(Fade to Dream Sequence...)

At the time, I was on vacation from my job and working 20 hour days trying to create marketing solutions for my fiancé who was struggling to start up a career in real estate sales.

For months I had been watching her interact with customers and was convinced she was going to be a star. But her problem was marketing, she needed more leads- and my answer was to create a unique website with a blog.

In case you didn't know, 2004 was the year of the blog. Heck, days before my first blog posting Time Magazine published and article saying so (which must make it true).

Even if you were a Luddite who didn’t own a computer, it would have been hard not to have heard about blogging in 2004. Time went as far as to compare it to Radio in the 1930’s and Television in the 1950’s.

Sure naysayer’s compared blogging to CB Radios in the 1970’s (i.e. a fad that would eventually die), but in 2004 blogs were making and breaking presidential campaigns, getting people fired, and making a handful of average people very rich and a lot of newspaper people very nervous- so it was a hot topic for a reason.

But since real estate agents are my target readers, let’s back up for a moment and assume you never really understood what all the fuss was about and give you a brief history lesson.

If you are reading this online, somewhere in the 1990’s you probably discovered the internet. Heck, it may have been the reason you bought your first computer.

If you were a proactive technology-oriented business person you probably rushed out to build a website (or paid some geeky person to do it for you).

If you did it yourself, you probably came to realize how big of a pain in the rear it was to make changes and keep the website up to date.

You see, in order to do do it yourself, there was a computer programming language called “HTML” that you had to learn.  Once a new web page was created in HTML every other existing page probably had to have minor changes made to link in the new page.  Then all of the changes had to be uploaded to the website.

It was all very time consuming, extremely easy to make mistakes and again a big ol' pain in the rear.

Blogging software, which is short for Web-Log (drop the We and you have b-log) was created as a way to make it easier to post content on websites. Basically, blogging software gives you a nice word processing screen to type on and with the click of a “send” button the computer creates the web pages for you and updates all of the other web pages to connect them together. Because blogging software keeps things in a chronological (log) order, blogs are often compared to online diaries or journals.

From a technology standpoint, that’s all there is to blogs- a simple piece of software that makes it easier to publish content to the internet in a journal fashion.

So why all the fuss you ask? Well, for most people the difficulty of understanding how to “program” a webpage and upload it to the internet is what kept them from ever trying in the first place.

Because blogging software made the process easy, the average person didn’t need to know anything past simple word processing skills to publish on the internet. Basically, the barrier to entry in internet publishing had been removed. Students, housewives, and other ordinary average people like real estate agents were suddenly able to be internet journalists and authors.

(Continued Tomorrow)