Weblogs....Blogs!

What is a "Blog"? A blog is similar to a journal, with each entry having a date, a short text about a specific topic (your life that day) and is frequently updated. Except in this case, the journal is on-line (on a web site) and is not limited to talking about your life. You can think of it as a way to easily publish information on a website without having to deal with HTML.

You can find more info on blogging and how to get going in the following article "The Art of Blogging" part 1 and part 2.

Essential Blogging book by: Shelley Powers (Editor), Cory Doctorow, J. Scott Johnson, Mena G. Trott, Benjamin Trott, Rael Dornfest

We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs book by: Paul Bausch, Matthew Haughey and Meg Hourihan

Here are some useful articles:

• Wordpress the number 1 open source (free) blog software
• Get a free wordpress blog in seconds at wordpress.com
• Choosing blogging software dilemmas
• Blog Software Types: Article
• Blog Software Perspectives
• Blog Software
• Radio vs. Movable Type: An article reviewing the diffs between those two popular blogging software.
• Radio Userland A popular PC/Mac based blog publishing client ($40)
• Movable type Free software, must setup on your ISP.
• Blogger.com The grand daddy of Blogs.
• Free Blogger client for mozilla.
• List of weblog tools (Google directory)
• Live Journal Free service to publish your own live journal.
• UserLand Software Makers of Radio Userland. They have a package to create a whole site's content management and have multi-author blogging.

Discussion Forums / Bulletin Boards

A Discussion forum is a software that allows people to exchange (i.e. post text entries and replies) on various topics. It is a great tool for virtual community building.

With most software, you can customize the look and feel of your forum by downloading templates (or designing your own).

Here is a list of popular discussion forum softwares.

• PhpBB ,written in PHP       (Sample site)
• Phorum Open Source, written in PHP       (Sample Site)
• Zorum Free software!, written in PHP       (Sample Site)
• Vbulletin$160, written in PHP       (Sample Site)
• YaBB Open source, written in perl       (Sample Site)
• YADZ Discussion Forum Open Source, written in JAVA.       (Sample Site)
• UBB$200/$300, written in Perl. They also offer hosting.       (Sample Site)