What’s a blog anyway?

I am away from home, at my home in Curacao for a reunion of Salas folks from around the world. I saw an childhood friend of mine, Raul, who asked me 'So what's a blog, anyway'? I was taken aback, because, what would Raul be doing, reading my blog, and especially with the rather 'odd' image that I left as the top entry before I headed down here?

So, this is just a reminder of what I already knew, of course, that anyone around the world can read this. And secondly, that anyone with the name Salas might be tempted to see what's to be seen on www.salas.com, so be careful what shows up on the front page!

A blog is a contraction of the word "Web Log", as in web diary or web journal. A blog is a web page where a single person writes whatever they choose to write on some kind of regular basis, for whatever reason makes sense to them. Who reads blogs? Who knows? It's hard to know. Why? Because for one reason or another there's an interest in what's being written.

There are a few blogs (relatively) which are really amazingly interesting and have information and news which are otherwise impossible to find. That's why I read them. (I probably wouldn't read www.salas.com if I wasn't writing it, if that makes any sense 🙂

As an illustration, and if you are still reading this entry, I am going to guess that you might be interested in what's going on in Venezuela. I live in the USA and I don't read Spanish. I get my up to date news about Venezuela from "The Devils Excrement" which is a blog written by someone who seems to live in Venezuela.

The odd thing with blogs is that I don't know who writes The Devils Excrement and what their bias is or is not. (I don't even have any proof that they live in Venezuela.) But when I am able to correlate what they write with other sources I do get the sense that it's accurate. But for all I know it's 100% pure propaganda. So you do have to be a careful consumer of this stuff.