Most were behind the scene changes to software which should help the site run better. We also changed the look of the Control Panel and added a theme. A theme allows you to change the look of your blog and we plan on adding many more in the near future.

We just had our first real case of a user abusing the system and we are not even officially live yet!
A guy, let’s call him Richard, registered dozens of blogs over the course of a few hours and immediately put “for sale” signs on all of them. I have to give the guy credit for trying but that was just not cool. We emailed Rich to notify him that we were going to be taking the “blogs” down and he promptly notified us that if we did we would be breaking International Blog Laws and would report us [to the Internet police?].

Gave us all a good laugh, but because of that we are limiting the number of blogs you can register to 1 for now. Extra blogs will be by request only. I know there are still ways to get around the restriction, and people will do it, but now it will be a smidge harder.

While many blogs are personal in nature and act as a public online journal they can really be about anything. Often you will find blogs dedicated to a specific topic such as food, politics, or local news. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs and web pages related to its topic. Some blogs are dedicated to a specific media. Video blogs, audio blogs, and photoblogs have all become popular. There are even moblogs (short for mobile blogs) which are blogs written by a cell phone or PDA.

Interestingly, the term “weblog” was coined by Jorn Barger way back in 1997. This was later shortened to “blog” and is accepted as both a noun and verb. So you can say, “I have a blog.” or “I blog about cars.”

A blog entry typically consists of the following:

• Title, the main title, or headline, of the post.
• Body, main content of the post.
• Permalink, the “permanent” URL of the full, individual article.
• Post Date, date and time the post was published.
• Comments
• Categories (or tags) - subjects that the entry discusses
• Trackback and or pingback - links to other sites that refer to the entry

Early weblogs were simply manually updated components of websites. People needed to be web savvy and dedicated in order to start and maintain a web blog back then.

But now, browser-based software and dedicated blog hosting services such as http://www.today.com have made it super easy for everyone to join the blogosphere.