 | According to Merriam Webster OnLine, the number one word its readers sought to define in 2004 was one we've likely all heard but are just beginning to understand: "blog."
The online dictionary site defines a blog as a Web site that contains a personal journal with reflections, comments, and often, hyperlinks provided by the writer. Short for Web log, a blog lets you keep information that you want to share with others - words, pictures, and even music-in one easy-to-locate online space, thus eliminating the need to send multiple e-mails to share your world. |
|  | | Log your family life or express your thoughts | | | Andrea Rennick has no need to turn to the dictionary to understand what a blog is. This mother of four has | been keeping a Web log about her family life since 1999, "before blogs were invented and they were called online journals," she says.
Rennick's blog, A Typical Life, is built around stories about her family life and includes postings on everything from her Saturday shopping adventures, to photographs of her kids, to reminders about upcoming meetings and her stained glass classes.
"It's a space to express my thoughts, where someone listens [and where] other moms commiserate and help me figure things out," says Rennick, who spends anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour - in bits and pieces - almost every day on her blog. Rennick's family and friends, including her 88-year-old grandfather, have become regular readers of her blog.
Rennick is one of thousands of women who now share their lives and experiences through blogs. A study by market research firm Perseus Development |  |
| | Corp. says more women than men start blogs, and women are more likely to maintain them. | | | Log your family life or express your thoughts | | | Blogs can keep families and friends abreast of a baby's birth, provide updates on a loved one's medical condition, make wedding planning easy, and create a sense of community. | | | "Women plan weddings, conceptions, adoptions, detail pregnancies, and work through grief and divorces in blogs," said Rennick. "Everything women get together to talk about one on one or in a group, they blog." |
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