Online journals or Web logs are a popular way to share personal experiences and thoughts with family, friends and complete strangers

Hundreds of people know that Paul Bausch has a dog named Luna, likes photography and technology, and went for a hike at Silver Creek Falls a couple weeks ago. He told them all about it without ever leaving his home in Corvallis.

Linn-Benton Community College professor Beth Camp has already shared her adventures while on an eight-month trip to Europe with her friends and family, even though she's still in Paris.

Albany resident Zac Evenson ponders the pros and cons of Bush v. Kerry in the 2004 election in front of an audience of strangers, putting forth his current thoughts every few days.

All three have discovered the joys of blogging.

Web logging, known as blogging, is the practice of publishing an online diary of sorts for others to read.

"It's a way for me to get my ideas out," Evenson said. "Without this, either I wouldn't be able to, or just a small group would hear what I had to say otherwise. It's a way to make my voice heard."

Blogs are normally in reverse chronological format, with the most recent entry on top. They often include links to subjects that interest the author. People write blogs about everything from knitting to politics. Some people become famous in the online world, with thousands of people logging on to read their daily musings. Others are read only by their family and friends. Recent studies suggest that between 2 and 8 million U.S. adults now have blogs.

People have been posting their thoughts online for as long as the Internet has been around, but blogging in its current form began expanding in popularity in 1999, with the creation of programs like Blogger that make it easy for non-tech-minded people to create their own blogs with a few mouse clicks.

Bausch, 30, was around for the early days of blogging - back when you had to know HTML, the Internet coding language, to have your own presence on the Web. In fact, he was part of a three-person company called Pyra that started Blogger, a program that allows people who know nothing about technology or design to create their own online journals in less than five minutes, for free.

Bausch said they created the application as part of a different project, but when they realized how useful it could be, they decided to offer it to the public.

"We did that in August of 1999, and it just grew exponentially," Bausch remembers. "It eclipsed everything else we were doing. It took over our lives."

Blogging popularity continued to grow, and other blogging services popped up, such as Blog-City, Diaryland, LiveJournal, Pitas, TypePad, Weblogger and Xanga.

Bausch is now a free-lance Web developer and technical writer developer who moved to Corvallis a year and a half ago from Sebastopol find a more serene place to live.

Bausch writes about a variety of things in his blog, onfocus.com, often about new developments in the online world. He also posts photos that he takes and comments about interesting things he does or sees.

"I couldn't tell you how I decide what to write about," he said. "It's intuitive. It's whatever I'm interested in."

Finding things to keep writing about is apparently sometimes a problem for bloggers — a survey by Perseus Development Corp. found that 66 percent of surveyed blogs hadn't been updated in two months. That's 2.72 million abandoned blogs. More than a million of those were started up but then had no additional entries.

Zac Evenson of Albany has had online journals for years and has written past blogs that petered out.

"I was trying to do something just covering my day, but I would run out of things to say and not have anything interesting to comment on," he said.

His new blog, Who To Choose (www.whotochoose.blogspot. com), focuses on one topic: following his thought processes as he decides who to vote for in the 2004 presidential election.

Beth Camp, another mid-valley blogger, also has a blog with a specific focus (bethcamp.blogspot.com). She writes from abroad about her travels in Europe while on sabbatical from her job as an English professor at Linn-Benton Community College.

"Blogging seemed an ideal way for online journaling to share my impressions with family, friends, colleagues and students," she wrote in an e-mail to the Democrat-Herald from Paris.

She is one of the many bloggers writing for what the Perseus survey calls "nanoaudiences." News of blogs normally is spread by word of mouth. Very popular blogs may receive mention in the traditional media. But many blogs are read only by the author's family and friends, if anyone.

For some, though, blogs can be a way to connect with new people who live in the same area or share similar interest. Bausch started a site called ORBlogs that is a listing of Oregon Web logs. It's a way to form connections that go beyond the online world, he said.

He's met people through forums about Oregon blogging, and also attends a yearly conference called South by Southwest, where he has met people in person that he previously only knew through his blog.

"I've met people who I'm friends with to this day who e-mailed me about things I've written," he said.

Do it yourself

Starting your own blog is easy, free, and literally takes less than five minutes. All you need is a computer with an Internet connection.

I tried out the service at blogger.com, but there are many other popular blog hosting services, such as Blog-City, Diaryland, LiveJournal, Pitas, TypePad, Weblogger and Xanga.

At www.blogger.com/start, click on the orange arrow that says "create your blog now." You'll be asked to come up with a user name and password, as well as what name you want to be displayed with your blog. They will also ask for your e-mail address, but that won't be displayed on your blog unless you want it to be.

You can click on a button and read the Terms of Service, which are lengthy. They spell out exactly what Blogger provides and doesn't provide, tell you what the rules are (you are responsible for obeying all laws and not using blogger to spam people), and say that you can't sue Blogger if you are somehow not satisfied with the service.

Then you'll be asked to come up with a name for your blog. I wasn't very creative, so I called mine Jen's Page. Then you'll be asked what address you want people to type in to read your blog. The address is always in this format: http://(yournamehere).blogspot.com. For instance, mine is http://jens_page.blogspot.com.

Next you will pick out a template for your blog. There are several attractive ones to choose from.

That's it. You're ready to start posting.

To see my blog and read more about what I learned about blogging while researching this article, visit http://jens_page.blogspot.com.