The document discusses blogs, providing a brief history and overview. It notes that blogs have influenced traditional media by breaking news stories faster. It also outlines the basic anatomy of a blog post, including links, comments, and feeds. The document warns bloggers about legal issues like libel and privacy concerns when blogging about work. It emphasizes that blog posts live online forever due to caching and archiving.

1. “ Randolph Is Talking” Rob Ainbinder [email_address] http://randolphistalking.blogspot.com

2. About Me Bus driver, blogger? Sort of… My blogging story

3. What’s a Blog? “ a personal Web site that provides news articles of other sites that are of interest to the user, also may include journal entries, commentaries and recommendations compiled by the user” Whatever you want it to be! journal/diary, photo album, customer service, R&D, sounding board As long as its updated regularly

4. A Brief History of Blogs 4/96 – Dave Winer launches a news page that in 1997 becomes Scripting News. Starts Radio Userland 8/99 - Pyra Labs, today owned by Google, launches Blogger

5. Blog Universe* Technorati now tracks over 27.2 Million blogs The blogosphere is doubling in size every 5 and a half months On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day 13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created About 9% of new blogs are spam or machine generated *As of February 2006 (source: http://www.sifry.com/alerts )

6. Blogs Influence on “TM” 4-2-04: Ryan Lizza, New Republic reporter breaks news of Jim Margolis, leaving the Kerry campaign, posted at 12:22 p.m. beating the AP by 11 minutes. 9-9-04: Charles Johnson helps expose the forged George Bush/CBS/ National Guard documents. (www.littlegreenfootballs.com) 1-13-05: Jon Lowder, W/S blogger writes about the W/S Journal. In reponse, The Journal adds features to it’s Website. (http://www.jonlowder.com/)

7. Anatomy of a Blog Post Links (a.k.a blogroll) Comments Feed

8. A Warning Libel and copyright laws apply Don’t blog under the influence Don’t blog about your job… specifically or risk firing Blogging is forever Blogging is forever … literally and it’s all cached by Google.

9. Commenting The currency of blogs Differentiates a blog from a Web site. Sometimes more interesting than the o.p. Comment generously on blogs you like (and ones you don’t).

10. Newsfeeds Blog posts are like songs on the radio. Re-broadcasting constantly