This book on blogging has more good tips than any other we’ve seen. Besides explaining what blogging is all about (in a word, it’s “storytelling”), “Create Your Own Blog” shows you how to create personal, business, podcasting or video blogs. We learned there’s such a thing as “podsafe” music. Go to creativecommons.org/wired for free music you can legally use in podcasts. The author recommends Posterous.com when you just want to fire off short blasts and subscribe to other people’s blasts. At Posterous, you email what you want to say, and the email can simultaneously put a picture on Flickr and Twitter. The really nice thing about this book is that if there’s an easier way to do something, the author lets you know.

Inkpop.com is a place where budding teen authors can showcase their work. You don’t have to be a teenager to submit a story but your story should be aimed at teenagers. Visitors to the site vote on the books they think are best. These become “trendsetters” if they spot one that becomes a “top pick.” HarperCollins hopes to find new authors this way. We looked at the top vote-getter, “Shadow Watchers,“ about a teen who hears voices.

It seems like half the world wants to have their own blog on the Internet, and Blogger.com is where you can go to do it. It’s all free, and the author takes you through steps on how to make it look nice, make it available to the world, do your own updates and editing and all that stuff.

Note: One of the nice things about Blogger is that you can email your posts and pictures to it and they will appear automatically. Here’s how to do that.

Joy likes this book, which is both a reminiscence and musings about the future of the Internet. Rosenberg was a co-founder of Salon.com, one of the first online magazines. He reports on what he saw around him as the computer revolution took off. He was 15 in 1974 when Ray Kurzweil, a pioneer in voice recognition, music synthesizers and text-to-speech systems, brought a refrigerator-sized computer to his friend’s house. Rosenberg and the friend used it to publish a magazine for fans of a game called Diplomacy.

For instance, Shaquille O’Neal, the famous professional basketball player, has over 1.2 million followers of his “tweets” and gives away free game tickets at his site: twitter.com/THE_REAL_SHAQ. Here’s an example: “People n phoenix have 5 min to touch me I have 2 laker tickets n my hand I’m on a corner at a bus stop.” (At seven feet, one inch, he should be fairly easy to spot.) Since Twitter only allows 140 characters, including spaces and punctuation, users tend to omit full spelling, common articles and conjunctions, and pay little attention to capitals.

Go to search.twitter.com to read tweets. You have to register to send tweets, but not to read them. Twitter allows you to communicate with the world in short bursts. News of remarkable events and people are often transmitted within seconds. The safe landing of a jet liner in the Hudson River close to New York was tweeted within seconds. Though the box you type into says “what are you doing now,” people use Twitter for all kinds of things, including business.

Some of the top tips from “The Twitter Book” include:

• Use Twi.bz to shorten a long website address. It lets visitors see where they’re going, by using the original name in the new address. For example, we shortened a link to a column item at our web site, from “oncomp.com/2009/06/music-maestro-if-you-please,” to: oncomp.twi.bz/a. Twitter will shorten your link for you if you don’t, but twi.bz lets you include the real website name.
• Tweetdeck.com. You may be following 3000 people but you really only have time for three; Tweetdeck lets you look at the key ones first. (Use the “group” feature to set it up.)
• Tweetbrain.com. Use this to ask questions of the whole Twitter community. Somewhere, somebody has an answer for anything. New York Times columnist David Pogue recently tweeted for a hiccup cure and got dozens of replies in seconds.   

After your register, you get a phone number to call and a woman with a wonderfully cultured British accent tells you what time is reserved for you to call in your broadcast. When that time arrives, you phone in and are “on the air.” Well, virtually anyway. The broadcasts are carried over the Internet.

Blog Talk has grown enormously since we first reported it, now sending out more than 4,000 Internet broadcasts. Most are by people talking about nothing in particular. We even posted our own “broadcast” of high tech news and column highlights a while back. But we never kept up the broadcasts, being frustrated by the awkward nature of the call-in procedure. The instructions you get for recording your broadcast kind of threw us off point, but they’ve made some improvements.

This is our first iPod, even though it’s Apple’s fifth generation. We’ve been holdouts because of all the other great music players out there, but we were finally driven to get it. It was partly because creating accessories for the iPod has become a new industry and we were getting a product pitch a day about some gadget that you just had to have or the iPod police would ticket you for “mopery with intent to creep.” These accessories turn out to be mostly junk, but the gizmo itself is pretty cool.

Who knew that watching a movie on a screen half the size of a playing card could be enjoyable? We went to iTunes.com from our desktop computer and clicked on “movies.” We paid $1.99 to download an amusing Danish animated short and the next time we plugged our iPod into the computer, the movie moved right over. We also brought in a lot of free National Public Radio broadcasts and National Geographic videos by clicking “subscribe” from the “podcast” directory at iTunes.

In short: a blog is a blog is a blog. Venting is in. We found a new and free way to create a blog that can practically be handled in your sleep. It’s at a web site called OurStory.com. Sign up and they will not only host your blog but they send you a question a day to prompt you to enter more content.

For example: “What places did you go as a child?” “What were your favorite toys?” And: “Did you ever receive any advice that turned out to be good?” You fill in the answer and it goes into a timeline on a web site created especially for you. You can also add pictures and videos. We chose a picture of a nice pastoral scene that reminded Joy of Hilltop Lakes, Texas, where she went as a child. Other timelines can be listed in categories like “love story,” “travel story,” “family story,” etc. You can make your blog completely private, a kind of memory box for your own enjoyment, or share it with the world or restrict it to friends and family who have the access password.

The layout for OurStory.com is quite nice, with tabs for stories, photos and questions and answers. You can click “Explore” to read a featured story of the day. We duly clicked and read a story about the end of comic book hero “Captain America,” who appeared in a Marvel comic book series from 1941 until March, 2007; the blog’s appearance marked the last day of the comic book’s publication. You can choose to turn your own story into a professional quality bound book for $20.