Social Networks are very popular at the moment, and are a great way of keeping in touch with friends and family. They only really help though for keeping in contact with people you already know. For communicating with people you do not know already, or for creating a professional image on the Internet, blogs can be incredibly powerful.
Blogging is something I have always had a mild interest in, but recently I have tried to put a lot more effort into it and so far I am liking the result. They are a great way to communicate and present yourself to the world and to future employers, and can be set up in a fairly short amount of time. Once you're set up, just start to write about anything you find interesting.
That sounds minor, but it's a key point—write about anything you find interesting. If you are bored, telling the world you are bored will not be interesting to read. Likewise, if you force yourself to write about something you are not interested in, it will not make an interesting article to read.
Setting up a blog can be very easy, and should take very little time depending on your skill level and what you hope to achieve. For a corporate environment or someone who is likely to run a lot of blogs, a self-hosted solution such as Movable Type (also available as Open Source) would be ideal. This allows you to run a large number of blogs from a single installation, and with a suitable theme they can look very professional. For single users or smaller blogs you may prefer to host your own WordPress installation, which can be installed within a couple of minutes on almost all web-hosting platforms.
For beginners or anyone who is not comfortable or able to run their own website, a hosted blog may be a more suitable option. WordPress.com provide a hosted system based on their WordPress MU platform that can be simple to install, and gives you an unlimited number of blogs. As it is a free service however, they will run advertisement banners on your blog unless you pay a small subscription fee to remove them. Blogger is one of the biggest blog-hosting solutions, run by Google and with tight integration with the rest of their online services such as Picasa Web Albums. This may be ideal to you if you already use Google's services heavily.
For more professional hosting, TypePad is a hosted blog platform from Six Apart, the creators of Movable Type. They do not have a free service but there is a 14-day free trial available for anyone who would like to try it out before they commit to a subscription. It is not quite as advanced as Movable Type but does not involve the added work of having to host it yourself, and it has a very good support system in case you ever have any problems.
Now that you have your shiny new blog set up (and hopefully you've left a comment with the URL so that I can have a look), what are you going to write about? Inspiration can come from many places, and at any time. I tend to write about software- and web-related stuff, as it is what I am most interested in, but friends of mine write about engineering, beer, their home town and even about writing. The more interested you are in something, the more you will find to write about it.
You may find when you start that you sit down to write a post, you draw a blank and cannot think of anything to write. This happens to everyone, so don't fret too much. Take a break from the computer, flick through the news, go for a walk, and once you have cleared your mind you may find an idea just pops into your head. This may happen at any time so if possible make a note of it. I use the Notepad application on my phone to jot down any post ideas, and I often have four or five posts in draft mode that I can flesh out when I get time. You do not have to write an entire article and publish it in one go—write what you can and if you get stuck just save it and come back to it later.
Blogging is like any other form of creative writing. It takes time and work, but in the end it is worth the effort and you will quickly build up a presence in your own little corner of the World Wide Web.
