Blogs and the Blogosphere: Definitions and reasons to care

Blogs and the blogosphere
Definitions and reasons to care

Hello
I’m an information architect and site developer at Lucent Technologies’ library
An active blogger under the pen-name, jibbajabba(urlgreyhot.com, iaslash.org)
Contributor in the Drupal open source blogging platform
Business blog evangelist

What is a weblog?
A web diary or journal
A log of links to other sites or pages
A publishing format

Some recent statistics
About 11% (50 million) of Internet users are regular blog readers . (Pew)
Technorati is currently tracking 22.6 million blogs *
There are about 70,000 new blogs a day. (Technorati)
Bloggers update their weblogs regularly; there are about 700,000 posts daily, or about 29,100 blog updates an hour. (Technorati)
* As of 12/10, 2005; See: http://technorati.com/about/

Technorati blogosphere stats http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/2005_10.html

Why we blog
Simple
Direct & interactive
Unmediated
Based on story telling
The Clue Train Manifesto http://www.cluetrain.org/ A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies. ... These markets are conversations.

A blog is really a conversation
It’s a 1 to many conversation
You publish
People comment
The conversation is recorded on the weblog

More precisely, it’s a cocktail party Lots of weblogs = Cocktail party metaphor: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item.jhtml?id=5111&t=technology

The cocktail party* is the blogosphere First I’ll tell 2 friends And they’ll tell 2 friends And so on, and so on... * A conversation thread may not follow a linear flow at a cocktail party

The blogosphere
Typical web sites allow 1-many one way conversations (publisher to reader)
Blogs allow 1-many 2 way conversations (via commenting & trackback)
The blogosphere (a system or networks of blogs) allows many to many discussions - conversations distributed over many sites and services

How the parts connect
Common XML formats used for publishing blog metadata
A standard protocol used for distributing conversation (trackback)
Blog-specific search engines/crawlers relationships, i.e. who links to whom
Sites are connected via standard formats and processes Technologies supporting syndication XML – publishing metadata XML-RPC – for sending trackbacks Services supporting findability Search engines, aggregators & directories Bloglines Blogpulse Feedster Google Blog Search Pubsub Syndic8 Technorati

XML (RSS) Syndication drives most of it Clients read blog feed locally Services store and process blog feed

Trackback pinging is a supporting technology

Relationships manifest in the blogosphere Relationships are observable in indirect linking -- relationship info. is fed back into the services and give depth to the blogosphere.

Democratic – openness and interactivity
The pulse of the web (within a given audience)
Credibility is an issue
When authoritative – blogs are valuable for filtering
Readership may be outpacing traditional media
Do blogs matter?

Key reasons for participating
Direct communication
bypassing the media
discussing things the media won’t
communicating directly with customers
Reputation management
Trend spotting

Getting started
A few popular blogging software options
You install & run on a web host
WordPress , http://wordpress.org
MovableType , http://movabletype.org
Drupal , http://drupal.org
Hosted services
Blogger , http://blogger.com (free)
TypePad , http://sixapart.com (commercial)
More: http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Internet/On_the_Web/Weblogs/Tools/Publishers/
Try some out: http://opensourcecms.com/

Blog reading services
Server-based news readers
Bloglines , http://bloglines.com
Kinja , http://kinja.com
NewsGator , http://newsgator.com
Desktop clients
Omea Reader for PC, http://www.jetbrains.com/omea/reader/
NetNewsWire for Mac, http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/

Blog search services
Technorati , http://technorati.com
Blogpulse , http://blogpulse.com/
Google Blog Search , http://blogsearch.google.com/
Feedster , http://feedster.com
PubSub (subscription RSS service), http://pubsub.com

Questions?

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Blogs and the Blogosphere: Definitions and reasons to care

by Michael Angeles on Nov 10, 2006

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Blogs and the Blogosphere: Definitions and reasons to care — Presentation Transcript