Setting Up Blogging

“Blog policy at Microsoft is just two words: Blog Smart.”

Lawrence Liu, director of platform strategy for Telligent

Blog is short for Weblog, an old-fashioned term from the turn of the century for a kind of online diary. The original Weblogs were not initially a hit. In 1999 well-known usability guru Jesse James Garrett collected a list[1] of all the known Weblogs — all 23 of them. A year later, his list had grown to almost 300.[2] Peter Merholz, Creative Director at Epinions.com, decided for some reason that the word should be pronounced “wee-blog” which he proposed be shortened to blog, and the rest is history.

As we reported in an earlier post, today there are more than 240 million blogs with more than 120,000 new ones launching every day.[3] Websites such as Technorati[4] exist solely to catalog and classify blogs, delivering a sampling of the best and most-influential blogs. Big money is made by blogs such as Mashable,[5] Perez Hilton,[6] I Can Has Cheezburger,[7] and Techcrunch[8] which staked out claims in niche markets (social media, celebrity gossip, cute (?) cat pictures, tech gadgets) and drawing large viewership.

Along the way, the blog has morphed from a text-only medium to a multimedia extravaganza, featuring audio, video, animations, and games. Technical innovations such as Real Simple Syndication (RSS)[9] en­abled blogs to connect to one another, and made keeping up to date on many blogs at once a simple matter of starting a Google Reader account.

Other social networking sites have made it easy to connect blogs to their services:

• You can automatically tweet a synopsis of your new blog post to Twitter and Facebook using TwitterFeed[10]
• You can add your blog to LinkedIn (use the BlogLink app or Ping.fm[11]) and to Facebook (add to the Notes section)
• You can add your blog to your YouTube channel
  

As you can see, your blog could be the center of your social media universe, powering a series of satellite sites fed by a single blog post.

So what is this powerful force?