We’ve discussed “What Is A Blog“, but now comes the question of where you should start one.

This is an extremely personal question that everyone has to answer for themselves, but there are many reasons why a person would want to begin one.  Some people do it to express themselves, others do it fill a gap they perceive in their area of interest and others do it to attempt to make money through monetizing their site.

Most blogging experts will tell you that if you don’t start blogging for one of the first two reasons, the third will be impossible.  I tend to agree with them, because if you are blogging about something you don’t care about, then it’s going to show in your writing.  There have been many stories written about bloggers making a lot of money, but every one of them has been writing about something they care about and the monetization success came along later as a bonus.

Mind you that thousands of new blogs start every day, so this is another strike against the idea of starting one with the idea of making a lot of money.  You will have to do a lot of work to get people to find your blog, so you will be much better off doing it for friends & family, or talking to people who share your specific interests.

Again, this is a question you have to answer for yourself, but if you aren’t writing about something you love, then it is going to be a very long slog to success.

What exactly is a “blog”, and why are there are so many of them?

In short, “blog” is an abbreviation for “web log”, meaning a log, journal or diary kept online.  They can range from personal in nature, to specialized news sites like Mahsble (disclaimer, I work there), to those used by companies to communicate with their customers.

As to why there are so many, that is probably something that will be speculated on until the end of time.  They are a cheap and easy way for people to express their opions to crowds of various sizes, or to just simply work out their frustrations with the world around them.  What direction a blog takes is totally up to the person who started it.

As blogging has gained in popularity, there have been rising conversations as to what responsabilities bloggers have as journalists, or if they should even be considered such.  There are also many discussions about whether people in professional positions should even keep blogs as their employers may find something on it they disagree with, resulting in their termination.  We will cover all of these angles, plus how to start your own blog, in the coming weeks.

Hotlinking, or remote linking, is the act of using a file hosted on someone else’s web server on another site without their permission.

So, how do you know if you are hotlinking?  It’s fairly simple: if you embed an image, say on MySpace, that you did not upload yourself to a server, than you are hotlinking that person’s file.  While this may not sound like a big deal, every time that file, usually an image, is displayed somewhere, that uses up a portion of that person’s bandwidth.  As bandwidth is not free, you could potentially be costing that person money by using their image without their permission.

You also open up yourself to embaressing situtions when you hotlink because you have no control over what happens with that file.  The person you are linking from could potentially delete the image, or they could discover your use of the image, and by just uploading an image with the same file name, you could very soon be displaying some image you would never want to be associated with. As I have been blogging on SeanPAune.com for going on four years, I have an extensive amount of images, and I have been known to swap out images to add my domain name to an image after someone starts hotlinking it.  It amazes me how long it will take people to notice sometimes.

There are numerous free image hosts out there on the Web now, so if you still want to use an image, but think you have no way to host the image yourself, there are alternatives.  Services such as PhotoBucket, Flickr, Picasa and so on will allow you to host images with them for free, and will allow you to display the images anywhere you want, even providing you with codes to do so that you can just copy and paste.

In short, if you go to look for an image on Google Image Search, and it comes up with a picture you want to use, but it is not a domian name associated with you, not only is it a form of stealing, you could get in a very embaressing situation.

While we have talked about the wonders of social networking, with the astounding number of services out there, how do you ever keep up with everything your friends are doing on all of them?  That is where a service like FriendFeed comes in.

FriendFeed is what is known as an “agregator” in that it brings information from multiple sources into one centralized location to ease your access to it.  Let’s say you have accounts on Del.icio.us, Flickr, Digg and some more, you sign up for an account on FriendFeed, enter your account information from those sites, and then your friends can go to your page to follow everything you do on every site from one place.  This saves them time from having to visit each site to see what you’re doing, and then you can in turn do the same with all of their social accounts.

The other bonus to everything being one centralized location is that FriendFeed allows people to leave comments on your activities so that everyone can join in on the conversation.  This also can be done without them even having to have an account for the site activity they are commenting about.

With support for over 40 sites and activities, this is a fantastic way to keep your online social life organized, saving both you and your friends a lot of wasted time from looking to see if the other updated all the time.

Normally we don’t do news type stories here at StarterTech, but this one could impact every facet of your Internet browsing experience.

When we explained How To Pick A Domain Name, we mentioned how there werea lot of extensions to pick from.  While “.com” is always the most desirable, big businesses may soon be getting their own extensions that will be unique to them.

According to the TimesOnline, these new “top level domains” will be expensive, costing anywhere from $100,000 to $500,000.  This may seem insane, but don’t be surprised if you start seeing “.microsoft” and “.apple” domain names popping up.

The interesting news is that they will also be allowing “non-Latin” scripts to be used in domain names for the first time.  So far they are planning to support Chinese, Japanese, Arabic and Cyrillic, so this will be a massive increase to the number of domain names that can exist in the world.

As if finding a domain name wasn’t already difficult enough, now you have an endles snumber of options to boot.

There are times where you have a piece of equipment that sits there quietly for years, and then one day it just stops. What causes this? What did you do wrong?

When we previously disccessed what a switch it, we mentioned smaller ones that feature 4 or 8 ports for home use.  At our offices, we’ve been using a Linksys 4124, 24-port switch for the past 5 years, but that came to end this past Sunday when it… just stopped.

Mind you that switches have no buttons, no moving parts, it is just a dumb device that sits there routing traffic.  We have never turned off the device in the entire time (except for power failures here and there), so all you can say is it truly just gave out with time.  While this is annoying, and you may feel like you’ve been cheated by your equipment, it is just a natural happening, and you kind of have to accept it.  We have already purchased a new switch, and gotten it installed, but this one will probably also just randomly die at some point down the road, but I know to expect it.

This is also an oppurtunity to talk about back-up hardware.  Until recently, I always had a back-up router, but I am currently using my last one, but I plan to purchase a new reserve router soon.  I know this may sound expensive, but when you are making all of your money via online means, that makes every piece of equipment that helps you with your connection becomes a mission critical piece.  Now that I know a switch can just die like this, in a year or two I will buy a spare switch.  I had an 8-port on hand, ao I was able to get the most critical computers back online, but some computers and printers were offline until the new switch arrived.  Never a good thing.

So what’s your back-up plan for hardware failues?  Do you even have one?

There has been a lot of talk about the end of analog television, and the transition to all digital transmission on February 17, 2009.  Are you ready?  Will you still be able to watch television after this date?

In short, if you currently receive your television via a cable company or satellite TV provider, this will have absolutely no effect on you.  Your television is already receiving digital signal, and you will see no change at all in how you receive your transmissions.

For people who are still receiving their television over the air via antennas, then you will be effected by this change over.  You will need to either have a digital television, or you will need to purchase a digital-to-analog convertor to be able to play the signal on your TV.  The Federal Communicatiosn Council has set up a website dedicated to helping you make sure that you are ready for the change.  You can visit it at DTV.gov, but it is a fairly simple process to prepare for the change, and it only sounds scarier than it really is.

Once you’ve gone out and bought an iPod Touch or a BlackBerry, what are you going to do to keep your expensive new toy from being damaged?

While some gadgets, such as the afore mentioned BlackBerry, come with a manufacturer issued carrying case, they are usually cheap and useless.  In situations such as the iPod Touch, they come with nothing, so it is up to you to find anything to protect it from the get go.  No matter what the gadget is, you should defintely take it’s physical protection into mind when purchasing it.

So, what do you look for in a case?  For me there are two big factors: accessability to the gadget’s functions and the ability to carry it on my belt.  In the case of my iPod Touch, I went with a clear hard platic case from Griffin.  Though it didn’t have the belt clip I usually like, I liked how it thickened up the device, giving me more to grip, and it also gave me full access to the screen and all of the buttons.

In the case of my BlackBerry 8830, I went with a case that covered the keyboard, thinking it would do a good job of keeping them clean, which it does, but it also makes it fairly difficult to type.  I am sadly going to have to buy another case because I chose poorly, so my lesson is learned to ponder all aspects of the case before I purchase.  The new one I am looking into has no key obstruction at all, and has the belt clip I like, so hopefully it will work.

In picking yours, set your own criteria, and then if you are still unsure, search via Google for the name of the case and see what people are saying about it on message boards.  If the case is bad, there are sure to be some comments left out there as to why it doesn’t work well.

Though online shopping is safe, is it right for your purchases?

This is a question people have been asking themselves since online shopping first came to the public conscience in the mid-1990’s.  The answer is both simple and complicated at the same time as it totally depends on the customer and the items they are attneding to purchase.

In a study released earlier this year by the Pew Research Center, consumers said they use online shopping mainly for research, but as a heavy online shopper myself, I tend to do the oppisite.  The reason for this is mainly that I do like to see if a computer mouse feels good to me, or if a new keyboard has the action I want, but other those styles of items, I do all of my shopping online without a second thought.  It saves time, usually money, and with rising gas prices, it saves you money in wasted gas drivign around to find that item you want or need.

Even if you do prefer to purchase things in person, the Internet is a well spring of information from manufacturers, professional reviews, consumer reviews and more, but do be careful of getting too deep into your research as you may become overwhelmed and never make your purchasing decision.

In short, there is some aspect of online shopping that fits every need, you just need to ask yourself what type of consumer you are to figure out what use it will have to you.

Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking system that allows you to save sites you bookmark to a centralized site where you can tag and organize them.  If you choose to leave them public,which they are set to be default, other people can search them, explore them and discover other sites they were unaware of.

Unlike Digg, people do not vote on the popularity of a link, they simply keep saving it, and the more saves it has, the more chance of traffic being driven to that site.  While it is an exciting way for typical users to find new links, it can be a boon in traffic to site owners that get a lot of links shared on the service.

This definitely falls under the cloud computing idea we discussed, and as we said, you should never rely on your data being safe without a back up.  Luckily you can download your bookmarks to save on your local browser, and you can also upload the ones on your computer to their system, and in that case those will be marked private by default.  This will also give you access to your bookmarks from any computer by simply logging into the del.icio.us site.

It’s a completely different way to use bookmarks from the old way, and may be worth at least a little exporation on your part.