As a sign of how popular blogging has become as an information source, one only has to look at what happened to the Baghdad Blogger, a 29-year-old Iraqi architect who became a celebrity worldwide for his gripping and witty account of the invasion of Iraq.

Salam Pax (his acronym) began his blog http://dear_raed.blogspot.com, which he calls 'Where is Raed?', as a means of keeping in contact with his friend in Jordan who was a spotty e-mail writer.

As one of the few English sites with a personal description of the situation the news media soon began carrying stories about him. The servers carrying his blog became overwhelmed as the fame grew. Stories on him appeared on the BBC, the Voice of America, CNN, The New Yorker and other major news media.

One hack described him as the 'Anne Frank of the war ? and its Elvis'. Now he writes a biweekly column for the Guardian newspaper in the UK, has had a book compiled of his diary entries (due to be published) and continues to blog at his site.

While Bermuda is not Baghdad (now there's an understatement) you too can have fans worldwide wearing T-shirts and drinking out of coffee mugs proclaiming your greatness as a blogger. All you need is some small technical know-how as detailed below ? and of course a large amount of talent and humour. First you need a site of your own, basically the free space on a server that comes with your Internet subscription to a local Internet Service Provider in Bermuda. You might even have your own domain name (like www.ahmedelamin.com) for example. A cheap domain name seller is Gandi at www.gandi.net.

Now you're ready to begin blogging. A blog is a web page made up of frequently updated posts that are arranged chronologically ? and is basically an online journal. It can be a personal journal or you can invite others to comment. You can blog the hard way by formatting your comments everyday (using an HTML editor) or you can use any of the online blogging services that make it a cinch.

You just write your thoughts, log in to the usually free service, paste your text into the space provided, then click on the 'Publish' button. You've posted your first blog. For my now dead posts (you really have to be dedicated to do this stuff) I use Blogger (www.blogger.com). This free service is very easy to use once you have your own site. It even automatically creates archives of your posts online and creates the necessary web pages on your site, without you have to code the text in HTML yourself.

You also have a choice of templates that you can edit to make the site personal, look the way you want. Your task is just to keep writing or blogging.

Another service provider is Movable Type (www.movabletype.org), which provides free blogging software. This is a bit more complicated to use, as you must install the software on your website. Google, the web search engine, has also released a new browser toolbar that among other features lets people easily update their blogs as they surf the web. If you find an interesting story, an interesting quote or some other information you simply highlight it and add it to your blog by clicking the "BlogThis" button on the toolbar. You must of course configure the toolbar before doing this. The Google toolbar is a strip of function buttons that sits at the top of a web browser and lets people access features such as search without going directly to Google's home page.

When adding to your daily blog please, please be careful of who you're writing about. You can still be sued for libel by someone you have blasted to bits in a blog, which is open to the public as a published piece of work. If you're writing in anger, take a cup of coffee or sit outside in the sun for a while before posting. Another word of advice: Be responsible. As you are your own writer, editor and publisher be sure that you get your facts right.

There's enough mis-information put out on the Internet already. The gossip you hear in Bermuda may be titillating, but publishing it may get you in a lot of trouble if you have no facts to back your statements up. Of course blogging is all about personal opinion. What you think and feel about events, so there will always be lots to write about, especially with the re-opening of the debate in Bermuda about Independence. Like the Baghdad Blogger, you must depend on your powers of observation and your intelligence to get yourself launched on the path to Web stardom. Start blogging.