Learning2.0 : Journey to about2findout.com

Blogs are perhaps the 'killer app' for web2.0. I'm also a part of the blogosphere for one month now and so far it's a positive experience. I try to write two or three posts a week. Blogs are all around us now, we even have our internal blogs at IBM these days, and I can't help wondering why so many people would be interested to read what seems to be the digital version of a diary. Today I want to shortly share my experience in setting up a blog.

First there is the choice of site. The most popular blogging tools include MovableType, Blogger, TypePad and Wordpress. You can read some comparisons here.
MovableType and TypePad are both owned by Six Apart. Blogger.com has been purchased by Google some time ago.

I chose blogger because it is free (TypePad isn't), simple (on first sight MovableType is so powerfull it has to be complex too) and has an intuitive interface and clear help section to get you started. I also chose it because it is integrated with Google's Adsense and I wanted to experiment with that as well. Finally I chose Blogger because with Blogger you can actually put the blog on your own web site.

The most 'difficult' part of Blogger for me was the customisation of the template. Blogger has nice default templates, and with a little knowledge of style sheets (CSS, well explained on w3schools.com), you can tweak the colors, font size etc. It's also in the template you can add the creativecommons or other logo's (see on the left).

Next is a screenshot of the interface to post a new blog entry (this one actually). As you can see, a nice clean and clear interface. I recommend Blogger.