Blogs and Web Logging
Posted on Charity Village October 9, 2003.
In a previous article I described Google's new toolbar, which includes features like pop-up ad blocking, streamlined searching, and blogging, or web logging. This month, I'm going to focus on blogs and how organizations can use them.
What are blogs?
Blogs are online journals, or 'weblogs' (say it quickly and you'll see why they are called 'blogs') that enable people to post snippets of information to the web as often as they like. Many bloggers post several times a day; others may post a few times a year. Blog services are designed to be easy to use without knowing anything about html or the myriad technical complexities of publishing to the web. However, most of them also offer a great deal of functionality for advanced users who want to tweak the settings.
The brief history of blogs is summarized beautifully by Rebecca Blood. Blood distinguishes between the daily journal blog, in which writers talk about what they ate that day and what their friends are doing, and the 'filter blog', which provides a platform to discuss, challenge and pass on news from any source. Blogs became visible during the Iraqi war, allowing individuals (including, in some cases, Iraqis themselves) to communicate what was happening without mediation from mass media. As blogging become still easier to use and the Internet continues to become more globally accessible, this micro-medium will expand to communities that have not been able to take advantage of a free press Ð including low income groups in North America.
The real and future impact of blogs is being hotly debated. These are some of the issues:
- Blogs, like most good ideas, are being co-opted by large corporations and political parties that are using them for advertising and promotion.
- There are so many blogs that readers are drowning in information (estimates say there are well over 2 million blogs)
- Most blogs are dumb and pointless (however, Wired News cites Sturgeon's Law, which states, “Sure, 90% of science-fiction is crud. That's because 90% of everything is crud.”)
- Blogs offer a real opportunity to create an alternative to mass media
- Blogs create personality cults, in which the most popular get read and the least popular are invisible
- And so on.
What are blogs good for?
At a very simple level, blogs are great for posting time-limited information on the web. Some examples include:
- Posting updates, announcements, events and news on an agency web site. The 'news' link on an agency web site could lead to a blog that could be updated by staff or volunteers in seconds. Old news is automatically archived, and each entry is time- and date-stamped. A lovely example is the Status.Blogger.Com page, which merely lists current problems with the Blogger service and what they are doing to fix it. It is hosted on a separate server so that even if their web site goes down, users can find out what's happening and when it will be resolved. Wouldn't it be great if other web services did this?
- Posting neat or useful information for communities or teams. I have started a blog – blog.realworldsystems.net – to keep track of the daily research I do regarding technology, policy, research and so on, and to communicate it to people who are interested in what I'm finding. It's completely idiosyncratic, based on the issues that appeal to me at any given moment. Other team members can do the same.
- Creating a 'team blog' that shares group information on a project or topic of interest. Blogger provides several ways to build a team blog, including the capacity to post emails onto a blog automatically. In other words, team members can send an email to blog_username@blogspot.com, and the email will be posted. Or, the email will be marked as a private draft until an authorized editor approves and publishes it. Other options include a 'blog to email' feature, in which a mailing list can be sent new items as soon as they are posted.
- Many blogging programs provide RSS, or 'Really Simple Syndication', that enable readers to automatically download postings from blogs that appeal to them. In fact, RSS is being suggested as a spam-free replacement for email newsletters. See this posting on my own blog for details.
Blogs can be public or password-protected.
Blogging options
The software leaders of the blogosphere are Radio, Blogger and Movable Type. There are several other blogging tools, but newbies should probably stick with one of those three.
Blogger and Radio are compared here, and although the comparison is over a year old, most of the comments still seem accurate. For a more technical comparison of the three, see Radio Blogistan.
I've tried several blogging tools, and recommend Blogger for its simplicity. It is completely web-based (so it can be edited on a public computer like a library), it's free, and offers an instant way to post content by dragging a 'Blog This' link to your browser toolbar. It works with any recent browser and operating system. It takes about 5 minutes to create a fully functional blog, including your choice of design templates. To create a blog, go here. Blogger is undergoing some changes right now as a result of its recent acquisition by Google, and some of its functionality is temporarily missing. For example, Google appears to be introducing a new, more powerful search engine for blogs, and in the meantime, Blogger doesn't offer a search.
Movable Type is the best-looking software, but requires more technical expertise. Both Radio and Movable Type have a great deal of complexity, so if you have a programmer or a technical enthusiast you can create some very interesting web sites, but their documentation is poor and I don't recommend it for official agency use.
In addition, there are blog-like entities called Wikis, “collaboratively-edited website[s] which many people also view as an anarchistic publishing tool. The distinguishing feature of Wikis is that they typically allow really all users to edit any page, with full freedom to edit/change/delete the work of previous authors.” [from UseMod]. Wikis have a cult following, but haven't hit the mainstream yet. It may happen yet; this month, the popular Web Crossing service announced they are providing Wikis as part of their collaborative toolset, along with their discussion groups.
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Gillian Kerr, Ph.D., C.Psych.
President, RealWorld Systems
gkerr at realworldsystems.net