• Blogs is short for web-logs, a kind of diary that you can create and add to easily and that others can subscribe to. I call them "Web Sites for Dummies". I say that because they usually come all set up with nothing for you to add but the content you want to share. These started off, it seems, as just personal journals, but have evolved into up-to-the-minute news sources as journalists of every kind have discovered them.

• It is important to note that I define journalist broadly. A journalist can be a professional reporter, a soldier in Iraq with Internet access, a disgruntled employee airing his boss's dirty laundry, or a marketing director announcing new developments in services to his customers. I have a few myself, and here's one of them.

• There are a number of blog providers out there who will let you set up an account for free, and you can set it up to let people leave comments, or not. The easiest to use is Blogger, and it is a part of Google. (What isn't, lately?) To read blogs, or to subscribe to them, it helps to have a feed reader. The Firefox web-browser has a free one, so it's the only one I know. You can also subscribe to blogs through My Yahoo, and I track a few of them that way. The Gainesville Sun even makes its local news available as a blog feed, so you can use your feed reader to track the latest stories that they release.
• It really doesn't make sense to subscribe to a blog unless you are following a lot of them. I do, so I have played with a few of these to see which one makes it easiest. I like My Yahoo, and I track 49 of them there. My Yahoo also lets me keep up with the weather report in this city, and in my home town of Troy, NY, just so I can gloat. Some of the blogs I follow are news feeds like Reuters and Yahoo News, as well as podcasts like Slate Magazine, Encouraging Audio Books, This Week in Tech, BBC World Technology Report, Nature Podcast from Nature Magazine, Religion and Ethics News Weekly (PBS), The Daily Breakfast with Father Roderick, The Onion Radio Network, and The Word Nerds. There are also text blogs like Tom Peters, The Smoking Gun, New Urban Legends.
• One of the easiest podcast tools for people who want to hear them is WinPodder. Download it for free and start collecting free content immediately. You don't need an iPod to listen to them.

I have gotten rid of the in-house blogs hat were hosted by my own website. They were an infernal nuisance to customize, and the tech support was non-existent.

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