So you want to start your own blog and tell the world exactly what is on your mind, and maybe even make a buck or two while you are at it? I’m going to show you just how you can be blogging in a matter of minutes.

What is a blog you ask? A blog is a type of website ran by an individual or sometimes multiple individuals where they can post regular entries of commentary, or keep an online journal. Blogging is the perfect way to express your opinions about certain subjects to other people on the web, or just tell them whats happening in your life.

I’ll be showing you how you can be blogging in a matter of minutes by making use of the free blogger.com platform.

If you already have a GMail account signing up to the Blogger.com service from Google is a breeze. Blogger.com is a free blogging platform that enables anybody to run their own personal blog for free. It also allows unlimited flexibility to personalize your blog with themes, gadgets and more.

Step 1: Go to http://www.blogger.com and click the Create a blog button

Step 2: Enter your name and tick the Acceptance of Terms box and click Continue

Step 3: Give your blog a title and choose a blog address, this will be the domain you type into the browser to get to blog, click Continue

Step 4: Choose a template you like, this will be the look of your blog, click Continue

Step 5: You blog is now created, to start writing your first post click Start Blogging

Step 6: To start writing your first post give your blog post a title and then start writing your heart out about what ever you would like. After writing your first blog post simply click Publish Post and your post will appear on your site for everybody to read.

See how simple it is to start your own blog? Keep coming back as I will be doing some more articles soon on blogging, including how to get more readers to your blog and setting up your first advertisement to earn money from your blog.

If you have any questions regarding starting your own blog feel free to leave a comment and I will reply swiftly.

MyScoop the latest addition to the South African blog aggregation and social bookmarking arena has again amazed me with its latest feature.

Nick Duncan the man behind MyScoop is constantly working on new features to make MyScoop South Africa’s best social bookmarking and blog aggregation tool, and its latest feature is site statistics straight to your inbox.

According to Nick there will be a setting in your MyScoop profile where you will be able to enable or disable the new feature as well as an option to receive statistics monthly or weekly.

The statistics mail contains stats such as your monthly rank overall and in your category, referrals sent through MyScoop to your blog, traffic statistics like visits and page views and a detailed view of how much traffic got sent through to what article on your blog.

Personally I think MyScoop is starting to give Afrigator and slowly dying Amatomu a run for their money when it comes to blog aggregation and social bookmarking. MyScoop already packs more features and nice to haves that Afrigator does not cater for, and every day I see more and more local bloggers joining MyScoop, even the big boys in South African blogging is starting to give it a try.

Whats your take on MyScoop?

Blogging is the ultimate form of expressing yourself on the Internet and getting your opinion out there, yet there is still a vast amount of people without access to Internet.

CTWUG, Cape Town Wireless User Group, is a free city wide wireless network spanning across the greater Cape Town area. CTWUG offers their users access to all kinds of services for free every month like Gaming servers, VOIP, WugTube a video sharing site like YouTube and now blogging.

Some may not see this as a big deal, but I do. Currently the CTWUG network has over 130 active members where a lot of them currently does not have access to the Internet. A year or so back we started moving all our public web services over to the local network allowing these people without Internet to be able to make use of these services via local wireless traffic, this included our main website and forums, wiki, IRC chat servers as well as our image gallery.

Now the latest addition to the CTWUG website is the blog section. Users with or without Internet access are now able to write to their hearts content about any topic they would like and make it viewable to the Internet. The blogs are currently aggregated with MyScoop and Afrigator so chances are good that other people will notice it and read it. I am all for social networking and I see blogging as the seed that started social networking, thus I always urge people to start blogging if they can and have the time.

I would like to welcome all the new CTWUG bloggers and would like to urge everybody to start blogging be it about the latest games, series, gadgets or even personal experiences. Anybody can blog about anything they like or dislike.

Google recently signed a deal with micro blogging site Twitter to index Twitter feeds in real time. The end result is Google’s real time search.

Imagine you need to head into Cape Town but would like to know how the traffic is to plan your trip. Well all you would have to do with Google’s real time search is type in CapeTraffic and it would show you latest tweets from the CapeTraffic hash being used by Capetonian tweeters.

Not only does Google Real Time Search index Twitter in real time but freshly published web pages, Tweets, MySpace updates and shockingly, Facebook public profiles. Check out the demo video below.

Want to see real-time results for any query right now? Go to http://google.com/trends and click on any of the hot topics on that page. Replace the search query in that page’s URL with a new search term and if real time results are available, you’ll be able to see them.

Awesome don’t you think?

Is social networking just a fad? Or is it the biggest shift since the industrial revolution?

An excelent youtube video on social networking.

Yesterday afternoon I decided to install a nifty plugin called Flagfox, this plugin displays a flag next to the url corresponding to the country the site is hosted in. So this morning while having my first cup of coffee and browsing my normal blogs like iMod and 2Oceansvibe I noticed that non of these site are actualy hosted in South Africa.

This made me think, what classifies a site as a local site? Is it simply the co.za domain? Or perhaps the fact that the author lives in South Africa? Maybe its because the content is only geared towards local people.

For me what makes a site local is a combination of almost all of the factors above. Personaly the 1st thing I look at when classifying a website as local is checking where it is hosted, and then obviously the content.

This brings me to the local blog aggregators Afrigator and Amatomu, how do they specify if a blog is South African? Do they actualy check if site is relevant to South Africa or is it up to the author of the blog to decide whetere his site is local? As previously stated for me for a site to be a local site it needs to be hosted localaly and content must be relevant to South Africa, the first can be debatable on if the content is realy relevant to South Africa. Now take Carblog as an example, I could be wrong but just a quick visit to the blog released nothing realy local to me, just posts about cars being released with price tags in pounds. Now is this a local site cause it has a co.za domain or because the author resides localy as the content is not realy relevent to South Africa and the site is hosted in USA.

Sure everybody has their own views of what makes a site local and I would like to have your views on this, as 8 out of the top ten 10 South Africa blogs on Amatomu (Afrigator was down at the time I wrote this) are not hosted localy and some of them has content not relevant to South Africa.

Please give me your views on what you think makes a site local.