More and more people are turning to blogging to express themselves. A blog is simply a website displaying text entries and pictures, along with boxes for readers to comment. Besides something to say, all that’s needed in setting up a blog is an email address and blogging service.
Determining Purpose and Audience for a Blog
Before setting up a blog, bloggers should determine the purpose of their blogs as well as their audience. There are various types of blogs.
- Online diaries – Many people blog to share ordinary events happening in their daily lives.
- Internet scrapbooks – Blogs can serve as internet scrapbooks where people display pictures of family gatherings, vacations and other personal events.
- Soap boxes – People with strong opinions can use blogs for spreading their agendas. Usually this type of blog is used for political purposes.
Free Blogging Services
- Blogger – Blogger is probably the largest blogging server. To use Blogger a Google account is needed.
- Wordpress.com – One of the oldest blogging services, Wordpress offers free downloadable software. However, it’s only available to bloggers who upload and configure it to their own hosting server.
- MySpace.com – Besides serving as a social network, MySpace.com allows bloggers to target audiences based on their age, gender, interests and other factors.
- LiveJournal – LiveJournal offers photo storage, publishing tools, privacy controls and online communities for various interests.
Although writing effective text for a blog is important, finding good pictures is just as vital in creating an effective blog that draws people. Many bloggers use digital cameras for most of their pictures. However, sometimes it’s impossible to find just the right image so pictures have to be secured from online sources. However, bloggers need to be cautious to only select pictures that are royalty free images.
Royalty Free Picture Sources for Blogs
- Stock Exchange – One of the largest sources of free images can be found at the Stock Exchange website where bloggers can find thumbnail views of scores of searchable pictures on many different subjects. However, because of the popularity of Stock Exchange, sometimes it’s hard to get onto the website as the demand is so high.
- Morguefile.com – Morguefile.com offers high resolution images for both private and corporation use.
- Freestockphotos.com – Although Freestockphotos.com offers free images, it’s somewhat smaller than Morguefile. This site is excellent, however, in finding landscape photography.
- USA-gov - For excellent patriotic photos go to USA-gov.com where there are pictures the United States government has donated for use at no cost. Besides patriotic photos, there are also pictures pertaining to foreign countries, in addiction to some miscellaneous subjects.
- Wikimedia Commons – Most photographs and pictures can be used for free at this site. Users should just be careful to credit sources and read all details of the picture to ensure the image is free.
- SnapVillage.com – Although this site isn’t totally free, it does contain a section where bloggers can find free pictures. This is done by clicking on the “Browse” tab and then selecting “Free!” images.
Finally, sometimes it can be tricky knowing if a picture is considered free to use. A good clue that an image is not free is a “watermark” across the picture.
Also, when using “Picfindr.com” to find several photo sites at once, users should notice not all sites featured there are not free. A good clue is to look for any watermarks across a picture, indicating there is a charge.
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