My favorite among the microblogs and tumblelogs is Tumblr. It’s been called a tumblelog (a sort of online scrapbook) and a microblog, but I’ve decided to use mine more or less like any other blog (many others do too). There is a difference, apart from the fact that it’s super easy to post media files. You don’t get categories, but you do get tags and there’s a customizable sidebar where you can add any info you like (html, widgets and so on). That’s a little harder to use than WordPress. If you’re familiar with LiveJournal, it’s a bit more like the free text boxes. Since I know a little (and I mean very little) html I’ve had fun custumizing the sidebar, but if you don’t know any of that, forget it. Just type in the info you want. It will be ordinary text, but that should be enough. Most of the themes have a little About box where you can tell your readers who you are or what kind of blog it is.
Soup – It’s another tumblelog. They make it very easy for you to post links, photos and other media files or – just publish your blog feed from LJ or Tumblr or Twitter. That means that anything you post on your LJ (or one of the other places) automatically gets crossposted to your Soup. It’s also very easy to set up. You don’t even need to sign up, you can try it right away. Then if you like what you’ve created, you sign up and get to keep your trial Soup.
Shoutem – If you’ve heard of Twitter, this is very similar. It’s what I’d call a microblog. You get to post short status messages, and you can add a link or a photo. It’s great. You can get your own microcommunity for free.
Twitter – Most people have heard of Twitter, but if you haven’t, you just post short status updates. It can be very simple stuff like ‘going for a walk’ or ‘having dinner’, but it can also be something more complex. Here are a few famous examples: Maybe you’ve read about how scientists monitor Twitter to learn about earthquakes before their institutes of seismology tell them. I think that’s true, actually. People are used to tweeting (posting) about anything that happens. For instance, someone tweeted seconds after a plane crash. The British actor, director, writer and media personality Stephen Fry got caught in a lift/elevator and a minute later all his fans knew about it. Then it made the news too…
You can post directly from the Twitter page or you can get a client. I’ve tried several and I didn’t like any of them enough to continue using them, though it was practical to just type into a little window and then have your status update posted remotely, as it were. Maybe if you only have one account it will work better for you. Thwirl is the one I’ve liked best. I’ve also tried TweetDeck and Twitterific and if I remember correctly, they were ok too, but not for someone with multiple accounts. If you don’t like the very basic profile page on Twitter, you can get a more extensive Twitter profile.
FriendFeed – it’s not really a blog, not even a microblog, but it works almost exactly like Soup or to some extent Twitter (though you get more features). You sign up (there are several different ways of doing that, all very easy), get a page of your own, where you can post like on Twitter or collect feeds from your regular blog or some other site you’ve joined. There are over fifty different sites that you can connect to your FriendFeed. This one’s the best feed site I’ve tried. You can also join groups – they’re also called rooms – collections of people’s posts about whatever interest the group is about. I love FriendFeed, it’s very convenient and you can customize your page so it looks nice too.
To market your blogs or webpages you can join blog toplists and blog directories. There are several. One of the best known ones is Technorati. They’ve recently changed the site and now they’re even more swamped with updates so at the moment I don’t think I can recommend it, but they’ll probably work things out and be back. Others are BlogCatalog, BlogFlux, Blogarama and Blogged. They’re quite easy to use, and there are instructions on the sites.
If you want to keep track of your visitors you can add a counter/tracker to your blog. I’m using StatCounter and eWebCounter.