Announcing – the Blog!
Posted on September 13, 2006
Filed Under Business Computing, Internet, Open Source/Freeware, Software |
Blog, the word almost leaves one thinking of a 1950’s movie about a giant mass of green monster flesh bent on the destruction of humankind, as we know it. You can practically hear the screams as “The Blog” devours another ’52 Chevy and the smell of hot buttered popcorn floods your senses.
Weblogs (blogs for short) have turned up everywhere on the Internet and have become extremely popular. A blog is a type of online journal or diary that is updated regularly and often speaks to a single subject matter.
Blogs are typically created in, not surprisingly, blogging software. Blogging software runs on a web server but often they are easy to install even if your web site is hosted by someone else. In addition there are sites devoted to blogging where you can subscribe and have the blog set up for you automatically.
Popular blogging software includes Nucleus (http://nucleuscms.org), Text Pattern (http://www.textpattern.com), and Word Press (http://wordpress.org). Blogger (http://www.blogger.com) is probably the most popular blogging site.
More than a simple web page, blogging software acts like a simple Content Management System (CMS). CMS software in its simplest terms makes adding content to web pages completely separate from the visual deign of the web page. This makes it easier for non-technical users to update web pages without them having to worry about the inner workings of the site.
In addition to the simple purpose of maintaining posts, blogging software also offers some other very useful features:
Comments – blog readers can offer feedback on a particular post. Comments are found at the end of the post and can become a full-blown discussion or debate.
Categories or Tags – posts can be categorized to make it easier for readers to locate posts of interest.
Trackback and Pingback – a way of referencing posts in other blogs.
Syndication – blogs entries can be exported to a newsfeed and read in a feedreader or be included in the content on an other site (more on this in another column).
Blogs can be a personal collection of thoughts in diary form but they can serve a business purpose as well. Due to their nature of being frequently updated and full of content with typically well-formed HTML generated by the blogging software, blogs tend to be search engine friendly.
When a person searches Google for a given set of words, a blog site will generally appear before a static content site when all other factors are equal. Blogs are therefore a great way to get your business message out in your posts and help optimize your ranking on search engines at the same time.
In order to best benefit from the search engine enhancements blogs provide, it is wise to consider the address the blog will reside. A blog at http://www.bowesit.com/blog would be more beneficial than one located at http://blog.bowesit.com
Similarly, a blog at http://blog.bowesit.com will be more beneficial than one posted on one of the blogging sites like http://bowesit.blogger.com.
Speaking of http://www.bowesit.com/blog, blogs also work very well for those who have spent the last couple of years looking for the best way to make their newspaper columns available online. Here you can find practically all of the columns I have written in the past 2 ½ years.
Comments
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.