Blogs and the Blogosphere: Definitions and reasons to care

Slide 1: Blogs and the blogosphere Definitions and reasons to care Michael Angeles http://urlgreyhot.com

Slide 2: 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 2

Slide 3: What is a weblog? A web diary or journal A log of links to other sites or pages A publishing format 3

Slide 4: 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) 4 * As of 12/10, 2005; See: http://technorati.com/about/

Slide 5: Technorati blogosphere stats 5 http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/2005_10.html

Slide 6: Technorati blogosphere stats 6 http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/2005_10.html

Slide 7: Why we blog The Clue Train Manifesto http://www.cluetrain.org/ Simple A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, Direct & people are discovering and inventing new ways to share interactive relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets Unmediated are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most Based on story companies. telling ... These markets are conversations. 7

Slide 8: A blog is really a conversation It’s a 1 to many conversation You publish People comment The conversation is recorded on the weblog 8

Slide 9: More precisely, it’s a cocktail party Lots of = weblogs 9 Cocktail party metaphor: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item.jhtml?id=5111&t=technology

Slide 10: The cocktail party* is the blogosphere First I’ll tell 2 And they’ll tell And so on, and friends 2 friends so on... * A conversation thread may not follow a linear flow at a cocktail party 10

Slide 11: 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 11

Slide 12: How the parts connect Sites are connected via standard formats and processes Common XML formats used Technologies supporting syndication XML – publishing metadata for publishing blog XML-RPC – for sending trackbacks metadata Services supporting findability Search engines, aggregators & A standard protocol used directories for distributing conversation Bloglines Blogpulse (trackback) Feedster Google Blog Search Pubsub Blog-specific search Syndic8 engines/crawlers Technorati relationships, i.e. who links to whom 12

Slide 13: XML (RSS) Syndication drives most of it Clients read blog feed locally Services store and process blog feed 13

Slide 14: Trackback pinging is a supporting technology 14

Slide 15: 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. 15

Slide 16: Do blogs matter? 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 16

Slide 17: Key reasons for participating Direct communication bypassing the media discussing things the media won’t communicating directly with customers Reputation management Trend spotting 17

Slide 18: 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/ 18 Try some out: http://opensourcecms.com/

Slide 19: 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/ 19

Slide 20: 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 20

Slide 21: Questions?