In This Chapter

One of the most active parts of the Internet is the so-called blogosphere, the home of those public diaries called blogs. A blog—short for “web log”—is a personal website that is updated frequently with commentary, links to other sites, and anything else the author might be interested in. Many blogs also let visitors post comments in response to the owner’s postings, resulting in a community that is very similar to that of a message board. It’s a 21st century version of self-publishing, enabled by the Internet.

If you want to start your own blog, Google offers its own blog-hosting service called Blogger; we’ll discuss Blogger in more depth in Chapter 18, “Blogging with Blogger.” But if all you want to do is read blog postings, there are literally hundreds of thousands of blogs you can choose from, covering just about any topic you can think of. How do you find the blog that contains the information and opinions you’re interested in?

Again, Google comes to the rescue. When you want to find a particular blog or blog posting, you can use Google Blog Search. This is a specialized subset of the main Google search engine, fine-tuned to search the far-reaching blogosphere. Read on to learn more.