I never knew stuff could blow up in cyberspace until it happened to me.

This was three years ago when I had a blog hosted on the Sun Journal Web site. It lasted a year before it was reduced to a smoldering, blackened crater. But what fun within that year!

Street Talk, the blog, was a place populated by hundreds of visitors each day, most of them drunk. During its short life, there was a fake suicide, accusations of lechery, loud debates over welfare, fugitives brought to justice and all forms of e-spitting, hair-pulling, crotch-kicking and slander-slinging.

It was an ugly place, Street Talk, but it was mine. The mushroom cloud appeared shortly after one of its spleeniest visitors complained to the Web master for the 10th time in a month. An odious man, he had been battered, berated and belittled by the blog lynch mob. The end came when one of the regulars in that nasty place did some research and posted the odious man's home address.

Kaboom-oom-oom-oom. The Sun Journal pulled the plug and Street Talk was toast.

But for me, it was an education on the power of the blog.

My regular bloggers were an unruly bunch, but not without their merits. During the one and only Christmastime that Street Talk existed, we raised hundreds of dollars for a needy family. Strangers met in the blog, extended the relationship to the real world, became the best of friends.

That early blog experience taught me this: If you give people a semi-public place where they can anonymously spew all that exists in their heart and minds, my friends, they will come. They will come with their rage, their desperation, their political passions.

You need only to go to the blog portion of any online news story to see a blazing example of uninformed opinion being screamed (achieved through the magic of Caps Lock) all over the place.

Where else but a blog like www.joeynilan.com will you find the freedom to make wild accusations of grave robbery against a presidential candidate?

For example.

Blogs are crazy, frequently hateful, occasionally dangerous.

Yet, I get infuriated when a Web master censors unsavory comments from a blog because he or she deems them distasteful. Silencing people because they are stupid is no better than silencing them because they are black, white, fat or ugly. Let the insipid comments stand, I say, and allow the blogging body to treat them accordingly.

Because, let's face it, a blog is a microcosm of mainstream society. The people who inhabit them tend to devise a form of self-government. In a bar, a loudmouth will get told to shut up. A drinker who wants to fight every man, woman and mop bucket in the joint will get tossed out on his butt.

And so it is in the blogs, which serve as today's barrooms, town halls, coffee shops and self-help basement groups of hope. People wander in, people wander out. Some stay to agree or disagree, others leave in search of another blog group more befitting their personal wants.

Street Talk was a loud place filled with discontent and madness. When that blog was reduced to rubble, I started another on my own Web site. I stocked the bar with new bottles and put linen cloth on the tables. I called it "The Screaming Room" and waited for the castaways from Street Talk to wander by.

Many of them did and most are still around, but you know what? There is seldom fighting and almost never any death threats or faked suicides.

For three years now, it has been my ardent aim to write a blog a day. For three years, I have been spewing garbage upon the eyes of my readers.

Garbage both literal and figurative. Not long ago, I wrote a poetic piece about trash dumps because no better concept came to me and I was desperate to keep that blog-a-day plan going.

Out of sheer desperation, I've blogged about sea monkeys, about burned toast, about boys trapped in freezers eating their own feet. Mine is the Sybil of blogs, with a different personality each day and a fondness for non sequiturs.

Such as this one, where I learned to make a great martini.

If there were such things as blog police, I would be doing time in a blog prison with burly blog inmates pawing me while I sleep. I am the last person from whom you want to take blogging advice, if you're thinking of getting into the game.

Allow me to give you some blogging advice: Take everything that you see on my blog and do the opposite.

The problem, I think, is that I have no theme. I started out thinking I would write about news issues, a daily observation from the front lines of reporting. Such a lofty plan. But the next thing you know, I'm writing a long and dreamy piece about the grassy spot behind the Waterville Armory where I had my first carnal experience.

I was fantastic. The blog was not.

Switching tactics, I decided I might stay more consistent if I blogged about horror fiction, instead. I could draw a fan base of horror fans and we'd all live in screaming harmony under one bloody roof.

The very first post: a rambling screed about how hat hair used to be all the rage but is now largely scorned.

The Screaming Room is an attention-deficit blog.

Don't be like me, blossoming blogger. Get yourself a theme so you won't be filling every neuron in your head with thoughts of toast, sea monkeys and that special place behind the armory. Focus on sports, dating or dogs. Make the sport of dating dogs the focus of your blog and I'll bet you'll snag a million visitors.

At issue here is your fan base. People will return to a place in cyberspace if they find what interests them there. If you blog about naked Twister, naked Twistologists will find their way to your special place in the blogosphere.

I have a co-worker, who is absolutely not the editor of this section of the newspaper, who has a blog dedicated almost exclusively to falling down. This would not work for everybody, of course, but this particular person, whom I don't want to name for fear she will edit the snot out of this article, falls down at least twice a day. The result is a very entertaining blog in which she plays to her strengths.

Her strength being the hilarious inability to remain upright.

Which is the whole point of the thing. If you blog, you must want people to read what you write. Which is why you should ask yourself why you want to blog and who you want to be your audience. Right in the middle of that job interview, actually pause and say: "Why the blazes do I want to blog and who the blazes will be my audience?"

I want to suggest that if you plan only to write weekly updates about your relationship with your guinea pig, you'll do fine with a MySpace blog or a just-add-water service such as Blogger. They provide the template, you simply upload your words and guinea pig photos.

Just be warned that real bloggers will shun you because, really, that's just so 2002.

If you've got more ambitious plans, get yourself a self-hosted blog program such as Typepad or Wordpress, which you can set up for free with its famous five-minute installation that should take you no more than three days to figure out.

I use Wordpress and pretty much hate it. But with a grownup Wordpress blog, you can completely customize the appearance of your pages and enhance the site with plug-ins that will enable you to work with widgets, rotate banner ads, monitor your traffic, ping services to increase popularity, slap together a mailing list, publish polls, optimize, publicize and monetize.

Now that you're all set up, consider what some say are the Golden rules of blogging: never blog while drunk, blog at least once a day, never blog about blogging.

Consider those rules and completely ignore them. Blogging drunk is just bold fun; skipping a day makes your readers wonder if you might be dead; and blogging about blogging is the kind of self-indulgence that drives blog snobs to screeching madness.

Learn to hate blog snobs, the kind that screen comments before they publish them and who will actually censor you if you raise your voice. The kind that list firm rules about commenting and warn that violators will be banned even though they've had three visitors in four years.

Get a feed reader, such as the simple one offered by Google, so you can keep track of your favorite blogs and start networking. Add the following blogs to your reader at once: www.marklaflamme.com and www.joeynilan.com.

One is a handsome, talented reporter, the other is me.

Keep spam away from your blog as much as you can, but try to avoid using CAPTCHA. You know what I mean. CAPTCHA is a blur of unreadable letters and numbers that a visitor must enter into a field in order to prove that he or she is human. It's fine technology, but I can never get the sequence right on the first try and I feel like a dolt.

Don't be a shy blogger. In order to get people over to your slamming new site, you have to let them know where it is. Use your blog address in pickup lines, sneak it into your answering machine messages, work it into conversation whenever possible.

"You're right about the state of the economy, Louis," you might say during a chat in the gym locker room. "As I stated recently on my blog, Naked Twister Fun Dot Com, our financial stability relies on our willingness to get nude and indulge in enduring 1970s floor games ... "

And so on.

Have fun. Blog drunk. Play naked Twister.

And if you're thinking of blogging about toast, brother, forget about it. That sucker is mine.