If you are reading this, you are officially now part of the world of blogs (often called the 'blogosphere').

The simplest way to read a blog is to go to the web page that displays it, in my case, http://www.quietrevolutioninemail.com. However, a far better and rapidly growing approach is to get a specialized tool called a News Aggregator. This software application can live on a Web site or it can sit on your personal computer. The one I use, NewsGator, actually plugs into Microsoft Outlook and displays blog entries alongside my email messages. Yahoo! made industry news when they rebuilt their MyYahoo service from the ground up and centered it around blogs and news aggregation.

The fundamental difference between a blog and, say a page on a news site like The New York Times, is that each blog article is created and stored independently of the web page. Because the content is separated from the display, it is then straightforward to share that content in a variety of ways. It can be shipped out via email, it can be displayed on a single web page (like www.quietrevolutioninemail.com) or it can be accessed by a News Aggregator and displayed in whatever format the user desires.

Like the Internet itself, the concepts behind blogs are surprisingly simple. And, like the Internet, the ubiquity of blogs will drive rapid adoption and untold innovation as both authors and readers start to adopt the simple technology behind the blogosphere.