A blog (short for weblog) is a personal online journal that is frequently updated and intended for general public consumption. Blogs are defined by their format: a series of entries posted to a single page in reverse-chronological order.Blogs generally represent the personality of the author or reflect the purpose of the Web site that hosts the blog. Topics sometimes include brief philosophical musings, commentary on Internet and other social issues, and links to other sites the author favors, especially those that support a point being made on a post. (Whatis.com? Accessed 13-11-2010)The blog is accessible over the web for others to view , comment on and recently blogs now used extensively to organise ideas and promote ourselves, posting to the internet is done in a matter of seconds using blogger services (Blogger.com, Wordpress.org, Joomla.org). Content is managed by a back end Mysql database, keeping records of blog posts and associated comment threads, metadata, urls for each post and allowing and archive to built up over time without any time consuming administration.
A successeful blog, with enough traffic can become a profitable exercise through posting targeted adverts through google AdSense especially as blogs by reputable authors can become a valuable source of up to date information. http://www.newscientist.com/blog/space/2008/07/stephen-hawking-pokes-fun-at-america.html (a funny article posted about Stephen Hawkin ! Accessed 14-11-2010). Blogs are even used to allow conferences or events to be followed remotely in real-time.
With the multitude of blogs that exist and endless number of topics written about, how do we keep a breast of it all? Starter for ten.... google.com can be set to specifically narrow results of only blog articles in a conventional search. Posts are assigned labels relevant to the content (see the bottom of this post) which are index-able by google.com and other search engines. Once we find a blog we may me interested in in the future, rather than have to visit regularly to check for updates, RSS feeds are a useful way to transmit human readable information between blogs, providing real-time updates when new content is added to syndicated sites. A popular open source blogging service WordPress, explains the process of syndication:
A feed is a machine readable (usually XML explained in a future post) content publication that is updated regularly. Many weblogs publish a feed (usually RSS, but also possibly Atom and RDF and so on, as described above). There are tools out there that call themselves "feedreaders". What they do is they keep checking specified blogs to see if they have been updated, and when the blogs are updated, they display the new post, and a link to it, with an excerpt (or the whole contents) of the post. Each feed contains items that are published over time. When checking a feed, the feedreader is actually looking for new items. New items are automatically discovered and downloaded for you to read. Just so you don't have to visit all the blogs you are interested in. All you have to do with these feedreaders is to add the link to the RSS feed of all the blogs you are interested in. The feedreader will then inform you when any of the blogs have new posts in them. Most blogs have these "Syndication" feeds available for the readers to use. (http://codex.wordpress.org/Introduction_to_Blogging Accessed 14-11-2010)
Blogs are no particularly remarkable in isolation, but when linking blogs things become more interesting.....we are now entering the 'Blogosphere' oooooooh.....now that's more like it, Web 2.0 ! Trackbacks, which use HTTP GET protocol, allow bloggers to link to articles, sending information to one another as a comment. A better explanation is this:
- Person A writes something on their blog.
- Person B wants to comment on Person A's blog, but wants her own readers to see what she had to say, and be able to comment on her own blog
- Person B posts on her own blog and sends a trackback to Person A's blog
- Person A's blog receives the trackback, and displays it as a comment to the original post. This comment contains a link to Person B's post
http://codex.wordpress.org/Introduction_to_Blogging Accessed 14-11-2010
I use trackbacks on my Music Information Blog to keep abreast of what other music bloggers are posting, sharing the Knowledge of artists, new bands, old rare finds and anything of interest. Sharing posts in this way allows bloggers to cite each other, posting trackbacks as comments on related topics, effectively presenting an abstract of the content of the post, anyone else viewing my post will also be able to follow the trackback if that appears to be of interest also.
Critical evaluation of blogging also means we must mention the same old problem of authenticity of sources as in my previous article about Wikipedia. Content in a blog is really is just personal opinion. Personal opinions can be again damaging if used to the wrong ends, sources mis-quoted and plagiarism from other blogs can be a common threat to the 'who said it first' arguments that perpetuate in the era of information, news, gossip and libelous litigation.
Pingbacks are a technology, relying on XML-RPC, which unlike trackbacks, which can be edited or faked, pingbacks provide a link to the original blog article, notifying that blogger their site has been quoted somehwere else. The pingback is explained beter by our friends at WordPress:
The best way to think about pingbacks is as remote comments:
- Person A posts something on his blog.
- Person B posts on her own blog, linking to Person A's post. This automatically sends a pingback to Person A when both have pingback enabled blogs.
- Person A's blog receives the pingback, then automatically goes to Person B's post to confirm that the pingback did, in fact, originate there.
http://codex.wordpress.org/Introduction_to_Blogging Accessed 14-11-2010
The most successful 'Micro-Blogging' site today, Twitter, allows little flexibility in that it restricts posts to 140 characters, however the ability to follow other micro-bloggers terms of news can be shared with the world.......micro-news on tap, tailor made for your own consumption.
An article on the Twitter blog show how apples own social networking service for those listening to music to share excerts from songs, artists and links to itunes downloads, will allow this to be 'tweeted'.
Every day, millions of people use Twitter to follow and share what they care about. Twitter users now send over 95 million Tweets a day, many of which are about the music they're listening to.http://blog.twitter.com/2010/11/twitter-ping-discovering-more-music.html
Starting today Ping, iTunes' new social network for music, and Twitter are making it even easier for people to share music discoveries with their friends by putting Ping activity, song previews and links to purchase and download music from the iTunes Store right in their Tweets on Twitter.com.
Why not check out some blogs instead of picking up the News of The World on Sunday morning.....far more stimulating in my opinion.....but that's just my opinion of course, it's my blog !
Thoughts etc below please.......
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