Welcome To The Wonderful World Of Blogs
Welcome to the wonderful world of blogs - by definition the frequent, chronological publications of personal thoughts and Web links. Often they are a mixture of what is happening in the blogger's life and what is happening on the Net. It's the Reality TV of the Internet. There doesn't seem to be much that isn't tackled as blog topic. What a tremendous vehicle for talking about information technology, enterprise content management, knowledge management, knowledge transfer, or groupware software. You get the idea. Blog possibilities are endless.
Blogs have been around since forever (early 1997 to be exact), but really took off in popularity when automated publishing systems were introduced - i.e. Blogger at blogger.com. Use the term blog, rather than weblog - as it means a server's log files. By 1999 there were 23 blogs in existence, but things didn't stay that way for long. Blogs and blogging mushroomed rapidly and it was almost impossible to keep up with them. Of course software designers jumped into the melee and came up with even more ways for people to publish their own blogs quickly and easily.
The piece of history that's important for you to know, because it directly relates to what you can do with your blog, is that the original weblogs were link-driven. Today's blogs are also link driven and that is your key to the success of your blog. Find unusual links, interesting links, teaching links, and learning links for your blog and add your own review or commentary to them. Take a different viewpoint of document management and create a blog entry to challenge readers. Talk about a different theory you may have about business collaboration. Make your point of view interesting enough, and you will develop a loyal audience.
You can also add extra facts not found in an article, show your own expertise in the area or invite others to submit their observations. No matter what way you choose to do blog, you win! One thing to remember with a blog is, you need to get to the point fast. Make it short and to the point because you don't have room to write a novel. Best you don't do the essay route either as these days people don't have enough time to read lengthy articles on the Net. What you're really doing for them is pre-screening or filtering sites that would be of interest. Quality sites, because you've already checked them out. Sites that bring new information to light about web conferencing or business dashboards. This brings us to another point, an audience versus a public. An audience is passive. A public participates, which is what you want, traffic for your blogs. Another angle you can explore with your blog is how you want to write it. For instance it can be a mixture of links, commentary and personal notes or a record of your own thoughts (a quick reflection on something you observed or tried at work) Whichever style you choose, remember to make it distinctive to you and written in your own voice, letting your personality show through. Here are the various types of blogs found on the Internet: Vlog - comprised of videos Linklog - comprised of links Sketchblog - a portfolio of sketches Photoblog - pictures Tumblelogs - shorter posts, mixed media Moblog - written by a mobile phone or PDA Blawgs - by genre (political, travel, fashion etc) Private blogs - usually the most popular Business blogs - for businesses Corporate blogs - used internally for a business (marketing, branding, PR)
Knowledge Management
| 
