Today I’m going to do a basic explanation of the various types of weblogs that we are now seeing around the Internet. Some of you may be familiar with the basic “Blog” but I’ll try to tell you about the variations that have blossomed as well as what is happening with this revolution.

I have been blogging on the net for about 4 years now. My old satellite TV site had an early version of a blog. Blogs of today would make that attempt almost laughable. I currently have six blogs that I do. One is on cats (surprise!!!!), one on dogs, one on health and self-improvement issues, one on credit card debt (really an expert here), one on structured settlements (ambulance chaser rewards), and one on Internet and Affiliate Marketing. All of them are pure blogs with no new technology bells and whistles.

Let’s look at what these terms mean:

BLOG

The blog has been around for many years now although last year it was estimated that there are about 18 million weblogs, or blogs, on the net now. A Blog is a web journal or diary of sorts. You make posts everywhere between once a month to once every ten minutes depending on how opinionated you are. I would guess that most bloggers post an entry several times a week but some serious ones post articles/news items/opinions about every 10 minutes day in and day out (yeah, I know, get a life!)

Blog content is generally targeted to a specific audience on a certain topic. Many bloggers have multiple blogs to retain viewer loyalty on a specific topic so that thoughts and opinions don’t vary to the extent that you have an incoherent blog. Depending on the blog author and blog setup, visitors can post comments relating to a specific post or topic. This invites interaction with the viewing audience but can also lead to spa*mmers posting their junk on your blog.

Blogs are becoming used more and more by people/organizations that used to send newsletters, commentaries, ezines and the like to family, friends, business associates or subscribers. Many ISPs and email readers now block so much sp*am that many times these authors never get their material to their viewing audience. Now they can just send out an email to their lists telling them that a new post has been made to the blog with now worry about content filters making the mail undeliverable. Also, people who have RSS readers (another topic for another time) can subscribe to the blog and actually read the blog post on their own newsreader or on an online site like Yahoo!

Internet marketing, like yours truly, are also using blogs to either market our own products, affiliate products, or just derive some simple income from Google or Yahoo advertising income. Some of these guys have 4, 5 or 6 figure incomes just doing this alone.

Over the past few year bloggers have used a technique called “blog and ping” to draw almost instant attention to their blogs from the search engines whenever they made a post. What happens is that when a post is made, the blogging program “pings” or notifies various blog directories that a new post has been made. Search engine bots had typically hung out at these directories looking for news and new information. However, with the proliferation of Splogs (see below) this technique has sort of lost it’s luster and isn’t quite as effective any more. It sometimes takes up to 9 months before Google lists your new site in the search engines anymore so you put in a lot of work before you see any quantitative results (either viewers or income.) This is a lot like corporate America and quite the opposite of athlete’s contracts. J

I’ll give you one example of a blog here in case you have never seen one before and then we’ll move on. My dog blog is at http://www.dog-breeds-blog.com . I use a blogging program called Wordpress to make the blog and also have many “plugins” that enhance the publishing capabilities. There are tons of searches for “dogs” on the search engines so I try to post quality material while still trying to sell products, affiliate items as well as get a few clicks for Google Adsense income. One of my dog blogging buddies makes a full-time income off his dog blog alone but he has been doing it for almost 2 years so mine has a long way to go.

Vlogs

Vlogs are the newest, hippest versions of blogs and to many, they are the wave of the future. Vlogs are blogs that deliver their content in video form and are only enhanced with text, graphics, etc. like a normal blog or website presents. More and more people are getting high speed Internet connections which make this technology feasible to use. Also, the cost of equipment (digital video recorders, firewire connections, and video software) has been coming down dramatically. Right now the video is NOT full-screen type viewers. Not enough computer power yet. But over the next 5 years or so this technology will dramatically improve and thus Vlogs will become a part of our daily life. Yes, sometime soon Howard Stern or Rush Limbaugh will be Vlogging at a computer near you!

Glogs

Glogs are relatively new and you would probably only recognize the term if you are a sports fan. Sites like ESPN and CBS Sportsline now feature glogs (short for “game blogs”) which are essentially a play-by-play description of what is going on at a particular game at the moment. Fortunately they do NOT permit obscene comments on these things since they are intended for family audiences.

Splogs

Splogs are a relatively new phenomenon of the last year or two. Splogs are what is known as “Spam Blogs.” Technology has progressed to the point where the same spam*mers that fill your email box with junk can now set up literally 1,000 blogs a day on the net now. They then cross post comments to their various blogs (as well as legitimate blogs if they can get away with it) in an attempt to get the search engines to give their trash an “authoritative” site rating because so many sites are linking to it. Google et al are trying to find ways to combat this type of ratings robbery but, in my opinion, they are a long way away from a solution today. Wordpress users can “filter” or “moderate” these comments so that they never actually appear on our blogs but Blogger bloggers (Google’s own company ) have tremendous problems with this sort of trash.

All of these things are done for one thing. Money. High search engine results generally relate to higher incomes and that’s what these slime balls are trying to accomplish. You would recognize one of these things fairly easily if you saw one and I won’t dignify one by posting a link here. If I ever see one of these things with ANY page rank or results in Google, I immediately shoot off a complaint to the Big G. As a legitimate marketer, I’m tired of these idiots stealing money that belongs to those of us who try to perform an excellent value to the Internet community.