Few weeks ago I made a presentation for my colleagues about weblogs. It was an introductory talk for a quite technical audience. I’m waiting for an agreement to make this presentation public, but I hope that it’s not a problem if I provide here a piece of it.
In the presentation I distinguish between four things you can do with weblogs and explain how it is done. These four things (without screenshots and with only a few links) are below.
1. View
- Weblog usually has
- Posts, usually arranged in a reverse-chronological order
- Often it’s possible to add a comment to each post
- Each post has permalink, permanent URL for linking
- Archives
- Pages with all posts for the same day / week / month
- Calendar or list to navigate
- Menu
- Some information about the author and weblog, links to other pages
- Links to other weblogs (blogroll), other webs-sites
- Search and subscribe forms
- List of categories/ topics, often “recently updated” list
- Link to RSS feed
- Buttons, thanks, disclaimers, copyrights, etc.
2. Publish
- Blogging software
- Hosted on your desktop or on server (your own or provider’s)
- Keeps “raw materials” of your weblog: database of posts, templates
- Allows adding/editing/deleting of “raw materials”
- Makes HTML pages out of it and uploads them to your server (your own or provider’s)
- Metadata/channeling
- Categories – each post can go to several categories
- Topics/keywords
3. Discuss
- Finding weblogs
- Weblogs directories, Google
- Links from weblogs you read
- Finding new things in weblogs you know
- Browsing their pages
- Subscribing to RSS feeds using news aggregators
- Subscribing by e-mail
- Discussing
- Using comments of original weblog
- Citing and commenting in your own weblog
4. Search and track
- Searching
- Weblog-level search: blogging software function, special software, Google site-level search
- “Blogs I read” search: Trusted Blog Search tool
- Across weblogs: Blogdex, Technorati, Daypop…
- Tracking
- Most referred pages across weblogs, for a specific weblog
- Links to and links from, referers
- Revealing groups of weblogs
- Finding similar weblogs
- Word bursts (heightened usage of certain words in weblogs)
- Conversations across weblogs
Tags: better blogging, introducing blogsArchived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/05/08.html#a584; comments are here.
Related posts