Blogs represent a whole new way for art, ideas, and information to become popular. Most blogs are just for the person blogging. Many more are for the blogger, plus there friends and family. Some blogs are of interest to a wider public, and the nature of a blog allows a much more interesting relationship to develop between the writer and his or her audience than was possible in traditional print media. Blogs are also interesting because it allows for the growth of a community of writers and artists to grow and interact with each other.

What does this mean for promoting artists and ideas? Blogs fit into the larger picture of digital media in many ways. For one, search engines and blog-aware services like del.icio,us are aware of what sites are getting linked to the most in both static sites and blogs. By having your own blog, and commenting on people and things that are important to you, you help those people and things become more popular in all these arenas (as long as you know the basics of SEO optomized linking, that is). The more you comment on the things you like, and the more people who read your blog and care what you have to say, then the more you help promote those people and ideas.

"Blog" is short for "weblog." It is a page on the internet where somebody regularly posts entries. There are as many different kinds of blogs as there are  bloggers.

Blogs allow people to exchange information. Blogs are different than email, because they are usually public, which means anyone can read them. It also means search engines can index the content and the links contained therein.

This becomes very interesting in regards to the spread of art, culture, and ideas, because anything that is blogged about becomes part of a global web of dialogue in a very tangible (and searchable) sense. You can go see what music and videos people are blogging about, or what websites are hot, or what news articles are actually getting the most attention. Blogs also affect search engine results, because if everybody is linking to a given site within a given context (such as poi), that site will rank higher in relevant searches. This means that you can contribute to the evolution of art, ideas, and information simply by blogging about things you like, especially if you learn a few simple details about using keywords in the anchor text of your links.