What is a blog and how does blogging can help you and replace your website ?

What is a blog?

A blog is a personal website or web page on which an individual records opinions, links to other sites, etc. on a regular basis.

A blog is a frequently updated online personal journal or diary. It is a place to express yourself to the world. A place to share your thoughts and your passions.

• A blog originally came from the word “weblog” or a “web log”.A blog is a type of website which has posts (or entries) appearing in reverse chronological order.
• A blog is a collection of content that is organized repetitively. This content can take the form of basic words (copy) as well as rich media (audio, video, and embeddable objects).
• A blog typically focuses on a particular subject matter for clarity, focus ( for readers ).
• A blog can be built by hand, manually through writing the post, uploading to a website via FTP, and then publishing.

To summarize a blog:

1. Blogs provide commenting system 
2. Updated almost daily
3. Articles appearing in reverse-chronological order
4. Frequently crawled by Search Engines
5. Often covers a wide variety of articles

What are different blogging platforms?

There are many blogging platforms in 2014. Out of those, here are few top most blogging platforms.

Wordpress : 

WordPress is a free and open source blogging tool and a content management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL. WordPress is web software you can use to create a beautiful website or blog. We like to say that WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time. WordPress powers more than 17% of the web - a figure that rises every day. Everything from simple websites, to blogs, to complex portals and enterprise websites, and even applications, are built with WordPress. WordPress combines simplicity for users and publishers with under-the-hood complexity for developers. This makes it flexible while still being easy-to-use.

Features : Simplicity, Built-in comments, Flexibility, SEO optimized, Easy to maintain and many more...

Create a Wordpress Blog or Website at www.wordpress.com.

Or you can download Wordpress to create a Website or Blog at www.wordpress.org/download/

Here is a screen shot of famous wordpress website /blog Mashable.com

Blogger :

Blogger is a blog-publishing service that allows multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries. It was developed by Pyra Labs, which was bought by Google in 2003. Generally, the blogs are hosted by Google at a subdomain of blogspot.com. A user can have up to 100 blogs per account. Up until May 1, 2010, Blogger allowed users to publish blogs on other hosts, via FTP. All such blogs had (or still have) to be moved to Google's own servers, with domains other than blogspot.com allowed via custom URLs. Unlike WordPress, Blogger cannot be installed in a web server. One has to use DNS facilities to redirect a custom URL to a blogspot domain. (Easiest platform for newbies).

P C MADNESS is a blogger blog / website. 

Tumblr:

Tumblr (stylized in its logo as tumblr.) is a microblogging platform and social networking website founded by David Karp and owned by Yahoo! Inc. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content to a short-form blog. Users can follow other users' blogs, as well as make their blogs private. Much of the website's features are accessed from the "dashboard" interface, where the option to post content and posts of followed blogs appear. As of July 1, 2014, Tumblr hosts over 192.9 million blogs. The company's headquarters is in New York City. Yahoo! announced its intention to acquire Tumblr on May 20, 2013, for approximately $1.1 billion. The deal closed on June 20, 2013.

Here is official Tumblr staff blog

What are the advantages of blogging?

Here are few advantages from blogging. I collected info from many sources and listed here below.

1. Quick and Easy to Start
2. Get a Better Job
3. Mastering a subject
4. Start a New BusinessGet
5. More Clients to Your Existing Business
6. Easy Integration
7. Marketing and Communication
8. Build an Online Body of Work
9. Thought Leadership
10. Become a Better Writer
11. Learn More About a Group of People
12. Get Immediate Feedback
13. Gain Influence
14. Establish Yourself as an Expert in Your Field
15. Build a Network
16. Ease in reaching out to a vast audience on the internet
17. Builds Credibility
18. High traffic with high page ranking
19. A Source of Income
20. Flexibility of working hours

Easy updation from your SmartPhone

Download WordPress app	Download Blogger app	Download Tumblr. app
For Android	For Android	For Android
For IOS	IOS	IOS
For Windows Phone	No official app (Some 3rd party apps are available)	For Windows Phone
For Blackberry	No official app (Some 3rd party apps are available)	For Blackberry

Here are three best websites for learning "how to blog?"

• Copy and paste the URL in new tab.

1. http://startbloggingonline.com/
2. http://amylynnandrews.com/how-to-blog/
3. http://impossiblehq.com/how-to-start-a-blog-guide