I recently decided to broaden my scope of writing to include freelance writing for online publications. Since this is new territory for me, I began by checking out various websites' discussion groups and investigating what "people-in-the-know" say about getting your "foot in the door." The general opinion I found is it's a good idea to establish an online community of readers through a blog. "It's not a bad idea," I thought, so for the two days that followed I researched this mega-phenomenon called "blogging."   

   I'll admit that I had no idea what blogging really was. So I checked one of my favorite resources--the dictionary. According to dictionary.com, a blog is a personal chronological log of thoughts published on a Web page, in other words an online diary. However, as I read different blogs on different sites from blogger.com to Wordpress to Christianblog, they didn't seem to be limited to what I'd consider to be a typical collection of "diary" entries. It seems that you can post videos and call it a blog. You can journal your day-to-day life and it's a blog. You can write your thoughts about a political issue and that's a blog. Your travel log--yep, it can be a blog too. So I deduced that a "blog" is whatever you make it.