What does it take to blog?

What is required of a blogger posting on an informative blog? What is the level of experience required to make an interesting and worthwhile blog?

Ever since I came into Blogsphere about more than just a year back, it has been kind of love-hate relation ship. It was due to several factors - mainly due to the mercurial nature of my plans as well as my life that did not allow me to stick to some plans.

But, as stated in my other post, I did stick around, and I am here. Conversing with some of my friends, both online and offline, I happened to look at the various types of blogs around and discussed with them on what it took to write blogs. What is required of the blogger other than a place to host and software to present it?

It mainly depends on the type of blog one runs. There are many blogs out there, which are just personal diaries containing posts over posts of rants and uninteresting details of someone's life charted with varying level of detail and anonymity. And still there are some that are nothing but junk, existing solely for the purpose of selling something.

And there are some that focus on a niche or a handful of niche and publish post over post of information that is nothing less than a goldmine to one pursuing knowledge in that niche. Also, there are few more that just report the happenings in the world about different topics - be it politics, technology, movies or gossip on actors and actresses.

To report on the happenings on various topics, one needs sources. It very much edges on to journalism and I think there is a raging conflict between the two factions - blogging and journalism. Keeping such blogs aside, we are left with informative blogs.

Informative blog, I believe is one of the most timeless of all the other types of blogs. Personal blogs are not of much interest to the whole world while the other 'junk' ones are not even worth talking about. Reporting or news type of blogs have their value, but the posts loose their value and become just archives once the time has passed.

On the other hand, informative blogs become repository of knowledge as the blogger goes on adding post after post to it. It is real hard for someone to become a professional blogger in this area because it takes a lot of expertise to become a credible blogger in terms of a niche topic. People can only gain experience by actually working on such situations - and I think once the blogging hype wears off, only the experience gained and recorded would hold true value.