Blogs are all about sharing information across the Internet in the swiftest and most personal manner. They can project formal or informal communications. There is a lot of “yammering” out there in radioland about blogs and about what a blog is for. Some bloggers display annoying and abusive behavior. Part of the controversy surrounding bloggers is the fact that many of them push the publish button before they have ascertained the accuracy of their facts. Blogs provide a strong sense of personal power and freedom.
What is a blog? According to the Wikipedia,
“A blog is a website in which items are posted on a regular basis and displayed in reverse chronological order. The term blog is a shortened form of weblog or web log. Authoring a blog, maintaining a blog or adding an article to an existing blog is called “blogging”. Individual articles on a blog are called “blog posts,” “posts” or “entries”. A person who posts these entries is called a “blogger”. A blog comprises text, hypertext, images, and links (to other web pages and to video, audio and other files). Blogs use a conversational style of documentation. Often blogs focus on a particular “area of interest”, such as Washington, D.C.’s political goings-on. Some blogs discuss personal experiences.
Blogs can be hosted by dedicated blog hosting services, or they can be run using blog software on regular web hosting services. In the early 21st Century, blogging has quickly emerged as a popular and important means of communication, affecting public opinion and mass media around the world.”
Unfortunately, early-adopting bloggers have muddied the waters before most people have had an opportunity to understand the concept. Everyone has opinions but some people are determined to voice them loudly-and-often, based on inadequate information or extremely biased viewpoints. This makes blogging a perfect vehicle for spin doctors. There are more important points to consider so let’s focus on them.
Blogs bring us all closer to the author of the information, making it a social device far more powerful than email. Blogging is such an ingenius paradigm shift in technology that many times as you surf across the net you may be totally unaware that you are viewing one. For example, USAToday.com is a blog.
The highly intelligent women and men who have created blog technologies have done it mostly free-of-charge and behind the scenes, proving by their actions that blogs are all about sharing. A blog is an ever-changing performance– a living journey through space and time using cutting edge and often exotic web technologies.
Photo blogs are also a big part of this phenomenon. Photo websites for sharing your albums, allowing you and your friends to order prints are everywhere. But wait– the latest raves involve websites like Flickr and Photofriday.com where people do more than share their photos, they critique each others work and form new influential social communities that reach across the world. These sites and services are free. Teachers are beginning to use blogs for homework assignments. Churches are using them to post their calendars and copies of last week’s sermon. Streaming videos of meetings that were missed are now available via the company blog for instant review.
Static websites for companies and organizations change infrequently and are often the product of a web designer, a writer, and someone paying the bill to get their organization’s message out. Blogs can work like fixed websites in the same way, but the promise is that once the site is developed, reasonable people, not specialists, can update the information at any moment. New ideas, new photos, new projects can all be initiated with minimal training.
In the old web world, once a person views your site, they go away. Unless you keep your information fresh and exciting, your audience doesn’t come back. Blogs rely on social engineering– they are more in-your-face. They have alerting mechanisms built into the server-side software to keep an evergrowing audience primed for more.
You might say that normal web sites are recordings of things past, locked in a shell. Web logs (blogs) are current performances that continuously move forward, delivering up-to-the-minute content.
Blogs use pre-formatted web templates (containers) that already have the fonts, font sizes, colors, backgrounds, headline styles, and other elements determined before a person places the content into them. After the basic framework is set up to handle information, any person who desires to publish to the Internet is free to place anything he or she wants onto the web easily. No more worrying about how the page looks or whether it works. It just works.
On our artondisk.com website, we can create a few paragraphs, insert a photo or two, push a “publish” button– and the webpage is done. Finished. The server not only displays the finished product, it sends out emails to notify our audience, and feeds the World Wide Web a “syndication feed” to alert various search engines and subscribers unknown to us that a new post has been made.
We don’t have to mess with the look of the website when we post new content because our web server takes over and does the formatting for us. The headlines, sidebar, archives, indexing system, page size, colors and styles are all predetermined. We designed them up front with a bit of help from a template called Jakarta by a designer named Jose Mulia of Portland, Oregan, available through WordPress.
Cascading style sheets have been around for a number of years to help content providers and webmasters preformat web pages. So why is a blog template any different from a preformatted web page? Because it incorporates all of the major web development technologies into one dynamic melting pot. Behind the scenes a blog template adds many separate controls that deal with headers, footers, links, archiving, comments made by viewers, navigation systems, sidebars, search engines and forms. Each “post” gets its own identity (URI) called a Permalink which helps a viewer or author to find that specific page of information in the future.
The difficult part of blogging is the continual search for interesting things to write about and images to illustrate the topics. We have active restless minds over here in Art on Disk land, so that isn’t our challenge. Anyone initiating a blog must understand that it is a commitment and requires a revised look at the world. Once you get started, it creeps into your dreams, the way you organize your life and work– your “plan of the day,” but it doesn’t have to be time-consuming.
Blogging technology makes it possible to publish new information or articles with or without a timeline. It isn’t necessary to show the viewer when an article is posted. We do it because we find a timeline motivates us and keeps us organized.
The free programs (Blogger, Movable Type, WordPress, and many others) that make blogging work use only a web browser interface, so anyone can travel across the globe and post things to the Internet without having to learn Microsoft FrontPage, Macromedia DreamWeaver or Adobe GoLive. Macs, PCs, cell phones, smart phones and PDAs can all publish new material to your blogsite. On computers, the web browser is becoming the most important application.
Perhaps the next best feature of blogging software is that it automatically (automagically) categorizes and stores information in a logical database-driven archiving system so that 10 years into the future a person can come back and find something easily. This “personal publishing technology” makes it easy to create and distribute new information hourly, daily or weekly if desired.
Microsoft has begun using blogging extensively in their training efforts for employees and partners as well as for customer service. This week Norma and I attended a series of Microsoft Seminars here in Atlanta. The word “blog” was mentioned as a hot topic as many as 20 times in each seminar, along with the web addresses of Microsoft blogs we need to keep up with.
In my opinion, people who debate whether blogging is a good thing miss the point. It is a powerful synthesis and application of web technologies, not a group of gossipy people. It is not a replacement for chat rooms, instant messaging systems or static web sites. It is as revolutionary as the creation of a new form of space ship– it is a new information system. What people are doing with it at first is chattering about politics, news and technology (and blogging about blogging) :-). Eventually this technology will become so mainstream that it will be a primary format for the distribution and updating of information.
Companies are gradually updating their traditional business presence on the web by moving their “press releases,” calendars and current event topics over to their new blogsites. Even more interesting is the collaboration capabilities that blogs provide and the fact that a company can have 20 blogs or 50 if they want, each one a tool for a particular objective. Blogs are becoming a major addition to company intranets and extranets.
Federal Express changed our ideas about package delivery. Blogging is changing the way companies do business, and is the least expensive form of marketing right now. Further, a potential employee who has a reasonable blog can enhance (or diminish) his or her chances of getting a job by being visible and out front where persona is easy to distinguish and evaluate.
So, how do you learn how to set up your own blog? We learned a great deal from a very fine instructor, Tim Warner, through his Blogging course at VTC.com. We highly recommend that you visit VTC.com and subscribe. For as little as $30 for a one month on-line course, you can be blogging your way into the future. We don’t work for VTC.com but we have never found a better source for software training anywhere.
Today, search engines are very interested in blogsites and give high priority to indexing them. Do you want to rise to the top of the Google search engine (or Yahoo or MSN) without hiring someone to put you there, and without paying Google for “placement?” Start a blog and keep it up. Mention your best buzz words and phrases and feature people and events for your organization. It won’t take long. Search Google for “artondisk” or for “Art On Disk” and see what happens . . . we just stated posting a little over a month ago and we are at the top. Let us know if this article gives you any new insights or ideas . . . better yet, visit our blogsite at artondisk.com and subscribe!