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A business is similar to an individual when it comes to blogging although there is many more reason why a business would want to blog. Depending on what the business needs or wants, a blog could help them reach their goals.

A business should want to present themselves as the experts in their field, the one to turn to for all information, products, solutions and answers regarding whatever it is a business represents. A blog could help establish a business as an expert in their field, especially when it comes to customers leaving comments (preferably favorable ones) that cast the business in a good light.

Building customer relations is another reason a business may want to start blogging or having their employee’s blog. Blogs are more informal writings and most provide a section in which the customer can leave feedback or ask questions. This will provide a personal interaction with those customers that choose to become more involved with a business by making suggestions, speaking their mind about a product or service the business offers and simply telling the business the truth about what they want or need.

Additionally, in building customer relations, it is not the time to sell; there are plenty of opportunities to sell a customer merchandise or services, but in a blog, it’s more of a ‘get to know you’ and ‘what can we do for you’ style forum.

Business blogs create a nice avenue for media relations because it changes the dynamics from a media outlet of mere ‘recipient’ of a press release (which many are ignored because they receive so many and unless the business is advertising with the media outlet, they are not going to get any press) to one of a ‘seeker’ of information – if the business is doing something new, it might be newsworthy and all the pertinent information should be in the blog.

Blogs offer information about what a business is up to, what new products and services are ‘coming down the pipeline,’ if there are any concerns such as product safety recalls or perhaps manufacturers rebates and discount coupons the business would like to pass on to their customers.

Business blogs could be helpful for employees working on a project in order to update the status of key components without having to constantly draft memos or email the day’s productivity to a long list of recipients. All employees involved in the project, even those who are not immediately affected by its progress, could read the blog and instantly know where everything stands and when they might expect their portion to be due. 

Business blogs could be used as training tools for employees, these would be private, in house blogs in which special instructions, updates and general information would be shared with those who need to know. This should be a separate blog from the one that goes out on the website to customers.

A blog written by employees for a business could attract new employees, therefore using a blog as a recruitment tool is also a good way to utilize the business blog as a resource. Perspective employees could read several of the blog posts on the current page and in the archives and decide for themselves if this would be a business they would be interested in working for and with. Monitoring what current employees have to ‘say’ in their blog posts is a good way to gage how content they are with their current positions and what the business is doing in terms of helping their customers or perhaps ‘going green.’ 

Business blogs could be helpful in a number of ways from customer service to employee updates.

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There are a couple of popular stories about where blogging came from and in his book, Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What it’s Becoming and Why it Matters, Scott Rosenberg discusses the most popular origin of blogging.

Early 2001, at the height of the dot.com crash, a San Francisco startup company, Pyra Labs ran out of money – just as nearly all the other companies were doing. The co-founder of the business, a young man from Nebraska named Even Williams, decided to give it one more shot and gathered up $40,000 in funding and moved the Pyra servers into his apartment. This allowed the company’s 100,000 registered users to keep the Pyra service, Blogger, to publish their online journals or blogs.

A year later, Williams had 700,000 subscribers sharing everything from their feelings, grandma’s fabulous potpie recipe to antidotes of what their dog did that afternoon. This was a significant new form of ‘grass-roots’ media. Blogging began to turn traditional publishing companies on their ear, giving everyone with a computer and a modem a chance to express themselves, and more importantly, be heard, for free.

There are several names associated with the beginning of blogging, Justin Hall, a Swarthmore College drop out, began posting personal information on an Internet website in 1994. He would link some of his ramblings to various sites he found on the Internet, including porn and bootleg music. Another name credited with the being one of the first bloggers is Jerry Pournelle, a science fiction writer, journalist and essayist.

One of the oldest and longest running blogs is Dave Winer’s Scripting News. And another long running blog that combined video, pictures and text from a webcam was Wearable Wireless Webcam.

Millions subscribe to the theory that there was another person who began the blogging history and that was in 1993 with Mosaic’s ‘What’s New’ page. One could argue that the forum for a public diary began way before Mosaic’s page when in the late Renaissance years when diaries became ‘in vogue.’

In the early days, a blogger would simply manually update common components of a web site, although through the development of tools to smooth the progress of the construction and continuance of web articles put in reverse sequential order allowed for the publishing method to become viable on a much bigger level. 

Could blogging actually be a business and make a company money – besides advertising with annoying, flashing ads, yes. Nick Denton, a former Financial Times reporter turned entrepreneur led the way to a money making blog. Denton hired other reporters to post blog entries on sites such as Gawker for the gossip hungry and on tech gadget blog Gizmodo. Denton recognized what worked early on and stuck to it. He began with lots of attitude, frequent postings, strong focus and entry-level pay. After a short period of time, his opponent Jason Calacanis launched the blog network Weblogs and lured away some of Denton’s best people with promises of equity stakes. In 2005, Arianna Huffington came up with yet another model – she persuaded bloggers to write for free, in order to boost their brands, as contributors to her newspaper, the hugely popular Huffington Post.

Today, blogs are everywhere, including the History Channel website. A special program called ‘Band of Bloggers’ in which there will be special video and text posted from those soldiers serving in Afghanistan and Iraq. In addition to having a ‘Band of Bloggers’ on their website, a special about the project, featuring some of the video and text from soldiers, was aired on the History Channel television station.

A personal blog is an online diary or journal in which an individual writes (or blogs) about their feelings, thoughts or ideas. They could share photographs, recipes, dreams, stories and news with family, friends and strangers who happen upon their blog.

The expansion and popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and the latest, and fastest growing social networking site, Twitter, has given birth to a whole new generation of public forums in which anything is ‘said’ and read by public ‘voyeurs.’

Nothing seems to be private any longer, said one researcher as to the question of why people post everything to blogs. People are opening their doors and inviting anyone and everyone into their lives to have a look around. Many blogs have space in which a reader can leave a comment about what the blogger posted, this at times, can open a new ‘can of worms.’

Blogging became popular, and remains to some extent, a safe place for political disagreements and discussions during a presidential race or other high profile government race; even those running for a seat on their local school board would benefit from a personal blog about their platform and core beliefs in addition to information regarding their family and background.

People are nosy and want to know what others are doing, mainly to compare with their own life or lifestyle to see if they are ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ or to see if they or their family is ‘normal.’ Although, an Internet blog might not be the best place to discover ‘normalcy’ because there are hundreds of thousands of blogs available for ordinary people to read on just about every subject under the sun.

Blogging has made anyone with a blog an instant ‘published writer.’ Because blogs are a way to reach thousands and thousands of people at one time, people who have something to say about nothing at all or people who have nothing at all to say about something can do both whenever they feel like it. There is free blog space available on many different websites in addition to a person being able to set up their own free website and blog pages.

Personal blogs bring people together, a woman who gave up her baby at his birth, a childless couple looking to adopt, a single woman looking for ‘Mr. Right,’ an aspiring writer looking for her big break and scenarios too numerous to list. People blog for many different reasons, mainly to be heard, to feel that what they say has meaning and matters to someone and when they get feedback, even if its criticism, most bloggers are simply delighted that someone took the time to read what they wrote and decided to write back.

It seems as if everyone wants to know what everyone else is doing. And it’s not just teenagers and the younger generation. Older individuals who have become Web savvy may decide to begin a blog about their adventurous life as a ‘living’ legacy for their children or grandchildren. They may feel as if they have advice that could help someone or just want to be heard and a blog is the perfect way to release this energy onto the unknown.

An individual, who decides to create a personal blog, should take precautions to safeguard themselves and their family against unknown and unwanted dangers. A personal blog should not contain any identifying information such as a full name or address, telephone number or email address. People can leave comments on most blogs as a way to reach the blogger.

There are several terms that individuals and businesses need to know and understand when they create and write blog posts, receive updates and read other blogs. Most of the blog language is not ‘common sense’ terms so having a list of terms and their definitions is a good idea, especially when one is first starting out in the blogosphere.

• Atom – a ‘feed’ for which blog updates are delivered to an individual as soon as they are published.
• Blawg – this is a law blog used by lawyers and attorneys to blog about everything from the jury selection process to the latest debate in where to hold the 9/11 trails.
• Blog client – is a software package that enables a blogger to manage, edit, spell-check and perform a number of other related activities to their blog without opening a web browser, they do all this from a specific operating system.
• BlogDay – takes place every August 31 in which bloggers from around the world are charged with posting a suggestion for five new blogs on their blog in order to emphasize other blogs that vary from their own in terms of viewpoint, culture, affiliation, design or political view.
• Blogger – the person who runs the blog, writes the blog posts (normally) and updates blog posts in addition to answering questions received in the ‘leave a comment’ section.
• Bloggies – very popular blog award, one of many.
• Blogosphere – the blogging community or all the blogs put together.
• The BOBs – the largest of several international blog awards.
• Collaborative or group blog – a single focused blog or political ‘stripe’ blog in which there are many different users able to post content.
• Flog – a blending of the words ‘fake’ and ‘blog’ which is also a blog that is ghostwritten by someone else, sometimes a ‘hired pen’ or someone from the marketing department.
• Feeds – there are several different and equally sufficient feeds, however, the most popular one and the one used most often to update people about the change in content of their favorite blog is RSS – Really Simple Syndication. This is an XML-based language for circulation of Web substance.
• J-blog – this is either a blog containing Jewish themes or a journalist’s blog.
• Miliblog – a blog specifically designed and operated for a branch of the military – Army, Air Force, Marines or Navy.
• Permalink – this is a unique URL that is typically given to a blog post that is archived.
• Phlog – a photo blog with the mixture of the words photo and blog for the title that could also be referred to as a Photoblog.
• Pingback – found in the TrackBack software which alerts the original poster of a blog post when someone writes a comment about the original blog post.
• Post – an entry or written text that makes up the blog and published on the Internet for all to see.
• RSS – stands for Really Simple Syndication which is part of a family of Web formats used when publishing updates from a blog, podcasts, or news headlines.
• Search engine friendly URLs – SEF URLs is when a blogger take a URL and shortens it to make more sense in addition to making more relevant to the blog, using the blogs main topic or keyword in the URL would be making it search engine friendly.
• Vlog – a video blog containing videos. A vlogger would be someone who posts videos of themselves doing something relevant to the blogs theme up on the blog.
• Weblog – the original term used for ‘blog’