The word "blog" derives from the combined words "web" and "log"; that is, "web + "log" = "weBLOG". Think of a "log" as in:

"Captain's log, stardate 43198.7. The enterprise remains in standard orbit ..."

The blog is, in essence, a modern format for a diary. Not everyone in this world chooses to share their reflective diaries with others, but many do.

Seriously, many people get confused into thinking that a blog is a way of communicating online. In fact, a blog is more usefully thought of as an online notepad or diary.

In Mahara we create a variety of blogs and then we use those blogs as a way of collecting our reflective thought processes on different topics. Actually writing things down is a useful process for helping us to understand our thoughts more clearly than we would understand them otherwise. It obviously helps to use different topics, which can organize our thoughts and learning in a neat and ordered way.

Some people do then choose to share these written reflections with others, and Mahara will actually allow us to go public with our blogs, if we choose to. We will see how to do this later in the chapter when we add our blog to our Profile Page. Once you have got the hang of it, Mahara actually offers a really easy way of setting up really attractive public blogs and can be considered a serious contender to many of the other public blogging platforms out there.

So you now know that you should be blogging, let's find out how we can do that in Mahara.