Web Logs, Photo Logs & Journals

This material is excerpted from the forthcoming book Displaying & Sharing your Digital Photographs. If you would like to be notified when the book is published click the link below to send me an e-mail: E-mail me when the Displaying & Sharing book is published To see the book's tentative table of contents, click the link below: Show me the table of contents for the Displaying and Sharing book

A blog—a contraction of Web log—is a web page that's easy and fast to update chronologically. It’s instant Web publishing at its best. Typically made up of brief entries as in a personal journal, newer posts are displayed at the top of the page as older ones sink toward the bottom. The content of these public journals is as varied as the people who create them and some have become extremely popular—check out Dave Berry’s blog. In addition to personal comments many people post links to other interesting information on the Web including other blogs. A photoblog is simply a blog where photos are the sole, or at least important, component. A variant is a moblog, or a blog created with sounds, photos, and text sent in from a cellular phone or PDA.

My photo blog on seasonal nature sightings in the Marblehead, MA area.

To create you blog you first need a place to host it on the Web. You can host it from your own Web site but that takes some basic understanding of how your Web site works. If you don’t have some experience creating a Web site, you’d probably be better off sticking with a service that does all of the work for you. One of the leaders, and easiest to use, is Blogger, now owned by Google.. Once you have a place to host your log, you then need a way to write, illustrate, and publish it. There are two basic approaches:

Web-based software is displayed in your browser when you visit a blog service such as Blogger.com.

You have an authoring program on your desktop that works much like a Web authoring program or word processing program.

With either type of program you just type text in an edit window, format it, and click the Publish button to send your new page to your Web server.

The way your site looks depends on what template you are using to control where your posts and other elements appear on your page. Normally you’d just select one of the many pre-designed templates supplied by your Web logging service or software.

Many Web log services offer both free and paid versions. The free services are fairly basic, often run ads, and don’t let you post photos. To move beyond the basics you pay a small fee. If your host doesn’t allow photos or makes it difficult to add them, you can always put them on another site and just insert links to them in your blog. When someone clicks one of the links, the linked image appears in their browser. This approach also keep your Web log file smaller and faster for the viewer to load.

Some blog sites allow more than one person to add comments to a blog. This is a great way to share your photos with a group and get feedback.

Photoblogging is so new it’s just now getting ready for prime time. Some (all) of the tools are primitive in one way or another, and there are no really big (Microsoft-like) players involved yet. At this stage of development, it can be frustrating to get involved because you have to figure so many things out for yourself. On the other hand it’s fun to be on the frontier, doing things others aren’t yet doing, or even aware of. It’s also enjoyable to watch a field mature, which this one certainly will. By the time you read this, blogging may be integrated into Microsoft Office. The only sure thing in Web logging is that things will improve fast. Also new applications will develop. One such new application is "moblogging," a term used to describe mobile web logging from cell phones and other hand held devices. New tools like Manywhere Moblogger, Wapblog and FoneBlog allow bloggers to post photos. Blogger.com now has audio blogging so you can post voice messages to your Web log from a cell phone.