Sure, they have become a means of personal expression to the world sharing with a global audience what we think and feel.

However, the weblog, or simply "blog" as it is often called today, has also been adopted as a shrewd marketing tool for small businesses with limited resources enabling them to get their message to a worldwide audience.

Quoting fellow Allbusiness expert Greg Sterling, blogger and business consultant Paul Chaney notes:

Blogs that are merely transparent marketing vehicles and carry only ad copy or promotional messages are probably destined to fail...You should really see your blog as a way to make people aware of your products and services rather than as a source of direct sales.

While Chaney notes that "blogs have REALLY yet to prove themselves as direct response sales mechanisms" (I would add that this will probably never be an effective use for them), in another post he observes how much they can boost a company's or individual's profile.

Elsewhere in Chaney's post and in one from blogger Dharmesh Shah some hint can be seen as to why this is. Two words: constant updates.

Simply put, the superiority of the blog over a more conventional website can be seen this way. If the Internet were a static universe, a well ranked site with plenty of inbound links would simply keep accumulating visitors and links as more and more netizens became aware of its existence.

But in a constantly evolving webscape updated minute by minute as new websites appear, new links are forged and search engine crawlers continuously explore for new content, blogs updated daily or more frequently reign supreme adding visibility with each new post.

For a guide to blogging services, many of them free and easy to use, see Sheila Ann Manuel Coggins' guide at About.com.