What is a Blog, anyway?

[I wrote this back in May, right around the time I wrote my first post. I just never got around to posting it until now.]

Now, some of you are groaning right now—this is a blog! Quiet. It’s still a brand new technology to a lot of folks. For a lot of my friends, this may be the first blog they’ve read.

So, what is a blog? Well, it may be in some dictionaries by now, but it’s not in my 2001 paperback edition of the American Heritage. It comes from the word (which undoubtedly is also missing from my 2001 AH) web log—which is a sort of log about things going on on the web. There are tons of these!! Some are very personal, some are very political. The highlighted words are links that will take you to places on the web.

So, how do I get started reading blogs? You can go to Google and type in a topic that interests you and +blog. I’m not going to do your searching for you, but I recommend Bloglines as a place to get started in RSS. Oh man, did I just lose you again? RSS stands for “really simple syndication.” It means that if person A only updates once a month and person B updates twice a day, you don’t have to keep visiting everyone’s blog to see if they updated yet. You just go to your Bloglines account—it’s like your own blog mailbox, and voila! You can read all your blogs.

So, if you are interested, here are some instructions on how to go blog-crazy. It’s a sort of experiment, see? And it doesn’t cost a penny above your dial-up or broadband connection!!

When I was in college, we had a symposium where among other things we gave an honorary doctorate to Marian Wright Edelman. We had a guy come in and talk about HTML (hyper-text mark-up language). Basically, he described a page of Moby Dick. You would be able to click on every word and every word would give you insight into the nuances of this highly complex American novel (which I still haven’t read.) His point was, there is a lot of symbolism and talk about things that the average Joe might not get at first glance. So with HTML, you would be able to read the text with study notes right in the text. I don’t know if such a copy of Moby Dick exists, but it sure would make reading something like James Joyce’s Ulysses a lot easier to read.

This blog is going to be about books, mainly. The title, “pink sneakers and pocket books,” comes from the name of the web site I was going to build, which was Pink Pumps. I even had a logo designed, and I had a pair of satin pink pumps I had purchased at Goodwill on my desk as an inspiration. But as many things I’ve eventually set aside in my life, they didn’t fit me. I wear jeans, mostly, and I own at least 3 pairs of pink sneakers. Pocket books are what older Americans call the mass-market sized paperback books (that supposedly fit in your pocket). Most of the books I’ll be talking about won’t really be pocket books, because I intend to focus on chick lit and children’s books, both of which are published in a larger trade sized format. But the alliteration worked, and it’s my blog to name as I please. It’s going to be pretty girly, but occasionally I’ll wax on thing like librarians (I am one) or new technology (most of this post). It’s an experiment, and I thank the people at Blogger for giving me a free technology to mess around in. Please come back.