What's all this Blog blathering?
By Jim Mroczkowski
Feb. 2005
© R-Design, Inc.


One of the things that makes this internet of ours so revolutionary is its adaptability. No matter what new innovation, trend, or idea comes along, the web instantly absorbs it as a community and holds it up to the world to be developed, criticized, or adopted. This global community of developers, consumers and critics has brought us everything from e-commerce to search engines to spam. Most recently, it has brought us the blog.

If you’ve been paying any attention to the news in the last few months, you have probably heard a journalist use the word “blog” and then poorly define that word. Blogs were considered by many to be instrumental in breaking several big election year news stories, particularly the scandal that has come to be known as Rathergate. But blogs can be used for much more than humiliating Dan Rather. In fact, blogs are in many ways a crystallization of everything good and useful about the web, particularly its immediacy and malleability.

So, what are they? More importantly, what do they have to do with you?
The word “blog” is actually nothing more than a cutesy, trying-a-little-too-hard-to-sound-hip abbreviation of “web log,” and at its core that’s really all a blog is: a web site that is used like a log or diary, with dated entries posted in chronological order (most often with the newest entry posted atop the older ones). Besides their structure and layout, the thing that really separates blogs from other web sites is their currency; most blogs are run with free, easy-to-use interfaces that allow the online diarist (or “blogger”) to post the latest entry online in less time than it takes to send an e-mail. Rather than redesigning or editing the home page every time they want to add the latest text, they just type whatever they happen to be thinking and click “post,” and their thoughts are instantaneously online for the world to see. More often than not, blogs will also have a “Comments” section after each entry that allows any reader to post feedback about what they’ve read equally instantaneously, adding to the sense of community associated with blogs.

But such a bare-bones description only hints at the potential of blogs. The blogging concept can be expanded to encompass all sorts of uses for your business. A large company, for example, could use a blog to give its distributors up-to-the-minute information about new products, new prices, or changes to existing plans for the quarter. A company blog could keep employees updated on changes to the office’s snow schedule or cafeteria menu for the day. Google’s engineers even have their own blog (http://www.google.com/googleblog/) to keep people abreast of the latest additions and innovations to their search engine products.

Of all the uses blogs have, it is the one chosen by Google that would probably be most useful professionally, namely as a sales tool. Imagine being able to respond to any development in your industry within minutes of finding out about it, without having to contact your webmaster to implement a long list of changes to your site in order to get your statement online. Imagine helping your potential customers feel connected to you through frequently updated news posts and direct feedback right there on the site. You could post one-day-only sales, introduce your latest product, solicit customer opinions in real time, explain temporary shipping delays... a blog’s potential is limitless.

Of course, most people just use them to tell readers what they had for breakfast that morning and post pictures of their cats. But you can do better.

The best way to learn about blogs and blogging is to have a look around at some of the tools and the blogs those tools produce. A good place to start would be Blogger.com, an easy-to-use site that allows people to set up free web logs in exchange for running ads on those blogs. LiveJournal.com and TypePad.com are also good sites to explore; most LiveJournal sites are personal, whereas TypePad tends to host more corporate or professional blogs. (Not coincidentally, TypePad charges a fee while LiveJournal does not.)

If you are interested in blogging but would prefer to host your blog on your own web site, you will need to install some blogging software like the popular Movable Type (http://www.movabletype.org/) to get you started. Movable Type is free for single-author blogs; if you want multiple contributors to be able to participate, it’s going to cost you, but even the most expensive license is only $99. Once you’ve had a look at what blogs can do, that will probably seem like a small price to pay for the power the tool puts at your fingertips.