitter client with built-in search, ability to explore the public timeline, bookmarks for Tweets and many other features. TwitterFon - A light-weight Twitter client that allows you to search tweets, send photos, retweet and everything else you would come to expect. Twitterlink - A plugin for the mobile Safari that allows you to hit the bookmark icon and choose to tweet the page you are on. This will shorten the URL to 17 characters so you have room to describe what it is. Twitterrific - This Twitter client allows you to see links in a mini-browser, look at user profiles, see direct messages and a host of other features. Twittervision - An application that allows you to see where tweets from the public timeline are coming from via a map overlay. Twitter Trend - See what the hottest conversations are on Twitter in a tag cloud-like interface. Twitxr - Allows you to share photos with your friends on Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, Twitter and Twitxr. Appendix I, Microblogs – use Google to search for URL/Web addresses