Web blogging has taken the virtual world by storm. Almost unheard of 50 years ago, the blogging craze is now a prevalent activity in the web. Almost every Internet user has a blog or has used blogs at one point or the other.

For the more tech savvy individuals, launching their own blog sites has proved both successful and profitable. This venture has proven so successful in fact that more and more blog dedicated sites are cropping up on a regular basis. So what is blogging software really? 

It may be called by a number of names like weblog software, blog software or blogware, but blogging software is really a specialized form of Content Management System – something similar to software used in creating and manipulating databases. The blogging software’s main purpose is to create and maintain online blogs.

For the frequent Internet user, blogs can range anywhere from commentaries to news articles. But more often than not, blogs serve as varying forms of personal electronic diaries that may contain one or more of these elements: images, links to other blogs, links to other web pages, all sorts of allowable multi media and of course, texts. Readers of blog sites are allowed to leave their comments as a form of interactivity. 

However, with the ensuing dynamism of the World Wide Web, not all blogs cater to textual contents. Other more specialized blogs include: art logs or sites dedicated to scanned art pieces or web art; micro-bloggings, dedicated to very, very short textual blogs; MP3 blogs, dedicated to music stored in MP3 mode; photoblogs, dedicated to scanned or digital photographs; sketch blogs, dedicated to scanned drawings; and vlogs or sites dedicated to videos (something similar to YouTube videos).  

Blog applications are easy enough to find on the World Wide Web and even easier to download and install. All you really have to do is surf the web; although preferably, you would need a bit of background on open source software modification.

For the greater majority of techies, using open source blogging software is the most viable option since this allows them to modify the software, use it and eventually redistribute it – whether for profit or personal amusement.  

Open source blogging software usually supports the use of external client software like Atom Publishing Protocol and Meta Weblog API. These two aforementioned applications are what web developers call application programming interface: a source code interface that serves as an electronic library.  

Some of the open source technology that caters to web blog software uses PHP scripting language exclusively, particularly: Nucleus CMS, and Picoplog. The Typo web blog uses the free web application framework called Ruby On Rails. Others, use combinations of scripting languages like MySQL and PHP, namely: Pixelpost, TextPattern and (the most note-worthy so far) WordPress.

Still, there are sites that use a combination of scripting languages from ASP.NET, C#, MySQL, Perl, PHP, PostgreSQL, and SQLLite. These web sites are: Pixelpost, Serendipity, SimplePHPBlog, Slash, and Subtext. 

If you want to try your hand on launching your own web blog, you may want to try some of the open source software offered by: Apache Roller (Java based blog server); B2Evolution and TextPattern (both of which are PHP and MySQL based); LifeType (multi-user and multi-blogging platform using combinations of scripting languages); Six Apart (Movable Type / MT 4.0 based) ThinkJot (Asp.Net 2.0 based) and of course, the blogging software available at WordPress.  

Now, one of the most universal features of all web blogs is the constant maintenance it requires. This removes the possibility of the site ever becoming stagnant or passé. New blogs or updates are always welcome in such sites and it is this dynamism and ability to enhance or completely change the outcome of the site that appeals to many web bloggers.  

Maintaining a web blog is usually done under a browser-based interface. This means that any author or person writing the blog can create their own web content sites, remove it, edit it and maintain it as often as he or she wants to – all these without the need for more technical tools, or programming or the permission of the web blog hosts.