Picking The Best Free Blogging Site Choosing a free blogging site can feel overwhelming because there are so many options. There are several large free blog-hosting sites that dominate the blogosphere, but there are also smaller sites. Whether you decide to join up with an established site like blogger or whether you choose to sign on with a relatively new venture depends on what your priorities are. Reliability is perhaps the best reason to opt for a large and well known free blogging site. When you choose to have an established brand host your blog, you can feel secure that your blog will not crash often and will not disappear in the middle of the night. A company that has been around for a while is likely to have the resources to make sure that its clients aren’t unpleasantly surprised by any technical glitches. However, many bloggers decide that this isn’t enough of a selling point. The bloggers who choose to go with smaller, newer blog hosting sites do so for a variety of reasons, but perhaps the number one advantage is a fairly abstract one. Bloggers tend to relish the fact that the internet is a place where the underdog has a strong chance of success, and by choosing to have a small company as a blog host, a blogger is casting his or her vote for David against Goliath.

If You are Already Blogging, Money May be Just a
Click Away

If you already spend a fair amount of time blogging,
money may come to you literally as soon as you ask for
it. Once you have an established blog with a regular
readership, it is easy to turn a profit through advertising.
By hosting sponsored links or banners, you can see
income from your hobby almost overnight. Even if you
did not start your blog intending to turn a profit, making
supplementary income from your blog may be easier
than you think.

Of course, even for people who have spent months or
years blogging, money from advertising revenue may
not add up to a large sum. The amount of money that
you can make as a blogger depends on a lot of different
factors, but perhaps the most important element of the
equation is the topic of your blog. If your blog is on a
subject that appeals to a demographic that advertisers
have a strong desire to reach, you will be more likely to
be able to turn a large profit on your blog than if your
blog is on a fairly obscure subject that does not draw
the kind of audience that advertisers need to appeal to.
Of course, the only way to find out where you fall on
this spectrum is to try hosting some ads. If you are
already blogging, you have nothing to lose.

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Personal Blogging, Documentary, and History

When it comes to personal blogging, documentary is
the default genre. There are plenty of blogs that serve
other functions, but many blogs are primarily catalogues
of the life experiences of their author. Although there
are quite a few blogs that focus on collecting poetry and
other forms of creative writing, the vast majority of
personal blogs are in some sense documentaries.

For many years, the act of making a documentary was
meant to be an objective act of reporting the sights and
sounds that the filmmaker, writer, or photographer
encountered. However, in contemporary times there has
been a movement towards embracing the subjectivity
inherent in the documentary form. This means that
modern documentaries often reflect the distinctive
voice and sensibility of their creator, and the fact that
todays documentaries often revolve around personality
blurs the lines between documentary and memoir. Blogs
rest somewhere between these two genres, muddying
the distinctions even further. Personal blogging,
documentary, and memoir are now irrevocably
intertwined, for better or for worse.

Although few bloggers think of themselves as making
documentaries in any formal sense, every time
somebody sits down in front of a computer and types up
a record of their day, they are documenting their own
historical moment. The things that we take for granted
about our daily lives, like the way that we use specific
modes of transportation, or the kinds of products that
we buy, often seem quite fascinating to people who live
in circumstances different from ours, and it is this kind
of fascination that is at the heart of many documentary
projects. When people think about blogging,
documentary is not very likely to be the first adjective
that crosses their minds, but a few decades down the
road it is very likely that todays blogs will be seen
primarily as very subjective documentaries of our era.
The people of tomorrow will almost certainly look to
the blogs of today for insight into our historical
moment.

When it comes to blogging, documentary may not be
the aim of most people who spend their time posting
their thoughts and ideas on the internet. In some ways,
the documentary aspect of blogging is more of a side
effect than a primary goal. However, the fact that so
many people are interested in publishing these public
online diaries shows that personal blogs are about more
than just rumination. The fact that bloggers are so
stimulated by and interested in sharing their ideas with
each other reinforces the idea that personal blogs are, in
some ways, documentaries meant for public
consumption. Documentaries appeal to people who are
curious about other ways of life, and many people who
regularly read others personal blogs are looking for this
same kind of new perspective.

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