Blogs are a funny thing.
They can be endless diatribes of teenage angst or creative outlets for new writers.
They can be the result of collaboration or a single person's effort.

They can be long, or they can be short.

They can be as serious as CNN or as comical as SNL.

The only thing blogs may have in common is that, despite the majority of people not fully understanding the parameters of this 12-year-old "new" media, we are terrified of being left behind.

The blog movement started in 1994, by Justin Hall, dubbed "the founding father of personal blogging" by the New York Times Magazine, when he began posting online while working as an intern at San Francisco-based Wired magazine.

Three years later, the term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger.

The short form, "blog," developed when Peter Merholz jokingly broke the word "weblog" into the phrase "we blog" in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in 1999.

Blogs have since gained additional attention and coverage for their role in breaking, shaping, and spinning news stories.

In 2003, the Iraq war saw bloggers taking measured and passionate points of view that go beyond the traditional left-right divide of the political spectrum.

Blogging by established politicians and political candidates, to express opinions on war and other issues, cemented blogs' role as a news source.

Meanwhile, an increasing number of experts blogged, makingthe online sites a source of in-depth analysis.

Salam Pax, a pseudonymous blogger from Iraq whose site received notable media attention later published a book of his blog.

Blogs were also created by soldiers serving in the Iraq war to provide a glimpse of the soldiers' daily routines..

Such "warblogs" gave readers new perspectives on the realities of war, as well as offered different viewpoints from those of official news sources.

In the summer of 2004, both United States Democratic and Republican parties' conventions gave bloggers media credentials, and blogs became a standard part of the publicity arsenal.

The Daily Collegian Online is joining the fray and, along with many other Web site changes, jumping into the blogging world.

Starting Friday, we plan on featuring one blog per day: On Monday, yours truly will blog about State College's nightlife.

Tuesday, look for our editor in chief Erin James to fill you in on current issues of the journalism world. Wednesday, we'll go behind the scenes with our Arts Blog.

Thursday will feature analysis on recent news stories, and Friday we'll pump up for the weekend with the Sports blog.

All the blogs can be found on our homepage, www.collegian.psu.edu.

In its truest form, blogging is about engaging readers and creating a dialogue with them.

You read our paper, but you really don't know us or what goes into putting it out every day.

Likewise, we love to read your letters to the editor, but sometimes we still don't hear you.

It's a communication problem we need to work on.

So in the coming weeks we hope to put together some ground rules and let you respond to our blog posts.

It will be like a Facebook wall, except without the creepiness factor. And, we'll be talking about real issues.

We're all students here, and there's no reason why we can't talk more often.

But, like we said, we're all still figuring this out.

You can either sit out scared, or join in.