RSS feedsIf you are still working with the strictly hierarchical, top-down communication model of memos and newsletters to distribute information within the enterprise and beyond, then it would appear that the 21st century world of the blog has passed you by. You may not blog, but plenty of other people do. As we went to press, the number of blogs being tracked by supremo blog search engine Technorati had hit 71.7 million.
With its inherent ability to create a personal level of engagement, blogging has become de rigueur for the consumer with something to say, the business with a message to get across, and libraries, universities and research facilities that have information to share.
What Is a blog?
Good question, and increasingly difficult to answer given the myriad different flavours of blogging that have emerged during the last few years. Podcasting (audio blogging), photoblogging (image blogging) and vlogging (video blogging) might serve to confuse the medium, but essentially the same, simple truth applies to all: a blog is a system of user-generated content with entries presented in a reverse chronological order in the style of a journal.
Postings (blog entries) are indexed by means of subject-oriented tags, making them easily discoverable. Blogs also contain links to other blogs to drive further discussion and content creation by way of comments, and generally go way beyond the standard definition of a “web log” as the vanity publishing exercise of an inconsequential diary.
Internal or external?
You can think of blogs as coming in two flavours. First, there is the internal blog, used not as an alternative to face-to-face meetings, but as a supplement to them that enables ongoing discussion on a many-to-many basis, regardless of distance or availability.
Internal blogs are only open to those people within the enterprise who have the correct permissions to participate, so there is no danger of the rogue email effect where a posting slips out of the corporate boundaries and is exposed to the internet at large.
By the same token, because membership is already taken care of at the outset, there are none of the problems of sending out invitations to participate; discussion can just flow immediately, and everyone feels involved in the decision-making process. Unlike email, conversational threads (postings on the same topic) are easy to follow. The postings are easy to archive and retrieve, and there is no chance of messages not being delivered.
An external blog, on the other hand, is designed to take your discussions outside the enterprise and engage a wider network of contribution. By involving an audience that might include your customers, clients or anyone with a passing interest in your field of expertise, you can leverage the modern marvel that is known as user-driven content. Equally as useful for taking a corporate brand message and spreading it around the market as it is for sucking information in from contributors you would otherwise never reach, the external blog can be both your public face and your distributed knowledge database.
Unlike a static website, a blog actively involves existing and potential clients, empowers them with a voice and builds a level of trust between the enterprise and its users that is hard to achieve using other methods, one of the key reasons being that a blog is a much more personal level of communication. Less suit and tie, more pipe and slippers.
Server or hosted?
When it comes to setting up a blog, you need to consider whether to go for a hosted or server-based model. Your decision ultimately depends entirely on the level of control, customisation and IT expertise within your organisation.
A server-based blog is installed on your own IT systems and provides the ultimate in flexibility – it can be customised to suit your exact needs and availability is entirely your own responsibility. But a server-based blog is unlikely to be the cheapest option – you need to factor in the costs of IT staff to install, configure and maintain the application as well as the bandwidth and network infrastructure costs of hosting your own blog.
Hosted blogs are the simplest and quickest route to blog implementation, and almost certainly the cheapest. A hosted blog offers a ready-made blog format, whose look and feel can be customised by means of template design sets located on a third-party server outside your organisation. Costs vary enormously – from totally free to per-seat per-year fees.
The biggest drawback, certainly at the budget end of this market, is likely to be the use of generic URLs, which fails to reflect the kind of professionalism most enterprises will demand. Some blogging systems will let you rent a hosted option and then invest in the server-based version once you are sure it is right for you.
Structure of a blog posting
As far as actually creating, editing and maintaining your blog is concerned, things really couldn’t be any easier. Browser-based interfaces are the order of the day, allowing blog authors to update their sites remotely from any web-connected computer, including mobile devices. But the actual blog posting itself will follow the same basic rules of creation.
Every blog post requires a title, which should be concise and relevant to the content that follows. Think broadsheet newspaper headline rather than tabloid redtop and you have the right idea, although some news blogs do adopt the tabloid approach to entice readers who might not be interested if they knew what the story really was in the first place. Cryptic headings also make archiving and retrieval a lot more difficult than it need be.
The body of your post – its content – is entirely up to you, but remember that you are writing for the web rather than a white paper. Keep the layout easy on the eye, and adopt a less-is-more approach to your editorial.
A permalink is nothing more than a permanent, static URL that points directly at the blog posting in question and allows for easy referencing by other blogs and syndication services. The lifeblood of any blog, including internal ones, is the ability to link easily between postings and blogs.
Equally as important is the post date, as readers, researchers and archivists want to know the exact date that something was written.
While not all blogs allow comments, there is the danger that they become something of a static notice board unless they incorporate this basic level of user interaction.
Unlike the categories defined by the blog owner to create discrete topic channels on the site, tags are supplied by the creator of the blog posting and totally unstructured. A tag is indicated by boldfaced text and clicking on one takes the reader to another web page with related information. Tagging provides a much more granular and natural method of semantic indexing than categorisation.
Trackbacks are a mechanism that allows blog software that supports it to make a note of who is linking to your blog from theirs, and allows your users not only to see what you are saying about the subject but what other readers of other blogs are as well.
From the blog management perspective, trackbacks are highly useful in gauging blog post popularity. The more trackbacks your blog has – that is, the more blogs that are linking to yours – the better.
The ability to automatically archive blog postings, indexed by date, author or subject, provides a compelling case for building an organic, user-driven knowledge base in this way. But a blog is more than an in-house alternative to a complex content management system or relational database.
Let’s consider just one blog property – its ease of syndication. The networking and user relationship advantages of an external blog, and its ability to leverage the power of user-driven content creation have already been covered here, but blogs also make it relatively easy to find those users in the first place. Syndication by means of feedreader applications provide a simple method of taking a machine-readable XML file (your blog), and updating the content in real-time by publishing new posts (or headlines, extracts, and so on) on third-party websites, within web browser add-ons, and so on, using RSS.
Syndication means that end-users don’t have to physically visit your blog every day to check for new posts, but get the content delivered to them in a format of their choosing. This makes users much more likely to contribute to the blog when a posting of interest is flagged up.
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