Anyone who signs up for AOL's free instant-messenger service also gets expanded access to AOL's blog pages; that means writing, reading and posting to online journals.

A blog can be created in private or public mode, allowing the users to share their experiences to other people. Blogging has become quite popular these days, and AOL has one of the strongest blogger communities. However, latest research performed by web hosting company Hostway proves that most Internet users aren't familiar yet with this concept of web publishing. Only thirty percent of the responders said to have visited a blog.

Blogging mostly connects to online journalism as there are many people working in this branch that choose blogs to express their views, independently of the institutions they work for. Fifty-two percent of those surveyed said bloggers should have the same rights as traditional journalists when it comes to freedom of expression.

AOL is competing with search engine giants Yahoo! and Google that also offer their free email clients. Y!Messenger from Yahoo! is one of the world's most popular instant-messenger services, and both Google and Yahoo! offer free blogging.

But this time AOL comes with a little extra above its competition: each email account has 2 gigabytes of storage — that is twice than Yahoo!Mail accounts. AOL subscribers have the ability to update the journals directly from AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) or via mobile devices. Plus, online journals now benefit of support for the RSS 2.0 standard that allows bloggers to feed other sites with content through their daily updates.