Nasty blogging is the wave of the future! Unfortunately, anyone can write almost anything online and not even acknowledge who they are. Therefore, you can get slammed and once any kind of slander hits the Web, it’s floating around in cyber space for life. The question is: Can you do anything about it?

According to The National Law Journal’s Joel Cohen & Katherine A. Helm, “47 U.S.C. 230(c) confers broad protection for both the blocking and screening of offensive material. As interpreted, it basically gives blanket immunity to blog owners for most speech by third parties, whether prescreened, automatically posted or later removed.

“The “Zeran rule” is that the blog author/owner cannot, except in very limited circumstances, be held liable if an anonymous commentator posts the harmful information. This holds true whether the owner is an individual running a blog in his basement, or the New York Times Co. outfitting its online edition with blogs or article comments.”

Therefore, while an actual blogger can be held responsible, the publication is liable-free. The blogger’s bashing may be ordered to get taken down, but let’s keep it real…once material online has been out there for a while, it can pop up like magic, regardless of the material’s removal.

Basically, the law hasn’t caught up to the web regarding slander, yet. The only real defense is to take the “cyber law” into your own hands. What does that mean exactly? Slander back…or threaten a retaliation. Words can be brutal and when it comes to the worldwide Web, no one should throw stones from glass houses.

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Blogging has taken the Internet by storm - it seems that everyone is doing it, from your neighbor down the street to famous celebrities and musicians. Blogging is a term that comes from “web logging” and was shortened to blogging; and thusly a weblog quickly became shortened to blog.

Perhaps you want to break into the world of blogging on your own but are feeling a little overwhelmed by the whole concept of starting your own blog. You can start your own blog in a matter of 10 minutes by following these simple steps. However, we are assuming that you have a basic idea of what you want to blog about. If not, that should probably be your first step.

A Place To Call Home
Start by finding a spot to blog. You can use a free blogging place, such as blogger.com, xanga.com or others. You can find the one that you like the best by doing a quick internet search for “free blogs”. There are many out there that use a variety of interfaces.

When you find the one that you choose to use, in this instance, we’re going to use blogger.com, all you have to do is click on the “sign up” button. Once you’ve signed up with your witty name (which is what your blog will be called) you’re almost ready to rock and roll and begin blogging.

Adding Your Own Touches
You can customize the way your blog will look by going to the options portion of your account. It’s not recommended to mess with any of the HTML tags unless you know how to. However, blogger.com allows you to customize your blog with just a few clicks of your mouse. You can choose from themes, color choices and much more.

Begin Blogging
Once you’ve done any of the tweaking to your account for the way it looks when it is published, you are ready to blog. All you have to do is click on “write page” or “write post” and start writing. When you hit submit and publish, the blog you wrote is live. It’s really that simple and takes no more than 10 minutes.

Now that you have an established blog, you can write about whatever you want. Perhaps your blog is just for personal friends and family to read about you and your life. So, your “my blog” is about you and your life. Perhaps you want to update everyone on a new job or promotion, or show off pictures of your kids doing something cute. All of these are easy to do - just point and click to add pictures, video, highlight text, bold, italics, change the font and color - all with just a click of your mouse.

If you are looking to blog about something in particular, for example gardening, ensure you’ve chosen a relevant blog name. George’s Green Thumb Gardening is a good example of a blog name for gardening, but not for writing. Having a relevant blog name will help bring other people to your blog to read. The most important thing to try and do in any niche like gardening is to establish yourself as an expert in the field, so be sure that you’re writing about something you know and that the information you’re putting on your blog is true. Establishing yourself as an expert will bring more people to your blog to read it regularly and soon enough, you’ll have a “fan base” of people waiting to read whatever else you have to say.

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