Blogs get their name from two words: web and log. In that odd way that seems to be a part of the Internet, someone put together the two words, but not as you might expect. They came out "weblog."

And, of course, someone shortened that to "blog."

A blog is any collection of thoughts, pictures, poems or what have you appropriately (or sometimes not so appropriately) uploaded to the Internet. It's possible to have a private blog, but why anyone would want one is a mystery to me. Most blogs are public. Indeed, we don't know much of anything about the private ones because they aren't accessible.

Public blogs, on the other hand, are sort of like publishing a daily diary. The problem isn't so much to write them, it's to get people to read them. There are literally millions of them these days of varying content and interest. They range all the way from the musing of a bisexual boy in San Francisco to such outfits as Powerline, which unearthed what it calls Rathergate--the exposing of the fake 60 Minutes Wednesday documents--that were publicized during the recent political upheavals of last November.

Powerline is the handiwork of a couple of amateur politicians who run a blog in their spare time. The two operators believed the so-called documents about George W. Bush's time served in the Air National Guard were phony. And, as it turned out, they were right.

Once the bloggers of Powerline published the alleged documents on the Internet, they began receiving Internet replies pointing out reasons why the so-called documents seemed bogus. (Among them the fact that the military abbreviations included were incorrect and that the type used in the documents could only have been written on a computer, not on a typewriter. At the time the memos reputedly were written there were no computers in general use. And, it also turned out, the officer who supposedly signed the documents had already retired by the time the future president was in the Guard.)

Powerline and the Bush business point to one of the great advantages of blogging--the ability of readers to respond to what's on the blog. Much as talk radio gives all the disgruntled voters in the country a chance to voice their discontent, so the ability of blogs to invite a two-way conversation is what has made them so popular--that, and the fact that establishing a blog is fairly easy to do, doesn't cost much and really (like the rest of the Internet) has no constraints on what it contains.

The latter also is one of the blogs' weaknesses. There is no way to be sure the information a blog contains is correct, responsible or much of anything else. Just as the Internet is loaded with tons of pornography, so are there all kinds of bloggers available. One has to be careful in reading them, and, I might add, patient.

A sampling of blogs shows me, at least, that a lot of bloggers have nothing but trivia to contribute to the world.

A lonely young woman's love life or lack thereof tends to get dull after a couple of paragraphs and most people don't care about the health or illness of someone else's pets. But you can find a lot of examples of this kind of thing on some blogs.

Still, blogs like Powerline do serve some kind of purpose. Just what is not yet clear and currently there is a raging debate among bloggers and their critics about just what the role of blogs in journalism should be. I don't know what blogs finally will become, but I have the feeling that eventually they will settle into their niche in our national psyche just as has talk radio, available to those they feel need it and ignored by those who want to keep their opinions to themselves.

In the meantime, though, blogs are available for all to read. Doing so isn't difficult. Any of the several search engines on the Internet will direct you to a kind of Blog Central where you can pick out your subject, log on to it and find all kinds of blogs to read.

Or, if you want to try running your own blog there are Internet instructions in how to do that, too.

Don't try to read my blog, though. I don't have any except this page.