With a provocative headline like that, you might expect a scandalous revelation, such as, “Weblogs Slept with American Idol Contestant.” But no, this section just answers the question: “What the heck is a blog, anyway?”

First and foremost, don’t be confused by my interchangeable use of Weblog and blog. Blog is simply a contraction of Weblog. However, people who write blogs are called bloggers — never Webloggers.Blogging is a verb; Weblogging is the utterance of an ill-informed person.

Glad we straightened out those basic terms. Moving on to understanding what a blog is, the answer is best divided into a technical part (don’t worry, it’s easy to grasp) and a practical answer. The first illuminates some nuts-andbolts facts about blogs; the second reveals how you can use that information.

First of all, a blog is a Web site. Don’t let anybody tell you that Web sites and Weblogs are different creatures. To be clear, though, a Weblog is a type of Web site. It follows, then, that all Weblogs are Web sites, but not all Web sites are Weblogs.

Note that a blog is a Web site, not an entry on that Web site. Some new bloggers say, “I wrote five blogs today.” Actually they wrote five entries in their blog.

So, what distinguishes a Weblog from other sites? Weblogs have a certain type of software running in the background. This answer might seem obscure, but that software is the hidden key to blogs. In fact, blog software is so useful that it has spawned the blogging revolution with its millions of new sites. So what is this powerhouse that lies behind blogs, and how does it make blogs different from other sites?

Here is the crucial power of blogs: They make it easy to frequently add content to a Web site. Blog programs and ready-to-use blogging services cut out the laborious and technical traditional process of building a Web site and adding pages to it.