The Story of Thomas' first Blog

I started my first Blog in Jan 2009. I have heard a lot on blogging but did not find the time and effort to do one myself until now. Amazingly, I did created my first personal homepages using HTML way back in 1997.

Currently, I am enrolled into the second semester of the Master of Science in Information Studies with the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. I took up the "Internet and Web Technologies" module and as part of the coursework assignments, each student is to develop a Blog and examine how such Web2.0 technology can be used for collaboration and knowledge sharing within an organisation or among group of users.

I spend some time browsing through the various Blog hosting websites to look at some of the best tools to help me setup my first Blog and manage my web publishing needs. The more popular ones include the followings listed below.

1. Google-owned Blogger (http://www.blogger.com/)
2. Yahoo 360 (360.yahoo.com)
3. MSN Spaces (spaces.msn.com)
4. WordPress (http://www.wordpress.org/)
5. Blogsome (http://www.blogsome.com/)
6. Movable Type (http://www.movabletype.org/)
7. Textpattern (textpattern.com)
8. LiveJournal (http://www.livejournal.com/)

A web site review from Forbes.com, finally help me to decide on Blogger. I have extracted the comments here,

"Have you noticed any of the millions of blogs out there whose addresses end in blogspot.com? Those are all hosted by Blogger, Google's blog application. Blogger prides itself on its quick setup time and ease of use (indeed, we set up a test blog in less than a minute), with a large Create Your Blog Now button on its homepage. Once you get everything set up, however, managing the look and feel of your blog is not as easy as it might seem. For instance, you can pick initially from 12 well-designed templates (your choices expand to 31 once you're already set up), such as Dots, Minima and Sand Dollar, and then if you want to edit anything, you've got a dense chunk of code to work with. There is nothing in between basic and advanced. Still, basic posting is easy enough with Blogger's what-you-see-is-what-you-get editor, and you can even post via e-mail to save time. Blogger also finally added an image upload function in June, where you can post images to your blog and let Blogger host them. Also, for those looking to earn income from the traffic to their posts, Blogger makes it easy for you to enroll in Google's Adsense, a program to run contextual advertisements on your blog.

BEST: If you want to have Blogger run your blog to get all the advantages of its easy and quick set-up, but you also want to host it at your own domain name (to have YOURBLOGNAME.com, rather than YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com), you can simply enter your host password into Blogger and it handles the rest.

WORST: No categories for posts, just big archive lists. Also, you can't get rid of the Blogger logo and header hanging over the top of your blog.

I look forward to learn more about blogging and to look at how blogs have reshaped the web, impacted politics, shaken up journalism, and enabled millions of people to have a voice and get connected with one anothers.

If you do have some good references on blogging, do point them to me. Cheers!