As threatened, WGx was the motivation for Monday’s Willows SeniorNet User Group meeting, which began today at 2:00 pm – almost simultaneously with the publication of this specific post.

For those of you following along at home – or reviewing the sites we visited as a refresher – Of course, this is just an outline for the presentation, but here’s the basic idea:

‘Blogs’ Can Improve Your Life. Really.

What is a “Blog” (aka Weblog)?

Right, what is this thing anyway? WGx is going with the Wikipedia definition, which is “a website where entries are made and displayed in a reverse chronological order.”

To get even more basic, a ‘weblog’ is a reverse chronological diary.

Most blogs are exclusively text-based content, but emerging versions can focus on photographs (photoblog), sketchblog, videos (vlog), or audio (podcasting), and are part of a wider network of social media, aka the “Web 2.0″ phenomenon.

Before the world started “blogging,” there were many existing digital communities, including Usenet, commercial online services such as GEnie, BiX and the early CompuServe, and various e-mail lists and bulletin boards. In the 1990s, Internet forum software, such as WebEx, created running conversations with “threads”.

Early weblogs were just common websites which required manual updating. The evolution of technology tools have made the publishing process feasible to a much larger, less technical, population. There are several on-line software tools that provide the background support for weblog publishing. WGx uses WordPress, an open-source tool with a goring community.

Today, there are even commonly understood sub-categories of weblogs, like babyblogs, teenblogs, linklogs, photoblogs, tumblelogs, slogs (website sub-logs), and even splogs (yes, unfortunately spam blogs exist too).

There are also collaborative blogs, social network blogs, club and affiliation blogs, many different potentially-successful business models.

Surfing around the “Blogosphere”

Well, you could start with the WGx Blogroll, always published on one of the side columns of Willow Glen Extra. Like most bloggers, WGx maintains a handy list of respected and interesting weblogs to share with readers. The official WGx blogroll is limited to blogs that relate to Willow Glen and our surroundings.

The list of WGx Members serves the same purpose, but is limited to websites created, maintained, or hosted by Willow Glen Extra. Most could be used as blogs, but some don’t always function that way.

Blogging combined the personal web page with tools to make linking to other pages easier — specifically permalinks, blogrolls and TrackBacks. This, together with weblog search engines enabled bloggers to track the threads that connected them to others with similar interests.

Finding interesting Blogs

In May 2007, blog search engine Technorati was tracking more than 71 million blogs. You can use search sites like this to find blogs on any topic, primarily following the concept of “tags” which are words or short phrases that categorize blog posts and their topics.

One of the most recent creations in the Blogosphere is the site TailRank, which allows you to find blogs that are commenting on various news items or other cultural memes that you want to follow.

Reading and navigating Blogs

One of the easiest way to read weblogs is to bring the articles to one page you can review more easily than surfing around from blog to blog. The main enabler of this practice is the “RSS Feed.”

Bloglines is a web-based news aggregator for browsing weblogs and other news feeds via syndicated feeds utilizing technologies such as Really Simple Syndication and ATOM. My Yahoo! and iGoogle provide similar resources.

Joining the “Blogosphere”

In fact, it’s a lot easier than you think. Almost every blog article on the Internet is open for comment and discussion. Weblog “comments” are a universally recognized invitation to open debate on any topic. Most sites welcome comments from anyone, as long as you follow a site’s behavior guidelines when commenting. Most of the time, you don’t even have to make your identity known, although weblog publishers usually ask for a confirmation email address.

Publishing your own Blog

Again, it’s easier than you think it is. There are many, many websites that will host your weblog for free, using web forms and automated formatting to make your weblog look very nice. You don’t need to have any special knowledge (like HTML or CSS), but it’s even easier to take your blog to the next level if you do.

Here are just a few of the free, hosted options: LiveJournal, Windows Live Spaces, Blogger (now part of Google), and of course, MySpace.

Of course, the sky is the limit if you want to go really crazy. Any hosted website can be converted into a weblog, using a variety of easy-to-install tools and programming languages. Among the software you can use are well-known products Movable Type (aka TypePad), Wordpress (also hosted at Wordpress.com), and Windows Live Writer (beta).