Questions about blogging

Factual Questions
1

I was reading the New York Times last week that had an article about blogging. I subsequently went to a couple sites that are popular blogging sites and came away really confused. (I think Blog.com & Blogger.com…)

The NYT article talked about particular blogs that have developed a following and some have hundreds (thousands?..) of people who log on to read that a given author.

Cool so far…

So I went on site and looked to see if I could do a “search” to see if perhaps there were any friends that I have that may be bloggers. But there is no search feature! The main page lists several recent blogs, that you can click on, but I could see no way to get into the site and browse through, or in particular look for a friend. What am I missing? I mean, how does anyone find a blog, or a paricular blogger? I emailed one of the sites and they responded that they currently have no search feature, but suggested I might try google.

That inspired the next question… When you sign up are you given basically a single URL that “houses” all of your blogs into a master Blog or site? I had this mental notion that you always go to the site’s main page and then log onto a particular blogger’s stuff. That appears to be somewhat wrong, and that what really happens when you sign up is you’re given a web address of sorts and that people who read your stuff are able to go directly to that site without going through the site’s homepage. Is this correct?

Can anyone shed some light on this for me? I’m really confused…

2

a lot of bloggers choose to remain anonymous, as they can vent their angers, frustrations and innermost secrets. Now, I don’t mean everyone, but everyone I know who has a blog, and that’s about 20 people, they’re all anonymous. There’s blogs about everything imaginable, so some people don’t want their name and their proclivities listed together. That’s what I know.

3

It seems to me that the main way blogs are spread is word of mouth (online or otherwise). If you read something interesting, you might tell your friend “Hey, look at this.” If you create a blog yourself, you might tell all your friends “Hey, I write this, come check it out,” or include a link in your IM profile or .sig or such. Bloggers linking to other blogs seems popular as well, and I’ve also seen them linked to messageboards as topics of discussion or arguments.

Generally, I think that most blog locations give you a web address which you can go to and read without “logging in.” Livejournal, for instance, gives free users “http://www.livejournal.com/users/USERNAME” and paid users “http://USERNAME.livejournal.com”

4

If you want a blog on a particular subject, just google blog [subject] or maybe journal [subject].

5

One blog that gets mentioned in articles like that often is www.wilwheaton.net.

The main reason you can’t search, though, is the privacy factor.

6

I seem to remember that in LiveJournal, you have the option of allowing your journal to be publicly available via their search engine, or keeping it out of the index. So if privacy is really the issue, following LiveJournal’s lead would be good way for Blogger to let its users remain ‘hidden’ while still providing a useful service for those wanting to search its contents.

Considering that Blogger’s now owned by Google, you’d really think that a search engine or directory would be a natural addition!