If you are one of the millions of college students graduating this spring with MySpace or Facebook accounts loaded with so-called "friends" and message board entries, it may be time for you to grow up to a real blog. These sites are great to host a few pictures and your favorite song, but blog services will give you greater control, an unlimited number of photos, music or video clips. Plus, they may be a way to make some money!

The best part about blogs is that you can make them completely public or private and your viewers can access them without becoming a member or logging in. This means that those blog entries or photos that you want to share with your friends and family members will be easily accessible. Besides, can you imagine your grandmother signing up for a MySpace page, just so she can access your photos? Wait, you don't actually want her to see those photos though, do you?

There are plenty of free services to host a blog these days. I'll cover a few below, but imitation is the greatest form of flattery, so when you run across a blog whose layout or features you like, check out the software or service that they are using and see if you can incorporate it into your pages.

Blogger.com was one of the first free hosted sites and was quickly purchased by Google, which has kept the site much the way it was before the takeover. While the service has seen some outages, they are moving it to a more robust infrastructure. Existing users can move their pages over to the new engine which should prove to be more stable. The site allows you to completely customize the templates that make up your pages. This means that things like layouts and colors, Amazon wish-lists, Digg or Technorati tags, which give awareness to your blog, can be added anywhere you wish. You can even incorporate Google Ad Words to try and make some money from your stories, too.

Six Apart has created its fourth startup, a free blog engine called Vox, which aims to be your voice on the Internet. This company was an early developer in the blogging world when they created Movable Type, an application that required your own server. Since this was too difficult to setup for most people, the company moved to a Web services version called TypePad, although it was fee-based and rather expensive. Now with its latest creation, Vox, Six Apart has removed the fees thanks to a subsidized advertising network. Your blog will show readers relevant ads to offset the cost of providing the service, but you will not be able to share in the revenue. The company has also developed an easy way to incorporate images from sites such as Flickr, or movies from YouTube. Additionally, your chat status will also show up on your blog, which is cool if you do not mind people being able to know when you are online.

If you have a Yahoo! mail or Hotmail account, check out websites 360 and Spaces, respectively for these services. Each uses your existing logins and incorporates the ability to post images to blog entries for each if you use those elements of their additional services. While these sites are not as popular or as filled with features as those above, they require only one login for both your blog and email, which may be cool if you don't want to complicate your life.

With all of the "noise" on the "college era" community sites, posting your prose on a true blog engine will upgrade your image both personally and for potential employers.  More importantly, a blog may even allow you to make some money with what you write. Blogs are becoming an important element of outreach between companies and consumers. Getting comfortable with them now may be an asset for your career once you start looking for a job.

Dave Mathews has been blogging for more than 10 years, although at the time, no one called it by that name. His blogs can be found at www.davemathews.com on the net.

Blogging Quick Tips

• Post regularly or readers won't keep coming back to your blog
• Leave comments on other's blogs, to drive more traffic links
• Make sure the comments are smart and not seen as spam
• Use a photo with each entry since a picture is worth a million words!
• Link to your friends on the sidebar to gain traffic
• Sign up for Google Ad Words to make some money from your blog traffic

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