[1] What is a blog?

A blog or web-log is a kind of internet diary. In essence, it's just a web site, but with some extra bits that make it easy and interactive to use.

Get more information on blogs from Wikipedia

Visitors to blogs can not only read the content , they can also react and leave comments. So quite extended conversations and collaborations can take place. The ease of use has proved very popular with web users, and the blogosphere, not surprisingly, has mushroomed.

Another advantage is that most blogs have news feeds, so that it's very easy to trace what's being talked about on the web by monitoring feeds without even visiting the blog sites. In this way, the topics can be made to appear on your desktop. Taking it a stage further, you can bundle your RSS feeds into OPML files that you can import into your news reader so that you can use all the feeds or share them with other people. Examples of news readers are Snarfer, Accessible RSS.