Just what is a blog?

I started writing this a year or two ago now. I'd always wanted to write a novel, or at least a book. Or even a travel guide although to be fair I've not done much travelling really. I suppose I could write a travel guide for East London and Essex although it would have to be translated into thirty or forty languages. People who speak English seem to be mainly interested in escaping the area. Maybe I could write the occasional article for a magazine or something. I've hit a small problem already though. This blog, I suppose, was going to be my way of easing my way into writing. Once I got going and more and more people were reading and contributing to it it would be a natural progression to a book. Unfortunately I've already ran out of ideas. Looking back at the numerous (three)articles (if that's the right word) that I've written so far I'm far from happy. The first one is vague, ambling and full of self-pity, the next is that cod humerous prose adopted by a third rate sunday newspaper columnist and the most recent is..well just boring. I think there's only three so far but I'm worried if I stop typing this to go and check I'll lose what I've written so far. I find this a bit frustrating because underneath my self-deprecating exterior I've always believed there was an interesting, intelligent, insightful compassionate special person who just needed a bit of warmth and recognition in order to bloom. I've spent literally nearly all afternoon looking at other people's blogs to copy them, or as we writers say to inspire myself and now confidently predict I can categorise them into types and sub-types. Thinking about it I should have learnt how to put links into the text listing examples so that all my readers could quickly go and check each type of blog in order to agree with me.
I'm going to learn how to put links into my text then Im going to list all the various blogs during the next week or so.
Is that professional enough? Good. I wonder if there's a way to check how many people are reading each blog and then imitate the most popular types? God I think like an advertising man.