Golly…it really is true what they say about the internet and blogosphere allowing anyone to come from nowhere and yet suddenly contribute to the debate. Until last Friday the most frequent visitor to this blog was the googlebot (ie a machine), kept company mainly by my family, trying to keep up with what I’m doing.
And then as a result of my post on the local election results I had more than 400 hits over 5 days, many referred here by some quite well known political blogs. What a change!
I read somewhere recently that the direction the internet is heading is towards everything being free - and I have been discovering recently just how true this is. Nobody anymore pays for an email address, unless they really want to. The most popular browser that people choose to use to surf the web is free - Firefox, which comes from an organisation called Mozilla, which also produces a range of other browsers including a more Mac-friendly version, Camino, as well as a “full internet suite” version, Seamonkey. If you don’t like Firefox you can use Opera, if you don’t like either of them you can use Netscape, and if you particularly want to upload photos to the web you can use Flock. All without parting with a cent.
If you want to set up your own website you can have it hosted for free by most of the free email providers - Yahoo, or Google, say, or even Microsoft (at Livespaces). If you want to create a blog, Google (through Blogger) or wordpress will host it for you for free - or if you prefer wordpress will, as with this blog, let you use their software to host it on your own website.