Just What is a Blog Anyway?
A good friend and I share a passion for folk Americana music, particularly bluegrass. Recently, I ran across a wonderful Americana music blog. Knowing my friend would enjoy receiving their music each day. I sent my friend and e-mail and told him about the blog. He wrote back this morning and asked “what the heck is a blog”?
He is a pretty tech savvy person, but like millions of us who have heard the term “blog” but really don’t understand it. So, I’ll do my level best to provide a layman’s language explanation of what a blog is.
Simply put, a blog is a magnificent content management system (those of you from Teaching on the Internet will recognize that phrase). The best way to understand what a blog is (blog is short for Weblog), is to use your daily newspaper as a metaphor. Let’s look at how the process of delivering a newspaper to your door occurs and then we can compare that to how a blog works, visualizing the process in terms that most of us know and use each day.
Let’s say your favorite newspaper columnist is George Will. George Will is a syndicated columnist. He writes a column several times a week and syndicates (grants permission) to newspapers all across the country who have signed up for his column. That allows them to reprint each of his articles. (In blogspeak, George Will would be called a “blogger”).
In addition to George Will, the newsroom of your local newspaper receives much of its news from wire services such as Reuters, UPI, Knight Ritter, Associated Press, etc. The editor of the newspaper looks at each of these incoming stories (blogspeak=feeds) and determines which ones will make it to the next day’s paper. Then trucks deliver the paper to your doorstep.
This process is remarkably similar to how a blog works. A blog can be thought of as an electronic newspaper. A blog is simply a Website on steroids. It�s created using free editing software that creates XML code. (I use WordPress); the process is much the same as creating a Web page with FrontPage. Instead of creating HTML code it creates a special language called XML. (Don’t worry you won’t have to learn anything new WordPress takes care of all of the Techie stuff behind the scenes.
Once an XML file is created and moved to a server it can be accessed by any Web browser just like any other Website that was created in html. XML is known also as “Real Simple Syndication” or (”RSS” in blogspeak).
So, back to our George Will metaphor. When George writes his column in XML using WordPress he could immediately broadcast that column to not only all of the newspapers who have subscribed for his column, but anybody in the world who knows the URL of his RSS feed. In our newspaper metaphor bloggers (George Will) are equivalent to the wire service guys like Reuters. The newsroom in the blogosphere is called an aggregator. There are many of them out there, most free, but my favorite is Bloglines, and I’ve also heard good things about My Yahoo.
When you set up your account with a news aggregator such as Bloglines you tell it which wire services (RSS feeds) you want to subscribe to. Then each day Bloglines will grab the RSS feeds as they are broadcast and display them in your personal newspaper. Think of it as creating your own customized electronic newspaper. You are subscribing each day to the RSS feeds of bloggers who you are interested in following. Or better yet any keywords that you want to track. For example I am currently monitoring the keywords: barb quinn (can anybody guess why?)
Or you can have it delivered directly from George Will via e-mail, but why would you want to expose yourself to privacy issues. One of the neat things about subscribing to an RSS feed with an aggregator like Bloglines is that your privacy is totally protected from spam.
But now, you’re probably asking yourself why would a Webmaster want to create a blog? Several reasons, one could be privacy. A URL for an RSS feed that is not made public, can be invisible to the world, therefore a Webmaster who wants to communicate private information (to a group of people collaborating on a project, for example) they can do so. And in some cases charge a fee for receiving that information. But most importantly what motivates webmasters to create blogs is search engine ranking. Search engines love blogs.
Those of you in How to Start an Internet Business and Telecommuting-Working From Home, know that the content of your site is by far and away the most important thing that will get you ranked high with the search engines. The one thing search engines are hungry for is fresh content. Websites are typically static and change very little over time (Visual-Makeover.com sat untouched for almost two years). Technically, a blog could be just static Website as well, but with the added capability of becoming an RSS feed, it opens up a vast array of marketing and communication advantages over an old fashioned static HTML Web site. Barb Quinn double her traffic when she added her hair styling blog.
If you’re a blogger who is creating useful content several times a week in a niche market that is going to be of interest to the zealots in that niche over time the subscriptions will climb and deliver significant traffic to the blog. For those of you in How to Start an Internet Business, you know how profitable those niches can become.
You’re wise to begin learning about blogs now, as the future of the Internet is likely to go the direction of the consumer receiving only information they want, when they want it. In order to stay current with your old fashioned HTML Website, the consumer has to visit your site every day to check for new information. But, if I am your competitor I’m going to smoke you quickly, with my XML blog, all they have to do is sit back and wait for my RSS feed to arrive.
Now the next question you’re going to ask is what is a Podcast? (Short answer . . . a blog on steroids). Sorry not today.
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