March 2005

History of Technology - Blogging, the New Rage

by David Herron

The first thing to know is, what the heck are blogs? There are several essential features to blogging that make it a powerful tool, and if you skip any of them the power is diminished.

The word "blog" is short for "weblog", which probably doesn't tell you much. A "weblog" is, in turn, a sequential series of writings. Originally a "weblog" was meant to be a place that someone could quickly write notes, and the notes would be recorded chronologically. In other words, blogging is essentially a "diary". But if that's all you see a blog as being, then it's easy to dismiss them and miss the power.

Essential Features of Blogging:

Here are some of the essential features of blogging:

• Quick and easy to post new articles. The blogging system takes care of indexing the articles, and arranging them in topical and chronological order.
• Articles are arranged primarily chronologically.
• An index of articles are exported via RSS or similar syndication formats.
• When you post new articles, some blogging systems "ping" aggregator websites.
• Users can use RSS newsreaders to poll RSS news "feeds" for new content.
• There is space for the viewers of a blog to comment on the blog entries.

The RSS related features go together to act positively in drawing new readers to your site. RSS is a simple system of announcing "articles", with an author, title, some content, and the address (URL) of the full article. Several protocols have been implemented around the RSS idea, that allow specialized RSS newsreader programs to poll for new content, and allow one site to notify others that new content is available. By notifying other sites of new content, those other sites then generate links to the announcing site, and we already know that the more links a site has, the search engines will rank that site higher.

Blogs are simply a type of website. They are no different than any other website, in that they have content, and all the rules that apply to other websites also apply to blogs. If a particular blogger writes poorly optimized content, the search engines won't be able to figure out what the topic is, and be unable to send viewers to the site. On the flip side, another blogger, writing about the same topic, could do so with well optimized content, and the search engines will be able to match that site easily with people searching for that content.

Blogs are essentially vehicles for publishing writing. What an individual blogger makes of their blog is up to them.

Specialized Software Choices

Generally when people "blog" they use some specialized software to do the blogging. They write an article, and the blog software takes care of organizing that article into the set of web pages that contain the whole blog. The software maintains several index's, plus creates RSS feeds and participates in the ping and trackback protocols. Additionally the software often lets readers add comments to a blog entry.

You could construct, on your own, a website that looked like a blog. Ultimately, when a blog website is delivered to a web browser, it is just HTML pages, and a human could make HTML pages just as good as any old piece of software can. So what's the big deal?

Well, the big deal is that the blog software does so much for you automatically. It greatly relieves the burden of writing the content for a web site. Plus, the blog software, through pings and trackbacks, helps build connectiveness between your site and others.

Simplest: Sign up with an existing site

Many sites exist on the network that allow anyone to sign up for a "blogging" account, and begin a blog. These include:

http://www.blogger.com/ - Formerly an independent company, and now part of the Google empire, Blogger.COM is free and easy to use.

http://www.blogit.com/ - A Blog service with a money-making pitch. In addition to paying for the blogging service, Blogit pays you when someone reads your blog postings. If enough people read your blog, you can make a mint, right?

http://www.typepad.com/ - A very popular Blog service with many features. This is a paid service.

http://www.squarespace.com/ - This service is paid, with various levels of service for various payment levels. They include the ability for a "blog" to have multiple authors, and multiple editors, if you pay for that service level.

http://www.blogharbor.com/ - Blog service with many features, such as email forwarding (with SPAM detection), the ability to import and export blogs stored on other sites, and picture galleries. This is a paid service.

Intermediate: Web Hosting with Blog Features

Several web hosting companies provide blog services in one or more of their account types.

http://www.domaindirect.com/ - http://www.canaca.com/

Harder: Install some software

If you have an existing site, of which the Blog is to be a part, one route is to get blog software and install it yourself in your site. This path also gives you some additional control, because all the writings are stored on your server. If you were instead to use an existing site, what happens if (or when) that company goes out of business? Will your writings be lost?

http://webcrossing.com/Home/products/plugins/featuredplugins/weblogs/  - http://www.userland.com/ - UserLand Software is a leading provider of website and weblog publishing tools for organizations and individuals. Our products are used by thousands of corporations, academic institutions, government agencies and individuals throughout the world to improve communication and collaboration and to create online communities.

http://tractionsoftware.com/ - Traction is the leader in Enterprise Weblog software, delivering easy to use tools for departments, groups and individuals to communicate, share, organize and link business information in context.

About the Author
David Herron, http://peaceguide.com, http://7gen.com, TechnoSanity.7gen.com