c



 










In the beginning was HTML, and while it was rather ugly, it was good overall. It allowed anyone
with a modicum of skill to create Web sites, producing both good content and attractive
presentation of that content. Toss in a few <A HREF> links and you could even weave pages
together into a comprehensive site.

The problem was that it was darn tedious, and to this day, it's still fairly tedious to create Web
sites, to take the skeleton or template of a page and customize it for a specific page of content, to
update the navigational subsystem to ensure that the new page is known, and to maintain now-
necessary features like a sitemap.

It's no surprise that more and more sophisticated tools appeared on the scene, starting with
FrontPage and self-referential Web-based Web page editors (think homepage builders) and
evolving into the powerful Dreamweaver and GoLive expensive commercial solutions for
managing Web content.

These tools allow you to create beautiful sites with compelling content, but they don't allow
neophytes or non-technical people to maintain content or add new content. And so even with
these sophisticated tools, most Web sites are static creations, and most companies view their
Web sites as digital brochures. Sure, it might be more sophisticated with a Flash navigational
system, or might feature a discussion board or other community involvement element, but it's
very rare for a traditional Web site to be updated more frequently than once every month or two.

And if I had a dollar for each person who told me that he doesn't update his Web site because he
has to send his requests to a Webmaster, who then queues it up for weeks or months before
actually making the change, I'd be a wealthy writer!

 






In parallel to the development of Web technologies and tools, the ability to interact with others
was gaining popularity; the first widespread example is the now-crufty guestbook. You can still
find zillions of these through Google, but they were only a stepping stone to more sophisticated
online discussion systems. The next step was discussion boards, also known as bulletin board
systems.

Meanwhile, some smart developers were realizing that the Web-based Web page editors coupled
with guestbooks could create very nice tools for letting non-tech users add new content to their
Web pages. Logically, this technique was first used as online diaries and journals, creating a
system that time-stamped entries and showed them most commonly in a most-recent-first format.
Perfect for teen angst, Web-based logs of entries--Weblogs--caught on in some circles and grew
quickly.
As they became more popular, however, blogging tools also evolved at a breakneck pace, to
where new entries (articles) would automatically be placed on their own standalone Web pages
and also featured on the main page of the site until supplanted by newer material. This was an
important evolution because it meant that Weblog tools had morphed, perhaps without anyone
noticing, from diaries into true content-management systems.

Fast forward to the current generation of Weblog tools; they are indeed quite powerful and
capable tools for managing even the largest and most complex Web sites. Further, because
they're quite flexible, working off page templates just as Dreamweaver and its ilk do, sites that
use blogging tools as the back end can present their data using common blog conventions (which
I'll get to in a moment) or eschew all the standard approaches, using the tool as a way to simplify
management of what appears to be a more traditional Web site.

R
 





The real value of blogging isn't the capability of the tool, but the ability for each and every page
on the site, each and every article, to invite and display feedback from readers--comments, as
they're called in the blogging world. This is a dramatic difference because it changes a
monologue, a "brochure," into a dialogue with readers or customers.

Indeed, often the most compelling reading on a Weblog are the comments that others leave and
the debate that often ensues as people add their two cents and disagree with each other.

While there are no blog police and no laws stating that a site must have certain capabilities to
truly be a Weblog, it is nonetheless true that most blogs allow comments, timestamp their
articles, show them in newest-to-oldest order, and have an RSS feed--a rudimentary way for
people to subscribe to the content of a Weblog in a specifically designed RSS aggregator, rather
than forcing them to revisit the site with any sort of frequency.


á
  

  


I received a question from Don in my email this morning, apparently from today's article on the
Contra Costa Times. Dan asks, "How is a blog (short for "web log") different than a website?"
Here's my take:

¢











  
 





 If you can
send an email, you can blog. Most websites require technical skills.

¢




 
 


 
¢  

 A website is
frequently static information, and the order and sequence depends on the purpose of the site.

¢









 

 - like if you were having a conversation with me over
coffee. I didn't slave over this text, and sure, it could have been buffed and polished better. It
just came out that way, and it's that way in my blog. Conversational. From one person. To
you. A website's text has the whole teams in the marketing department analyzing every word
and link on the home page. Tweaking and testing here, graphics over there - more expensive,
requiring more specialized technical skills.

¢





 


 - so they can post comments to your individual posts,
and link from their blog to your posts. This allows a conversation to occur between the writer
and the audience. If someone in the audience also has a blog, or several do, the conversation can
get very interesting. They can ask questions. I wouldn't be writing to you now had this not
happened...

¢





  





!
!
 




 A blog
decouples the "content" from the "presentation". If I did an HTML page, the content and
presentation would be coded all together. In a blog, the content is separate from the formatting.
Even better, it's encapsulated in its own message envelope that can be read by other sites on the
Internet. This envelope is an extension of XML, an open standard for Internet messages, called
RSS. RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication". So what? This means, for example, if I'm a
software company doing a press release, I can publish my press release using a tool that supports
RSS, and anyone else who is watching for "software industry news" can automatically receive
and display my press release on their site. If you've used newswires, it's like that, but on an open
standards platform instead of a proprietary and expensive newswire platform. So anyone with an
internet connection can recieve it - not just paid up newswire subscribers. So this applies not just
to "press releases", but to every update you do. On a traditional website, I have to wait for
Google to come and crawl my site before anyone will know I've done something new....2-3
weeks could pass by then! On a blog, it's a few minutes.

¢
"





 






 In fact, some people joke that
"Blog" stands for "Better Listings on Google". Many of the features listed above - content
syndication, frequent posts, linking from other sites - play to Google's algorithms to get your
better listings.
¢
"





  


!
!


 

  



 Because of the RSS feature, you can monitor many blogs by syndicating them, and
automatically receive updates whenever their website changes on your PC. The updates come to
you, you don't have to go look to find out which websites were updated last night. Muuuuch
more efficient. How do you do that on a website? You have to go each day and check to see
what's new. If you use an RSS aggregator, the updates are sent to you each day, much like an
email.

¢
"
!






 Curious what people are blogging about?
Visit www.technorati.com. Check out their news, books and Top 100 links. This is what people
are posting about right now. They do searches across these RSS-enabled sites only. Your posts,
in RSS format, will appear there also.




! 








 



 My mom might not know
the difference between my website and my blog. (Do you, mom?) You still access it in a
browser, it uses regular URLs, there might or might not be advertising, some have good content
and some have bad.

What blogging does do is make publishing on the web something mere mortals can do. And
therefore, they can do it more frequently. This allows staying in touch and enhancing
relationships.

If you have a family, a blog can improve your relationships by staying connected and letting
your family know what's on your mind (or camera, or iPod). You can secure some blogs, so the
pictures of the kids won't fall into enemy hands. Even soldiers in Iraq are blogging about their
first-hand experiences in war, and letting their families know they're OK. If you run a small
business, a blog can help your customers find you online, help you listen to them, and be more
responsive than your larger competitors.

Could websites do that? Sure. But a blog can do so much more. For a fraction of the cost.

Does a blog replace your website? Probably not. You still need a way to introduce yourself and
your company. For example, I still want people to know I do consulting to help build software
startups - that's what you get when you go to my website. If you come here, you hopefully learn
more about my personality, how I think, if I have a clue, and how I might help you.


1. A  (a blend of the term Ô
)[1] is a type of website or part of a website. Blogs are
usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of
events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in
reverse-chronological order. V
 can also be used as a verb, meaning 







.

Most blogs are interactive, allowing visitors to leave comments and even message each other via
widgets on the blogs and it is this interactivity that distinguishes them from other static
websites.[2]

Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more
personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web
pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability of readers to leave comments in an
interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although
some focus on art (Art blog), photographs (photoblog), videos (video blogging), music (MP3
blog), and audio (podcasting). Microblogging is another type of blogging, featuring very short
posts.

As of December 2007, blog search engine Technorati was tracking more than 112 million
blogs.[3]

á


Main articles: History of blogging and online diary

The term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger[4] on 17 December 1997. The short form, "blog,"
was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word Ô
 into the phrase Ô
 in the
sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in April or May 1999.[5][6][7] Shortly thereafter, Evan Williams
at Pyra Labs used "blog" as both a noun and verb ("to blog," meaning "to edit one's weblog or to
post to one's weblog") and devised the term "blogger" in connection with Pyra Labs' Blogger
product, leading to the popularization of the terms.[8]