An Introduction to Weblogs

From Wikibooks, the open-content textbooks collection

(Redirected from Weblogs:An Introduction)

Current revision (unreviewed)

A Wikibookian suggests that this page be broken into several subpages
Smaller pages are easier to read and edit. See best practices for more information.
You can ask for help in the projects reading room.

This wikibook is designed for use by candidates studying for Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) Unit No. DN8111: Weblogs. The unit specification can be downloaded from the SQA web site.

The unit is designed to enable candidates to locate, use and create weblogs (“blogs”) and provide candidates with an opportunity to explore the applications of blogs, create blogs and track blogs using aggregation tools.

[edit] Locating and reviewing weblogs

[edit] Historical development of weblogs

[edit] Introduction

A weblog can be loosely defined as a journal or diary which is published on the World Wide Web. The process of updating and maintaining a weblog is known as blogging and the author is known as a blogger. Weblogs are usually updated at regular intervals using user-friendly software that requires little or no technical background.

The rate of growth of blogging has been astounding. According toTechnorati there are currently (early 2006) there are now over 26 million weblogs in existence. They reckon that:

The blogosphere (ie: the weblog universe) doubles in size about every 5.5 months.
A new weblog is created roughly every second and there are over 80,000 weblogs created daily.
About 55% of all weblogs are active.
About 13% of all weblogs are updated at least weekly.

ACTIVITY 1.1

Technorati carries out a major survey of weblog activities every six months. Check their website for the current values.

It is difficult to come up with a definition that fits all weblogs, or even most weblogs. In essence, weblogs are web pages that have several posts or distinct items of information per page. They are normally in reverse chronological order, with the most recent post at the top of the page and the oldest at the bottom.

Weblogs often contain links to other Web sites or weblogs. Many of the earliest weblogs relied heavily on links, and consisted mainly of short pieces of text, mixed with news items or useful links the author had found that day. Modern weblogs may link to external sites, but they might also have more of an inward focus, acting as a personal journal or diary for the author. Weblogs are often created and maintained by an individual, but they may also be produced by small groups of people, or involve large communities in a single weblog.

Most weblogs are non-commercial in nature, but they are increasingly being added to commercial sites and being used new form of business communication. A weblog can be a small part of a larger site, a small portion of a single page or an entire Web site. Weblogs are usually updated oftener than traditional Web sites, due largely to the smaller changes and lower amount of effort required to add a new weblog post as compared to adding an entire Web page full of content.

Weblogs are based on discrete posts, sometimes known as articles or entries. Each page is usually a collection of posts over a period of time, sometimes several years. Tools are available to automate the creation of new posts, leaving the details of creating archive pages, uploading amended files to a server and applying HTML templates to automated scripts. Bloggers can add new posts using a simplified interface that operates like a word processing application.

Weblogs are a rapidly-developing area, so it is likely that the information given below will become outdated very quickly. The following links are good sources of current information: http://weblogs.about.com/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weblog

A good primer on weblogs can be found at: http://www.dvorak.org/blog/primer/blogprimer1.htm

A short history of blogs can be found at: http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html

Further information can be found at: http://simonworld.mu.nu/archives/037779.php and also at: http://www.streamlinewebco.com/blog/_archives/2004/3/23/28903.html

ACTIVITY 1.2

Follow some of the links given above and read what they have to say about weblogs.

[edit] History of Blogs

It is difficult to specify exactly when the first weblogs appeared, as they weren’t defined until much later. No single person was responsible for their invention and they appeared spontaneously on several sites about the same time. The earliest weblogs were simply lists of links and personal filters of billions of pages that were swamping the World Wide Web, but they’ve since become personal journals or diaries, with much more opinion and editorial content.

Pages going back to the earliest days of the Web share many characteristics of weblogs and can be regarded as their predecessors or forerunners. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, used his own website on the first-ever Web server to keep his colleagues at CERN, the European Nuclear Research Centre, informed about other Web pages and servers within the organisation. The diary and journal formats which appeared soon after the Web's expansion outwith the research community bore some resemblance to the weblog format. They were updated at regular intervals and shared tales from the author's life.

One of the earliest forerunners the weblog was Justin Hall's Links from the Underground website which the author used to share links to interesting sites and tell stories of his life and travels, beginning in 1994. The site continued to be updated until mid-2005, when the author decided to take a well-earned rest. Another weblog predecessor was Michael Sippey’s website The Filter, a section of a larger site (http://www.theobvious.com), which shared links about technology news. The Filter was updated daily as early as 1996 and was used to publish essays and articles complementing the main part of the site.

The What's New page, seen on thousands of Web sites, has much in common with the weblog format. One of the earliest What's New pages appeared in 1993 at the National Center for Supercomputing (NCSA), producers of the first graphical Web browser, Mosaic. The NCSA/Mosaic What's New page served as a central point for information about new servers, sites and pages coming online.

Around 1997, a few web authors began publishing short bits of text each day without giving this activity a name. For example, Dave Winer of UserLand Software, started publishing essays on technology issues on his website in 1994. In April 1997 he started a new site (http://www.scripting.com) which kept track of Web sites devoted to programming and scripting and gave daily updates about his company's software. The site was still being maintained in late 2005, but now he adds a personal commentary to each day's postings.

Also in 1997, Jorn Barger began compiling a list of links with short descriptions on a regular basis. His site initially consisted of a list of 20 to 30 links, with single sentence descriptions, added at a rate of 5 to 10 a day. He later started writing an online diary to complement the links. Barger coined the term weblog to describe his site, and over the next year or two, the term was adopted by other authors.

Jesse James Garrett, editor of Infosift (http://www.jgg.net/infosift) began compiling a list of similar sites as he encountered them his travels around the Web. In November 1977, he sent that list to Cameron Barrett, who published it on list on CamWorld (http://www.camworld.com), and others maintaining similar sites began sending him their details for inclusion on the list. Garrett’s "page of only weblogs" listed the 23 weblogs known to exist at the start of 1999.

All the earliest weblogs followed a similar format, giving short pieces of text on a single, rapidly changing page which provided links to interesting sites the author had found. The notion of creating a website purely to direct visitors to other Web sites was a novel idea at the time, as the prevailing wisdom was that commercial Web sites had to be "sticky" in order to keep visitors within the site for as long as possible. In contrast, the early weblogs were eager to provide visitors with links to other sites, rather than confining them to a single site.

It was easy to read all of the weblogs on Garrett’s list, and many people did. However, as more and more people began publishing their own weblogs it became difficult to read every weblog every day, or even to keep track of all the new ones that were appearing. In early 1999, Brigitte Eaton compiled a list of every weblog she knew about and created the Eatonweb Portal. She evaluated all submissions by a simple criterion: the site consist of dated entries. This rapidly became part of the definition of weblogs.

1999 also marked the beginning of the “weblog explosion” when tools to enable anyone to create a weblog were initially released. Prior to this, weblog creators had to write their own software and code each day's postings by hand, using HyperText Markup Language (HTML), so people producing weblogs up until 1999 were generally Internet technology professionals or programmers.

July 1999, saw the release of Pitas , the first tool designed for creating, managing and maintaining weblogs. Pitas, which is still in operation today, enables users to sign up for an account and create a weblog, which is hosted for free with an address of the form: http://username.pitas.com. A Pitas weblog has several automated components, including features to let users customise their sites. There is a user-friendly posting page where users can add the title, URL and description of each post.

Pitas weblog authors don’t need to know HTML because the software automates the creation of links. However, templates allow knowledgeable users to change the HTML behind the visual design of their site without affecting the automatic elements of each post. Automatic archiving is an important feature of Pitas. As users post regular updates to their sites the software automatically moves older entries to the archive pages.

In August 1999, Pyra Labs released the first version of Blogger, which is also still online at http://www.blogger.com, although it is now owned by Google. Blogger provides similar features to Pitas, but with a number of important differences. Blogger initially required users to have their own Web site. It could take user posts, create static files and transmit the amended files to the users’ server when they updated.

The tasks of programming, maintaining and archiving information were handled by Blogger on a central server accessible from anywhere, leaving users to host output on their own sites. Blogger also offered the ability to maintain more than one weblog from a single account and provided additional ways to customise sites, eg: templates could be customised by using a series of special tags, and an archive template allowed users to specify how older posts should appear.

1999 also saw the release of LiveJournal, which actually came out a few months before Pitas and Blogger, but wasn't regarded as a weblog tool until much later. The tools available through Pitas and Blogger led to a massive explosion in the number of people maintaining weblogs. The number of weblog authors grew from dozens to hundreds and then thousands within months of these tools being released. Weblogs were filled with original writing, journals of author's lives and links to interesting sites, including other weblogs.

Additional tools followed, eg: UserLand Software released Manila, a content management system which incorporated weblogs and an integrated discussion system. A public server at http://www.editthispage.com allowed prospective users to try out the software without buying the server. Other tools released that year included Velocinews and Groksoup which also automated weblog posting and offered free hosting for weblogs. All of these services were free and all of them were designed to enable individuals to publish their own weblogs quickly and easily.

The original weblogs were link-driven sites containing a mixture of links, commentary and personal opinions. Their editors presented links to obscure websites and to current news articles they felt were worthy of note. These links were usually accompanied by an editorial commentary, often with an irreverent or sarcastic tone. The format of the typical weblog, providing only a very short space in which to write an entry, encourages brevity on the part of the writer. Longer commentary is often published elsewhere. These weblogs provided a valuable filtering function for their readers by pre-surfing the web for them.

In 2000, second-generation weblog tools began to appear. Greymatter a weblog management system designed to be installed on your own server, provided dozens of features which were not available in existing weblog tools. Since the software was installed on your own server, there were none of the traffic problems a large, central service such as Blogger sometimes suffered from.

Since 2001, the explosion in weblog growth and popularity has continued. Stories about weblogs have featured in national magazines, and weblogs have supplemented traditional media coverage in some cases. Notable examples include the South Asian Tsunami, the invasion of Iraq and the US Presidential Election.

Weblog tools have continued to develop with the release of packages such as MovableType and Radio, as well as dozens of more specialised tools. Articles about weblogs continue to appear in the mainstream press, and the registered users at popular services, such as Blogger and LiveJournal, are now numbered in millions. Weblogs are appearing on business and media sites, and they are being used increasingly by grassroots organisations as a way of bringing their causes to the attention of the public.

ACTIVITY 1.3

Follow some of the links given above and read what they have to say about weblogs.

[edit] Blogs and social software

According to [1] Wikipedia:

“Social software is a broad term used to describe software-based tools that facilitate interaction and collaboration. Social software connects people together intellectually and makes it possible to share and evolve ideas. Social software is not bound just by what features the tool provides, but also by social conventions and etiquette on how to use it appropriately. Such software includes email, Usenet, IRC, instant messaging, blogs, wikis, NNTP, folksonomy, and virtual online communities.”

Useful summaries of the different kinds of social software can be found at:

http://www.communitytechnology.org/products/groupware.html and

http://ideant.typepad.com/ideant/files/mejias_ITI2004_paper.pdf

Wikipedia also notes that “Blogs mean many things to different people: ranging from “online journal” to “easily updated personal website”. While these definitions are not wrong, they fail to capture the power of blogs as social software. Beyond being a simple homepage, or an online diary, some blogs also allow comments on the entries thereby a discussion forum, have blogrolls, ie: links to other blogs which the owner reads, and/or have trackback which allows one blog to notify another blog, creating an inter-blog conversation. You can find more information about trackback at http://www.movabletype.org/trackback/beginners/.

One of the most critical features of blogs is that they allow communication on a many-to-many basis, rather than simply one-to-one or one-to-many, as permitted by other types of software. Blogs engage readers and build a virtual community around a particular person or interest, eg: Slashdot (http://slashdot.org/) LiveJournal (http://www.livejournal.com/) and BlogSpot (http://www.blogspot.com).

Social software is fundamental to some of the latest developments on the World Wide Web, sometimes referred to collectively as Web 2.0 (see http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html).

Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org) is a good starting point for obtaining further information about social software. Some of the main types of social software are listed below.

E-mail will already be familiar to most people. However it can be regarded as one of the earliest forms of social software, particularly with regard to some of its one-to-many communication features, such as the use of the cc: field and mailing lists, as well as the use of contact lists or address books.

Instant Messaging (IM) allows individuals to communicate privately with one another over a public network. Popular clients include MSN Messenger (http://messenger.msn.com/Xp/Default.aspx) and Yahoo Messenger (http://messenger.yahoo.com/) IM communications were initially text based but they have now been expanded to include audio and video and clients can also exchange files.

Chat is an abbreviated name for Internet Relay Chat (IRC) which lets users join chat rooms and communicate with many people simultaneously. Users can join an existing chat room or create one of their own, on any topic of interest to them. Once in a chat room they can post comments and respond to the comments of others and invite other users to participate in private chats. You can find out anything you want to know about IRC at http://www.irchelp.org/. Popular suppliers include Yahoo. (http://chat.yahoo.com/)

Newsgroups or forums are the Internet version of electronic bulletin boards, popular among computer users long before Internet. A user can post comments on a topic and other users can respond. Messages are visible to all members of the group and some services provide extensions such as file storage and calendaring. The original newsgroup service, Usenet, is now available via Google Groups (http://groups.google.co.uk/). Other services include Smartgroups (http://www.smartgroups.com/) and Yahoo Groups (http://groups.yahoo.com/).

A Wiki is a group of Web pages that allows users to add their own content and permits others to edit the content. It provides a simple method of producing HML content and is an effective medium for collaboration. The term is also used to describe the collaborative software, sometimes known as a wiki engine, used to create such a website. Examples include: Wikipedia (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki), Wikibooks (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page), Wikinews (http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page) and WikiWikiWeb (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki).

Social network services allow people to meet on-line around shared interests or causes. In some cases it is only possible to join a social network by being recommended by an existing member. Examples include Orkut (http://www.orkut.com), MeetUp (http://www.meetup.com), LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com) and Tribe Networks (http://www.tribe.net). An offshoot of this area is social network search engines, which allow people to find each other according to their XFN social relationships, eg: XHTML Friends Network (http://gmpg.org/xfn/).

Social guides recommend places to visit in the real world such as coffee shops, restaurants and WiFi hotspots, etc. Popular applications include CafeSpot (http://cafespot.net), Tagzania (http://www.tagzania.com/) and WikiTravel (http://wikitravel.org/en/Main_Page).

Social bookmarking sites allow users to post their list of bookmarks or favourite websites for others to search and view. The object is for people to meet others with whom they share a common interest. Examples include Del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/), Furl (http://www.furl.net/) and Connectedy (http://www.connectedy.com/).

Social Shopping applications allow group members to make recommendations and give product reviews, eg: SwagRoll (http://swagroll.com/).

Virtual Worlds and Massively-Multiplayer On-line Games (MMOGs) are places where it is possible to interact with other people in a virtual world. Popular commercial worlds include Second Life (http://secondlife.com/), ActiveWorlds (http://www.activeworlds.com/), There (http://www.there.com/index.html), and The Sims Online (http://www.ea.com/official/thesims/thesimsonline/us/nai/index.jsp).

Commercial MMOGs include Everquest (http://eqplayers.station.sony.com/index.vm) and World of Warcraft (http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/lowbw.html).

Non-commercial projects include Planeshift (http://www.planeshift.it/) and Solipsis (http://solipsis.netofpeers.net/wiki2/index.php/Main_Page).

Folksonomy is the name given to the informal classifications (sometimes called tags or keywords) that Internet users invent to categorise the objects with which they interact on-line. Social software makes these classifications available to other Internet users, so folksonomy can be viewed as a distributed classification system. Examples of folksonomy-enabled social software include Furl , Flickr and Del.icio.us.

ACTIVITY 1.4

Choose two types of social software which sound particularly interesting to you and follow the links given above to find out more about them, or sign up for them.

[edit] Social conventions and etiquette

Social conventions and etiquette play an important role in weblogs, as in other forms of online communication. The following observations are summarised from a number of online sources:

Avoid hotlinking: Hotlinking is the practice of linking directly to an image on someone else’s website or blog. Most website owners disapprove of this practice – they would much rather see a link to their homepage.

Always credit your sources: if you quote or refer to an article or website, credit the original author appropriately.

Always check the validity of your information: just because information appears on a website doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true. You should always check your facts against several authoritative sources, especially if they are likely to be contentious.

Correct your mistakes and post updates: you’ll inevitably make mistakes at some point when posting to your weblog. The best practice is to own up to these and correct them.

Never leave spam comments: if you are commenting on someone else’s weblog, make sure that your comments are meaningful and relevant. A simple statement like “visit my weblog” without any additional relevant content may be regarded as spam by some people. You should also ensure that you delete any spam comments made on your own weblog.

Remember your audience: anything you post potentially has a worldwide audience and could be there for a long time. Even if you delete something there are always archives and caches, so make sure you really want to say something before going public with it.

Use good English: you don’t need to write perfect prose, but you should write clear and simple grammatically-correct English and avoid the use of non-standard abbreviations. Remember that WRITING IN CAPITALS is regarded by many as the online equivalent of shouting.

Always respect copyright: Never quote large extracts from any source without the explicit permission of the copyright holder. Quoting of small excerpts for the purposes of review or criticism is normally acceptable, but the sources should always be acknowledged, as noted earlier.

Identify yourself: if you leave comments on someone else's weblog, you should identify yourself properly, giving your email address whenever possible. If you don’t want to have a comment attributed to you, you should think again about whether you really want to make it.

Allow your readers to contact you: it is good practice to provide a way fro your readers to contact you, eg: via email or by leaving comments.

Rebecca Blood devotes a whole chapter to etiquette and ethics in The Weblog Handbook: Practical advice on creating and maintaining your blog. (Perseus Publishing, 2002). These can be summarised as follows:

Personal attacks: never attack another blogger online. This will only reduce your own credibility, and can lead to problems which will never be resolved.

Responding to attacks: if someone makes an attack on you, you should simply ignore it. Any time you spend on defending yourself reduces the time you have available for writing new material.

Asking for a link: don't ask other bloggers to link to your site. If they want to want to direct their readers to your weblog, they’ll do so without being asked.

Complaining about traffic: don't complain about how few (or how many) hits your weblog is receiving. The more you complain, the less appealing you will appear to your readers.

Crediting links: always give proper credit when linking to others' websites or weblogs or when passing on links found on someone else's website.

Announcing your schedule: if you won’t be able to update your weblog for some time, let your readers know when you plan to make the next update so they don't waste their time checking it when nothing is happening.

Giving warnings: always warn readers clearly if the content of a link might be something they might not approve of or may not want to see.

Answering e-mails: answer as many e-mails from your readers as you can, but don't let the time spent doing this affect the development of your weblog.

Publishing facts: only claim that something is a fact if you know it to be true and can prove that this is the case.

Linking to sources: if you quote material from online sources, give links to the original sources.

Correcting mistakes: if you feel that you need to correct mistakes in an entry, let your readers know. If possible, leave the original entry intact and make corrections by adding additional information. Try to avoid rewriting or deleting posts, since others may rely on them via links. If this is to operate successfully your original material must remain unchanged.

Disclosing conflicts of interest: if you have any conflicts of interest, eg: if you’re likely to benefit financially or in some other way from information you are posting, then be open about this.

Questionable sources: if you think a source is questionable or obviously biased, let your readers know before giving them a link to it, so they will be prepared to interpret it cautiously.

[edit] Links between blogs

Links are an important element of blogs and they play a major role in the development of virtual communities. Links can direct the reader to another weblog or web site. Many weblogs include an “interesting links” section, usually giving links which relate to the theme of the weblog. Others provide lists of “friends’ weblogs”. These can be a useful way of discovering new sites which might be of interest to you.

If you read an interesting post in another weblog and you decide to discuss the same topic in your own weblog, it’s a good idea to add a link to the original post that inspired you. When the administrator of the original weblog checks her access statistics she will find out how many visitors have reached her site through the link you’ve provided, and she’ll probably want to take a look at your weblog. If she likes it, she’ll probably put a link into her weblog, encouraging her readers to visit your site. Another way of encouraging visitors to your weblog is to put your URL in any comments that you write in other weblogs, although a comment consisting only of your URL is unlikely to be welcomed.

These kinds of links create informal communities. Some of these last for a long time while others disappear rapidly, just as in real life. Links are covered in greater detail elsewhere in this wikibook.

[edit] Weblog providers

There are many different providers of blogs, both free and commercial. There are some common factors which link all of the providers, but special features and facilities distinguish between them. There is a useful list of free blog providers at: http://weblogs.about.com/od/weblogsoftwareandhosts/a/topfreeblogs.htm

This includes the following providers, amongst others: WordPress, Blogger and Moveable Type .

There are also a number of reasonably-priced commercial services, eg: Blog Identity and Silkblogs .

Most available weblog software can be divided into two categories, hosted software and independent software. Hosted software resides on the server of the software provider and is normally accessed via a web interface. Independent software needs to be downloaded from the software provider and installed on your own Web server. There are advantages and disadvantages to each approach.

Whether you use hosted software or independent software, blogs may be hosted by the software provider, or hosted on your own web site. Again, there are advantages and disadvantages to each approach.

Almost all weblog software stores your posts in a database, which controls how the content is displayed and provides functions such as searching and archiving. A weblog’s appearance and layout are normally determined by templates containing information about layout and formatting. Whichever blog software package you choose, there are a few features you may want to look for:

Comments: most blogging software allows readers to comment on posts. Comments are normally time-stamped and identified by the author’s name and possibly a link to their weblog. Some weblog software supports the use of threaded comments, allowing readers can comment on other comments. Unfortunately, comments often contain spam and they may consist simply of a link to another web page. Some blogging software allows blog owners to review comments before they are posted.

Categories: some software allows a blogger to allocate posts to one or more categories, helping readers to find posts on related topics.

Pings: A method used to notify web tracking sites that you have made a new post to your blog. The tracking sit will include your post in its index and hopefully attract traffic.

RSS/Atom feeds: These are two types of blog syndication. Many readers use RSS or Atom based news aggregators to pull in posts and read them, rather than visiting numerous weblogs every day. This can be a useful feature if you want to update your site with content fed by blogs.

Blogroll: A list of the blogs read by the blogger whose site you are visiting. Lists may also be kept to recommend books, movies or music.

Moblogging: Short for mobile blogging. Many blog services allow you to post from a mobile phone, PDA or anything else that lets you send e-mails.

Post scheduling: Some blog software allows you schedule posts for publication at some time in the future. This can be useful if you are away on a business trip or a holiday.

You can find a chart comparing the functions offered by various blogging tools at: http://www.ojr.org/ojr/images/blog_software_comparison.cfm and another one at: http://asymptomatic.net/blogbreakdown.htm

[edit] Blogging tools

Blogger

Blogger is a free, hosted blogging tool. It was one of the first blogging tools to appear and now has millions of users. Blogger is free of charge and despite being simple to use provides a wide range of features. Unfortunately, it lacks the ability to categorise posts and you need to know HTML and Cascading Style Sheets to make custom changes to the templates provided.

Blogger allows you to FTP the files it has generated to your own Web site. This means that your readers may never realise that you are using Blogger and allows you to publicise your own domain name, rather than using a Blogger URL. Blogger is ideal if you want to set up a simple weblog quickly and cheaply, and it offers an amazing range of features, and professional-looking CSS templates (you can even make your own or customize one), for a free service. You can find full details of how to use Blogger to set up your own weblog later in this Wikibook.

Blogger is closely integrated with the Audioblogger service. You can post audio recordings on your blog simply by calling the Audioblogger number and recording your message.

TypePad

File:TypePad.png

TypePad Home Page

TypePad is a hosted blogging service provided by Six Apart, who also provide Movable Type (see below). It is a paid service, with the pricing scheme and features divided into three levels: Basic, Plus, and Pro. Higher levels provide greater degrees of customisation.

TypePad has a novel feature called TypeLists that lets you build lists, associating each item with a URL. These lists can be added to the left- or right-hand column of your blog without touching the templates. They can be used to add your current reading or listening list, links to other blogs or links to new posts.

TypePad is a good choice for users who want to get started quickly but still want all the functions. TypePad Plus and Pro are good for configuring layout options without having to go into the templates.

WordPress

File:WordPress.png

WordPress Home Page

WordPress is another hosted blogging service which is ideal for bloggers who have a limited budget but want full weblog functions. Comments can be moderated by the blog owner before they are published and you can filter comments containing certain words or more than a certain number of links.

Movable Type

File:MovableType.png

MovableType Home Page

Movable Type, created by Six Apart (see TypePad above) one of the best known independent blogging tools. It has every feature a blogger could want and continues to add more, often via the use of plug-ins. It is often regarded as a “bloggers blog”. Unfortunately, you need to rebuild the blog every time you make a change to a template, a configuration setting, or add a new category.

A free version of the software is available to download, but installation is fairly difficult unless you are already familiar with uploading and downloading files to a Web server.

ACTIVITY 1.5

Choose one or two of the sites above which sound particularly interesting to you and follow the links given above to find out more about them, or sign up for them. (Don’t bother with Blogger, as we’ll be looking at it in detail shortly.)

[edit] Using search tools to locate specific blogs

There are about 50,000 new blogs created every day, so it shouldn't be too hard to find one.

In addition to the normal World Wide Web search facilities, there are a number of specialised search engines which search only for weblogs. One of the biggest is Waypath. Another specialised search engine can be found at http://portal.eatonweb.com/. There’s a long list of blog search engines at http://deepblog.com/index.html, another one at http://www.aripaparo.com/archive/000632.html and yet another at http://www.faganfinder.com/blogs/

Google's regular search usually doesn't locate any but the most popular blogs, but Altavista usually does. However, Google also offers a specialised blog search engine: Google Blog Search

About.com suggests that blogs can be divided up into the following categories and gives examples of each: “personal blogs, art blogs, political blogs, news and current events blogs, hobby blogs, technology and computer blogs, photo blogs, sports blogs, travel blogs, commentary blogs, business or professional blogs, education blogs” .

Britblog lists fifteen different categories of weblogs.

For the purposes of this course, you should be able to locate a variety of different types of weblog, including:

personal journal: an individual diary, usually recounting someone’s everyday life and their thoughts about what’s going on around them. You can find an extensive list of personal journals (more than 7000 of them) at http://www.diarist.net/registry/

community weblog: a weblog reflecting the activities of a group of people acting in a common purpose. You can find a short directory of UK-based community weblogs at: http://www.britblog.com/directory/category/community.html

corporate weblog: a weblog produced by a company to market their products or activities. This category includes “flogs” (fake blogs) which look as if they are produced by an individual, but are actually produced by a company for marketing purposes. One company which has made a major move into corporate blogging is Macromedia, now taken over by Adobe. You can read about what they’ve been doing at: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,52380-1.html?tw=wn_story_page_next1 and you can find further comment, and links to the blogs themselves at: http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/logged_in/ekrimen_blogs.html

political weblog: weblogs produced by political parties, political commentators or other political entities. Political weblogs played a significant role in the US Presidential elections in 2004 and the Iraqi elections in 2005. This trend is likely to continue. Joe Trippi’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything” (Regan Books, 2005) gives a fascinating account of the use of the weblogs and the Internet during one US presidential candidate's campaign. You can find a good list of UK political blogs at: http://www.voidstar.com/ukpoliblog/index.php?cid=6

special interest weblog: this could cover almost anything not included in the above categories, eg: weblogs relating to a particular sport or hobby. Many of the categories listed by Britblog could be regarded as special interest blogs, eg: humour, travel, design and photography.

These categories of weblogs are not exclusive, for example a blog produced by a Member of Parliament could be categorised as a political blog, a personal journal or perhaps even a special interest weblog.

ACTIVITY 1.6

Visit one of the indexing sites in each of the categories mentioned above and have a look at some of the blogs listed there.

[edit] The characteristics of high quality blogs

High-quality blogs share a number of common features, the most important ones being usability, navigation, structure, connectedness and presentation.

[edit] Usability

Usability covers areas like ease of navigation, ease of finding information, visual appeal and ability to recover from errors. Weblogs are a basically a type of website, so the normal website usability guidelines therefore apply to them. You can find links to a number of usability guidelines at: http://www.nngroup.com/reports/. However, weblogs have their own specific characteristics and usability problems. Weblogs generally require fewer design decisions than other websites, you simply write a page and click on a button to post it. This ease of use has lead to enormous growth in the number of people publishing weblogs.

Most weblogs consist largely of short postings and rely heavily on links. If you find something interesting on another site, you can simply provide a link to it, possibly with the addition of a short commentary. This is much simpler than producing a conventional website. The Blogosphere acts as a positive feedback loop. Good postings are promoted by means of links to other sites, meaning that a larger audience gets to see them and promote them further. As a result there are disproportionately more links to good postings than to bad postings. Some weblogs are simply private diaries, produced for a small group of readers composed largely of relatives or close friends. Usability isn’t a major issue as the readers have a high degree of motivation and prior knowledge. However, if you want to reach a broader audience, usability becomes much more important.

Usability guru Jakob Neilsen has produced Usability 101: Introduction to Usability and a list of 10 major usability problems which are summarised below:

1. No author biographies

Anonymous weblogs lack credibility. Readers like to know something about the author, eg: qualifications and experience in the area under discussion.

2. No author photo

A photo lets readers know that you’re not trying to hide. Readers relate better to someone they can visualise. Readers whom you’ve met before will recognise your photo, and anyone you happen to meet in future will recognise you from it.

3. Nondescript posting titles

Readers should be able to determine the topic of a posting by reading its headline. Readers using search engines or newsfeeds (RSS/Atom) will often see only the headline and will use it to decide whether or not to read the full posting.

4. Links don't say where they go

You should tell readers what they'll find at the other end of the link by providing the relevant information in the anchor text itself or the surrounding words.

5. Classic hits are buried If you write any postings with lasting value don't relegate them to the archives, where people can only find something if they know when you posted it. Highlight such postings in your navigation system and link directly to them.

6. The calendar is the only navigation

Don’t let the timeline be the only way of navigating your weblog. Most weblog software lets you categorise postings so readers can easily get a list of all postings on a certain topic.

7. Irregular publishing frequency

Your readers must be able to anticipate how often updates will occur. You should pick a publication schedule and stick to it. Daily updates are best, but weekly or even monthly updates can also work.

8. Mixing topics

If your weblog covers too many different topics, you're unlikely to attract a loyal audience. Readers might visit a weblog to read a posting about a topic that interests them but they're unlikely to return if their target topic only appears occasionally among a range of postings on other topics.

9. Forgetting that you write for your future boss

Every time you post anything to the Internet, think how it will look to a prospective employer in ten years time. Once something is published it can be archived, cached or indexed in places you might never think of.

10. Having a domain name owned by a weblog service

Having a weblog address ending in blogspot.com, typepad.com, etc. will soon be the equivalent of having a hotmail.com email address or a Geocities website. You’ll be seen as a naïve beginner who shouldn't be taken too seriously. It’s easy, quick and cheap start a new weblog on one of the services that offer free accounts, but it only costs a few pounds per year to get your personal domain name. If you're serious about blogging, move your weblog away from a domain name that's controlled by somebody else.

[edit] Navigation

Navigation includes timeline navigation, search facilities, backtracking and threading. Weblogs can be great sources of expert information on a range of topics, but they are useless if you can’t find the information you are looking for. Weblogs can be organised in several different ways and these can influence how readers find information on your site.

Timeline navigation

Most weblogs are organized primarily by the date of postings, with the newest posts appearing on the main page and older posts being stored in the archives. Unfortunately, if someone is looking for specific information, digging into the archives based on date offers little help. The major limitation of date-based archives is that they aren't very descriptive. There isn't much you can do other than look at each month's posts until you find the right one. Date-based archives that operate by week or by single day (often via a calendar interface) are even less useful because they require readers to click through more pages to find what they want.

However, a few things can be done to make date-based archives a little more usable. Some weblog providers let you set titles or subjects for posts. You can post titles next to each archive page (if done on a single day or post basis), or let you show a string of titles below each month's archive link. An archive page listing the titles of posts provides more information than listing archived weblog postings by date alone.

Try to avoid moving your archives from one location to another. If you move your archives from http://myblog.com/old/ to http://myblog.com/archives/ then anyone who has set up a link to a specific post will lose it and any search engine that has indexed your site will point users to errors instead of the indexed posts.If you change your URL completely, or move from one server to another, examine ways of redirecting requests for the old files so that readers using search engines can still find your information in the new location.

Categorisation

Categories are another form of organisation offered by many weblog providers that can help readers to find information about a specific topic. Categorised weblogs usually group posts into several categories, creating specific archive pages for each category. The more categories blogger creates to organize a site, the more specific the categories become.

Some providers offer multiple categorisations, so each post can belong to more than one category. Weblogs of this type can have each post placed in two or three different categories. Readers searching for previous posts on a topic may find that some posts fall into related categories and the can try browsing these as well.

Search facilities

The most direct method of letting readers find something on a weblog is to allow them to search it. Blogger was recently updated to include extensive searching facilities (hardly surprising, as it is owned by search engine giant Google). Some weblog systems have add-ons that enable searching and bloggers can also make use of search engines that operate outside of their weblog system. Another option is to use a site-specific search offered by search engine companies. Google has indexed hundreds of millions of pages on the Web, so if your weblog has been online for any length of time, Google has probably indexed it.

Google lets you limit a search to the pages within their index of your site by adding the words site:myblog.com into the search box, or you can add a Google search boxto your site to do the same thing automatically.

Altavista's advanced searchalso lets you limit searches to a specific site.

ACTIVITY 1.6

Take a look at some of your favourite blogs. How good are their searching facilities?

Trackback

Trackback is a mechanism used in weblogs to show a list of other weblogs that refer to a specific post. The term was coined by Six Apart (http://www.sixapart.com/), the producers of Moveable Type and TypePad. Trackback works by sending a specialised message known as a ping between the blogs concerned. The receiving blog normally displays the trackback information below a post. This information normally includes a summary of what has been written on the target weblog, along with the URL and the name of the weblog. There is a good explanation of how trackback works at: http://www.movabletype.org/trackback/beginners/.

Trackback is fairly straightforward. If you're posting about something you've seen on another blog, which has trackback enabled, you can paste the trackback URL into the appropriate spot in your own blogging software, and the software will build a link from the original post to yours, without the other blogger doing anything. Trackback currently depends on individual readers making links. However, there is some interest in automatic creation of trackbacks, a process known as threading.

Unfortunately, Blogger does not yet support trackback, although the same effect can be achieved via the use of backlinks, which provide a way of expanding the comment feature to allow related discussions on other sites to be included along with the regular comments on a post. The backlinks setting can be found under the Settings | Comments tab and consists only of the option to turn it on or off. The default templates are already set up with the necessary code for backlinks. Once everything is set up and you have republished your blog, you will see the number of backlinks listed for each post, along with the number of comments. Clicking the link will take you to the post page, where the backlinks are all listed beneath the comments. Clicking the triangles next to each link will display an extract of text from the page linking to you, as well as author and date information. Haloscan provides a third-party trackback and commenting system which can be used with Blogger or other blog services.

ACTIVITY 1.7

Take a look at some of your favourite blogs. Do they support Trackback?

[edit] Structure

Structure includes concepts such as linear and hierarchical structures, timelines and semantic blogging.

Before we examine the structure of weblogs in detail, it’s worth taking another brief look at how they evolved over time. Some time around 1998, people began producing web pages that consisted mainly of short thoughts and were updated frequently. This was a major departure from traditional web pages, which tended to consist of longer sections of text which were seldom updated. The World Wide Web was originally developed as a form of electronic publishing and used a page-based structure derived from print media. Web sites consist of pages which have paragraphs, headers and links to other pages. These were modelled after printed pages and web sites were similar to books, being a way to bind many pages together.

Once the web became popular, web site authors began to look for ways of keeping their visitors interested and attracting them back to the site. Interesting content was the key to attracting visitors and interesting design, photography or writing ensured that visitors would enjoy their time on the site and made them more likely to return and to spread the word about the site. Regular updates also helped to ensure that visitors would return, but unfortunately, these were not easy to do. If you wanted to add a new page to a web site, you first had to write the content and save it locally on your computer. You then needed to decide where the new page fitted into your site and perhaps make changes to the other pages so they pointed at your new site. Adding a single new page often led to numerous changes across a site. When the changes were complete, the whole site needed to be uploaded again, normally by using an FTP program.

When you combine a page-based method of structuring a web site with the effort required to make changes, you can see why Web sites built around pages of content were often regarded as static. Once a page was written it was practically set in stone (just as with a book) and the information on the page began to age. The content rarely changed because of the effort required on the part of the site owner to make changes. Static pages and infrequent updates made visitors unlikely to come back or spread the word about the site.

Modern web sites are much more active, eg: sites that forecast the weather, let you check your bank balance or buy movie tickets or CDs as well as news sites that bring you the latest news and sometimes change completely every few minutes. Most of the web sites frequented by the general public no longer resemble collections of pages or books. They are filled with smaller chunks of information or information fetched from large databases. A web page describing new content available on a single site, or on the Internet as a whole, has much in common with a weblog: a chronological list of dates may be used to organise the page, and it may include small chunks of text and links to specific locations. Some of the earliest web pages were "what's new" pages, covering new developments on a single server.

When weblogs appeared initially, they were structured in a way that hadn’t been seen before. Instead of having new pages added each day, a single index page for a site would change slightly as small chunks of text and new links appeared each day. They were post-based rather than page-based. Weblogs rapidly gathered audiences because they changed frequently and were easy to read and digest. They were often full of links to interesting offsite pages, encouraging readers to return each day to find new links to obscure places.

Unlike static page-based sites, weblogs are dynamic. Unlike traditional Web sites that consist of multiple pages, weblogs often contain only a few pages: the initial index page and archive pages. The newest posts, filled with the latest content are displayed on the index page. The index page is normally first on the site, so visitors only need to remember a short Web address to revisit it. Most bloggers set their index page to show a week's postings. They should also have a clear and simple navigation system, so readers can find other pages easily.

Archive pages are used to store posts permanently. Most weblog management systems copy a new post to both the index page and the current archive page. Archive pages are built automatically by the blogging software and act as a backup of old material that was previously on the index page and also enable visitors to go back and read older posts. Most bloggers archive posts monthly, but some weblog systems allow authors to specify daily or single post archives, sometimes using calendars with links to each day's posts.

Weblog tools began to appear in mid 1999 to aid in the creation of weblogs. The tools varied in their support for features, but they were all fairly automated, removing the need to use FTP to transfer files between your desktop and a server. Publishing new posts to a weblog became as easy as filling out a Web-based form online and pressing a button. Weblogs altered the way people viewed Web sites, as they were about new posts rather than new pages. Reading one or two new paragraphs each day was easy for readers, compared to reading new 1,000-word essay each day.

Traditional Web sites had a page-based structure, but weblogs were post-based and built of small chunks of information, sometimes referred to as microcontent, which are easy to read and understand and small enough to be displayed flexibly: a weblog post could become the contents of a short e-mail, an instant message or even a text message to a mobile phone. Each item of microcontent can have a permanent Web address allowing others to point to specific ideas within a post.

All weblog management systems number posts in some way, usually by means of a post ID, a unique string of numbers that corresponds to a specific post. Weblogs built with Blogger have a long string of numbers for each post because there have already been millions of posts made. Blogger automatically builds permanent links which are automatically added to each post with a named anchor set to the unique post ID.

Permalinks are then added to the bottom of each post and clearly marked. These provide a method of linking directly to posts on other weblogs. Unless your weblog has them, no one will be able to link to specific posts. Permalinks give a fixed, permanent address to every post on your weblog, and are powerful mechanism for spreading ideas and understanding the importance of microcontent. Most weblog systems provide some way of creating permalinks, and they may be included in the default templates, but there is no standard way of handling permalinks.Some systems add the word "permalink" or simply "link" to the end of each post while others use special characters to indicate a permalink and some weblogs wrap the permalink around a timestamp to show exactly when the post was made.

As noted previously, many weblogs allow some sort of categorisation, or some form of title or subject for each post. Depending on the weblog you are using, you may be able to add a subject or title above each post, and organise posts into categories of your own choosing. These offer different ways to find and organise information in weblogs aside from simply by date. Subject names or titles can give additional information about posts, and they can also be used elsewhere on your site. If you are syndicating your content, you may simply want to point to your post by title, then mention titles in your archives. This allows readers to find older posts by reading from a list of titles instead of guessing which date contained a specific post.

Many weblogs includes the facility to make comments on specific posts. You’ll often find a link at the foot of weblog posts, indicating how readers can leave comments.

ACTIVITY 1.8

Take a look at some of your favourite blogs. Do they have permalinks? Do they allow archived posts to be searched by category? Can readers leave comments?

Linear vs hierarchical structure

The style of weblogs is generally very linear. It is well-suited to news, diaries and interesting links on the web, but it is less suitable for long-term, goal-oriented discussion of a subject, or collaborative content creation. Others forms of social software, such as wikis, may be better suited to these purposes. Some blogging software provides a limited degree of hierarchical structure by means of categorisation and comment threading.

Semantic blogging

Semantic blogging is one of the current research areas in blogging. Basically it involves applying the principles of the semantic web in the blog environment. The semantic web is an attempt to do the same for machine readable data as the World Wide Web did for human readable documents. It aims to transform information processing by providing a common way that data can be accessed, linked together and understood in order to turn the web from a large hyperlinked book into a large interlinked database.

You can find an introductory article on the semantic web at: http://education.guardian.co.uk/elearning/story/0,10577,981948,00.html and a more critical view can be found at: http://www.shirky.com/writings/semantic_syllogism.html

In relation to blogging, the most important notion is that of semantic search and navigation, ie: searches based on the meaning of terms rather than simply the words. . Steve Cayzer (see below) gives an example based on distinguishing between the island of Java and the Java programming language:

“Once aggregators "understand" the difference between Java the language and Java the island, and that your blog category 'Java' is a specialisation of my category 'Programming Languages', they can provide semantically relevant results rather than just syntactic matches. Moreover, these results can be sorted, filtered and presented in a meaningful fashion.”

Cayzer’s work is complex. You can find a brief description at: http://jena.hpl.hp.com/~stecay/papers/xmleurope2004/040420_semblog_draft10.html

Cayzer has also constructed a semantic blogging demonstrator to illustrate some of the principles involved.

[edit] Connectedness

Connectedness is concerned with links, particularly to other blogs and newsfeeds, but also to the Web in general. We’ve already given some consideration to links (Section 1.1.5) and there’s more information in Section 2.

[edit] Presentation

Visual design

A wide range of visual design elements can be used to enhance blogs. Many of these elements are available simply by customising existing web page templates. Design elements include the following:

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) elements: email addresses, instant messenger (IM) contact information, message boards and guestbooks.

Color alterations: changing the base colour of a common weblog template

Colours that clash: using colour schemes that detract from the visibility of the words, particularly those that register before you notice associated text.

Colours in titles and headings: any colour other then black or white

Custom banners

Custom calendar design

Custom color text

Custom cursors

Custom fonts

Custom graphical dividers: images

Custom table borders

Data representations: counters

Custom rules between entries: made up of images or another non-color based divider

Pre- and post-icons: icons in the header and footer of posts

Photographic backgrounds

Scrolling headers

Graphical smilies

You can find an interesting discussion on the use of these elements and others at: http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/common_visual.html. The authors (Lois Ann Scheidt and Elijah Wright of Indiana University at Bloomington) examine the use of visual design elements across a range of randomly-selected weblogs and make some interesting observations. In their introduction they state that:

“The availability of visual design elements - division of the screen into columns, image use, color and typeface choice … along with the placement of elements on the page permitting meaning to be suspended in the visual …allows for non-textual self-expression… New users of the medium have adopted fewer "innovations" than their forbears: as notions of what constitutes a "weblog" concretize, the creative use of visual and hypertextual features seems to be in decline. Design innovations breaking out of a certain "acceptable" visual style are increasingly rare, while weblogs that conform to expectations - three-column, smaller text down the side, prominent header and footer, some links and sparse image use …continue to be created.”

ACTIVITY 1.9

When you get round to creating weblogs of your own, take some time to consider the visual design elements. If your weblog stands out from the pack, it stands more chance of being noticed.

Typography

The typography (ie: the choice and use of typefaces or fonts) of blogs, and of websites in general, has been a rather neglected area in the past, but a new website is trying to address the problem. The author describes the site as a work in progress and intends building up the content gradually.

ACTIVITY 1.10

Bookmark this site and revisit it regularly to check for new material. Is any of this relevant to your own blogs?

Further information about web typography can be found at the following site which concentrates on accessibility and usability issues: http://www.scotconnect.com/webtypography/

[edit] Evaluating blogs

Blogs are not equal in terms of the quality of information provided and should always be evaluated carefully. The quality of information relates to the following attributes:

Relevance: information is relevant if it relates to the subject under investigation.

Accuracy: information is accurate if it is factually correct – or at least known not to be factually incorrect.

Clarity: information is clear if it is well written in accordance with the rules for clear and simple writing.

Brevity: information is brief if it is succinct and to-the-point

Depth/detail: information is detailed if sufficient information is provided to give the reader a clear understanding of the subject matter.

Timeliness: information is timely if it is up-to-date.

Note that some of these attributes conflict – there is a tension between brevity and depth, and it is difficult to maintain a blog’s timeliness and accuracy.

For the purposes of this course you should be able to evaluate blogs according to the following criteria:

Design: see Good Blog Design: Speed, Accessibility, Transparency and Clarity and also Well Designed Weblogs: An Introduction

Ease of use (usability): generally the same standards are applied as for website usability. However, there is some discussion as to whether this is appropriate. Both sites provide numerous useful links on usability.

Navigation: a useful article on blog/website navigation design can be found at: http://www.guuui.com/issues/01_05.php and another one at: http://tapestrydesigns.typepad.com/design_niche/2005/01/navigation_desi.html

Collaborative features: most blogs support a number of collaborative features, eg:

Readers can post comments.
Blogs may be jointly authored.
There are links to similar blogs (blogrolls).
Content can be syndicated via automated systems such as RSS.
Blogs can comment on (or re-circulate) content from other blogs.

A useful summary of blogs as a collaborative tool can be found at: http://cne.sitempower.com/site.cfm/blogs.cfm

Links: links are a major component of blogs. They can be made to other blogs or websites and that links may occur in the main text or in a list of links. Links are discussed extensively elsewhere in these notes (Sections 1.1.5 and 2).

Quality of information: information obtained from blogs must be evaluated critically in the same way as information obtained any other online source. There may be additional difficulties if a blog consists largely of quotations and links. A selection of useful resources can be found at: http://www.library.cornell.edu/olinuris/ref/research/webeval.html

One interesting approach is the use of the “Kapoun Criteria”: Accuracy, Authority, Currency, Objectivity and Coverage. See: http://www.library.cornell.edu/olinuris/ref/research/webcrit.html

ACTIVITY 1.11

Follow the link above to find out about the Kapoun Criteria, then check one of your favourite weblogs. To what extent does it meet these criteria?

[edit] Common uses of blogs

The potential uses of blogs are almost limitless. They can be used for anything that involves communicating or publishing information on the World Wide Web. Common uses include teaching and educational and corporate use.

According to Silkblogs:

“A blog is a means of sharing thoughts and ideas. Your blog can be a personal diary, a project collaboration tool, a guide, or any means of communicating and publishing information on the web. Its uses are as limitless as your imagination.”

Blogs in teaching

Blogs can be used in teaching, eg:http://www.eschoolnews.com/eti/archives/2004/10/000190.php

There is an interesting matrix of educational uses at: http://www.edtechpost.ca/gems/matrix2.gif

There's also a good workshop/tutorial for teachers learning about blogging. See Getting Started with Blogging in Education.

Blogs in project management

Blogs can also be used to manage projects, eg: http://www.infosential.com/archives/2005/01/10_ways_to_use_blogs_for_.php

Corporate blogs

There are a variety of corporate uses for blogs. See: http://www.corporateblogging.info/2004/08/six-types-of-business-blogs.asp

[edit] Creating a blog to perform a specific information task

[edit] Defining the purpose of the blog and its target readership

You should know the purpose and target readership of the blog before creating it. The purpose may influence the selection of an appropriate blog creation tool, eg: to what extent are collaboration facilities required. It may also influence the overall style of the blog, eg: a corporate blog is likely to be more formal than one devoted to a rock band.

Target readership is also an important consideration as this is likely to influence the design of the blog. One critical aspect to be considered here is readability. Some useful information can be found at: http://www.write101.com/letham2.htm

There’s a lot more information about purpose and target readership in Section 2.3 of these notes.

[edit] Using blog creation tools efficiently and effectively

You should be aware of the wide variety of blog creation tools available, the differences between them and where they can be obtained. There is a useful list of free blog providers at:

http://weblogs.about.com/od/weblogsoftwareandhosts/a/topfreeblogs.htm

This includes the following providers, amongst others:

WordPress: http://wordpress.org/

Blogger.com: http://www.blogger.com/

Moveable Type: http://www.movabletype.org/

There are also a number of reasonably-priced commercial services, eg:

Blog Identity: http://www.domaindirect.com/blogid.html

Centada: http://www.centada.com/

Silkblogs: http://www.silkware.com/silkblogs.application

Further lists may be found at the following locations:

http://www.lights.com/weblogs/tools.html

http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Internet/On_the_Web/Weblogs/Tools/Publishers/

[edit] Blogger.com

There are two ways of creating your own weblog: on your own website, if you already have one, or by hosting your weblog with a specialised provider.

The advantage of the first solution is that you have total control over the weblog and the software used, but it is significantly more complicated, as you need to download the software and install and configure it.

The advantage of the second method is that you don’t have to worry about anything: you only need to create an account with the service provider and write the content of your weblog.

For our first weblog, we’ll stick with the easy way. After creating the weblog we’ll take a look at how you can personalise the design.

Let’s look at how we can create a weblog. In just a few minutes we’ll create a weblog in Blogger.com, a popular American service provider, owned by Google.

Start your browser and enter www.blogger.com in the address bar. You’ll see the following screen:

Blogger Home Page

The home page allows you to create a new account or begin a session, so we’ll start by creating a new account.

Create a Blog

Creating an account in Blogger.com

Click on Create your blog now to open the Create an account page:

ACTIVITY 2.1

Enter the following data on this page:

• User name
• Enter a Password
• Retype Password
• Display name (for signing the articles you write)
• Email Address

Make sure that you pick a user name and a display name (these can be the same if you like) that does not allow you to be personally identified, eg: use something like BloggerBill rather than William McDonald.

Once you’ve entered this data, tick the box Accept the Terms of Service and click on Continue.

Title and address of weblog

Next, you’ll see a page headed Name your Blog:

You must give the blog a title and enter the URL (web address), which is made up of anything_you_like.blogspot.com. Let’s call ours Weblog Example One and use the URL http://www.weblogex1.blogspot.com.

ACTIVITY 2.2

Enter the title and URL for your weblog. (You’ll need to choose a different URL.

A weblog consists of a number of web pages. Just like a “normal” website, we must save these pages onto an Internet server so that other users can access them.

By default, Blogger will host your weblog on the Blogger server. This is a free service, but advertising will appear on each page. You can upgrade to a service which does not display advertising on payment of a small annual fee.

You can also choose to host your site at another location by clicking on Advanced Blog setup. This will open another page where you can enter the configuration details for the other server.

Advanced Blog Setup Page

At the moment, we’re not going to do this, so if you’ve opened the Advanced Blog Setup, go back to the previous page and click Continue.

The final stage is the choice of a design template for your weblog pages. This is simply a case of selecting one from those shown.

Choosing a template

You can easily change the template, or replace it with another of your own design. You can look at the various templates by clicking on the View icon. To select a template simply click on the check box next to its name. For the moment, let’s choose the right-hand one, Minima.

ACTIVITY 2.3

Take a look at the available templates and choose the one you want to use for your weblog. (You can choose a different one if you like, but remember that if you do your webblog will look different from the examples in these notes.)

Click on Continue and within a few seconds a window will appear saying:

Your blog has been created!

Now click on Start Posting to publish your first article.

Publishing your first article

The terms article and entry are used interchangeably to refer to the posts to a weblog.

We’ve already created our weblog and we’re now at the administration page, the control panel of the weblog. Notice that there are a number of distinct tabs:

The administration page

As you can see, we are currently on the Posting tab and the Create button is active. Within this tab you’ll see a large field entitled Post, and just above it, a field entitled Title.

ACTIVITY 2.4

Write “My First Entry” in the Title field and “Hello World” in the Post field. Now click Preview, at the top right of the Post field. Within a few seconds Blogger will show you the article as it will appear in the weblog.

The Preview screen

Check the text. If there are any errors, you can correct them by clicking on Hide Preview. If the text is correct, click on the Publish Post button and Blogger will publish the weblog. Alter a few seconds Blogger will confirm that the article has been published successfully:

Confirmation screen

The weblog in operation

Click on View Blog (in a new window) to see the result:

We’ve finished creating our first weblog and publishing our first article in only a few minutes. If you want, you can give the address of your weblog to your friends, so that they can visit it, but maybe you should wait until you’ve made a few improvements. Let’s look first at changing the template.

To change the template of your weblog, click first on the Template tab, then click on Pick New. This will open a template selection page similar to the one we saw when we created the weblog:

Template selection page

Pick a template from the list and click View to obtain a preview. If you’re happy, click Use This Template to select it. Now click Republish to modify the pages you’ve already published.

Opening and closing a session

That’s us finished for the moment, so click Sign Out at the top right of the administration panel to disconnect and return to the Blogger.com home page. You should always exit from the administration panel in this way, especially if you are share a computer with other users. If you don’t sign out, any other user can make changes to your weblog, without knowing your password.

The next time you connect, you’ll need to enter the user name and password that you chose when you signed up for your account. Whatever you do, don’t forget these!

Signing in

Enter your user name and password in the fields at the top right hand of the page and click on Sign in:

The Blogger user interface

As we’ve already seen, it’s relatively simple to create a weblog using Blogger. Were going to look now at what further options are available for configuring our site. We’ll start by taking a closer look at text entry.

Text formatting icons

Click on the name of your weblog If you look at the of the Post field, you’ll see a pair of drop-down lists, followed by a number of small icons:

If you click on the downward-pointing arrow at the right of the font drop-down list, you’ll see a list of available fonts:

Available fonts

Available text sizes

Highlight a piece of text and click on the appropriate item to change it to the selected font.

Similarly, if you click on the downward-pointing arrow at the right of the text size drop-down list, you’ll see a list of available sizes: Highlight a piece of text and click on the appropriate item to change it to the selected size.

You can also apply effects to text by using the b (bold) or i (italic) icons. Simply highlight a piece of text with the mouse and click the desired icon.

Examples of text formatting

Here’s an example of some text with the various types of formatting applied.

There are several other icons which can be used to apply formatting to text:

	This icon is used to apply colours to text.
	This icon is used to insert links to other websites. We’ll look at this in more detail in a moment.
	This icon is known as the blockquote function and is used to indent a highlighted section of text, perhaps to indicate that it’s a quotation.

The next group of icons are used to align or justify text:

	This icon is used to left-align text, ie: place it hard against the left-hand side of the page.
	This icon is used to centre text, ie: place it in the middle of the page.
	This icon is used to right-align text, ie: place it hard against the right-hand side of the page.
	This icon is used to fully justify text, ie: place it hard against both sides of the page.

We mentioned earlier that the globe icon could be used to create links to websites. This is very straightforward:

1. Select the text that you want the reader to click on to open the link.

2. Click the globe icon.

3. Enter the address of the website you want to link to in the dialogue box and click Accept.

The necessary code is inserted immediately. You can see the result by clicking on Preview.

ACTIVITY 2.5

Experiment with these icons until you’re familiar with what they do, as shown in the examples below.

Formatting text

reviewing formatted text

Click Preview to get an idea of what the final result will look like:

Many other effects can be applied to text, but in order to use these you would need to learn HTML.

Date and time

Blogger also allows you to configure the appearance of the date and time. In the lower part of the editing page you’ll see the words More post options ... If you click here, the following panel appears:

[edit] Purpose and target readership

It is important to match the design of your blog to its target readership, for example, blogs aimed at teenagers might be expected to be bright and brash, whilst those aimed at corporate users or researchers would be a bit more businesslike and professional looking. There are a number of steps you can take to help attract the kind of reader you are looking for:

1. Focus on a specific topic and set yourself an editorial calendar to stay on topic, eg: post on a specific aspect of the topic each day of the week. For example, if your blog is about a local football team, and you post every weekday, you might want to organise your calendar as follows:

Monday: a review of last weekend’s match.
Tuesday: focus on a particular player.
Wednesday: a review of a famous historical match.
Thursday: review of recent activity in the league.
Friday: information about the team you'll be playing this weekend

2. Visit and comment on other blogs. This allows you to make your voice known. If you make comments that other people find interesting, they’re more likely to visit your blog.

3. Contribute to blog carnivals. These are blog articles which contains links to other articles on a specific topic. Blog carnivals are usually hosted by a rotating list of frequent contributors and help generate new posts by contributors and highlight new bloggers posting matter in that subject area. You can find out more about blog carnivals at: http://sciencepolitics.blogspot.com/2005/06/blog-carnivals-and-future-of.html

4. Be passionate about your topic. The more enthusiastic you are about the topic, the more likely you are to generate enthusiasm in others.

5. Try some joint ventures. Ask other bloggers who write on similar topics to write an article for your blog and offer to do the same for them. This will hopefully attract some of their readers to your blog and vice versa.

[edit] Keeping your blog up-to-date and relevant

You should always ensure that the contents of your blog are kept up-to-date and relevant to its purpose and target audience. One of the most important features of blogs is currency. A blog which is out of date can rapidly become useless. However, a blog should only be updated when there is something useful to be added; indiscriminate updating, when there is nothing significant to be added, can discourage readers.

One very effective way of keeping you blog up to date is to add newsfeeds from other blogs or websites which deal with the same topics. We’ll be looking at newsfeeds in detail in Section 3 of these notes.

[edit] Blogs as an effective information tool

A blog can be regarded as an effective information tool when it succeeds in reaching the target audience, which could be defined by demographics, location, interests or many other variables and communicating the desired information, whether factual or opinion.

Once you’ve spent hours writing your weblog, you’ll want an audience to read it. But how do you attract them? There are millions of weblogs out there, so how is any potential reader going to find yours?

One of the first things you should do is make sure that your weblog is registered with the major portals and search engines. Most search engines and portals allow you to submit your weblog URL to them directly, eg: in Google you can do it from: http://www.google.com/intl/en/submit_content.html. There are also a number of specialized services which will submit your weblog URL too various portals and search engines, free of charge, eg: http://www.addme.com/ and http://www.submitexpress.com/

Unfortunately, it can take a long time before your site shows up in search engines or directories, and there’s not much you can do to speed this up without spending money. The sites listed above also offer paid placement services, but these are seldom worth paying for, so just be patient.

An alternative approach is the use of webrings. These are designed to improve links between related sites and they provide a simple way of joining a community of website owners. The webring will normally have a name which gives some indication of its purpose and each site will provide links to the previous and next sites in the ring, as well as some central location where you can join the ring. If a weblog you enjoy is a member of a webring, take a look at some of the other sites which are members. If you feel that the content of your weblog fits in with the others, it may be a good idea to join. You can find a portal to more than 40,000 webrings at http://www.ringsurf.com/

Another approach is to use update trackers. There are a number off services that provide listings of recently updated weblogs. Some of these generate their directories by checking lists of weblogs at regular intervals while others require weblog owners to notify them. Some blogging tools can be set to notify these services automatically whenever you update your weblog, eg: Blogger can be set to notify weblogs.com automatically.

Trackers are a popular way to surf weblogs, and they generate a good response for weblogs that are already known. However, any audience that reaches your site through these services will have already read your site before or heard of it elsewhere. You can submit your site to multiple trackers simultaneously by using http://pingomatic.com/

A simple, but useful technique for generating traffic is to add your weblog URL to your email signature. This will help to remind your correspondents that you are now keeping a weblog. It can also be useful if you participate in any mailing lists (sometimes known as listservs). Although these are often regarded as old-fashioned, they remain an important method of building communities on the internet and of making and maintaining contact with like-minded people. You can find out more about mailing lists at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_mailing_list

Taking part in a mailing list can be a useful way of building your online reputation, through intelligent and relevant contributions. You should ensure that your email signature is included in any contributions you write, but it is not generally a good idea to announce your weblog to the list, unless it is relevant to the list topic.

There are a number of etiquette considerations to be taken into account when using mailing lists. You should read the list for a week or two before you begin posting. You want to make yourself known so that people will be more inclined to read your weblog, but to make a good impression you’ll need to have a clear understanding of community standards before joining in.

If the mailing list has a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) document, make sure that you read it before beginning to post. Choose subject lines which are clear and descriptive to ensure that members can decide whether or not to read your message. Remember that almost all mailing list messages are archived, so anything you write is going to be available to any interested Internet user for many years – there are still mailing list messages around from the earliest days of the Internet in the mid 1960s!

Another useful approach is joining weblog commmunity sites like Plastic (http://www.plastic.com) or Meta Filter (http://www.metafilter.com). The etiquette rules for using these sites are similar to those discussed above for mailing lists. Remember that the comments you make on such sites provide the only information other members have about you, so if you want to interest them in your weblog, you will need to interact with others in an interesting and friendly manner.

Rebecca Blood (in The Weblog Handbook, Perseus Publishing, 2002) suggests a few rules to be observed when taking part in online communities:

Do not post when you are angry.
Always argue the facts, never the personalities.
Once you have stated your arguments as clearly and cogently as you can, sit back and read what others have to say - you may learn something.
Respond to personal attacks by ignoring them.
Do not hijack conversations.
Do not misrepresent other people's positions.

Once you’ve joined an online community, there are a number of steps you can take to improve your visibility within it. Can you provide a service to other members of the community? Eg: if you have particular expertise on a specific piece of software, how about providing tips or tutorials to the community. Bloggers occasionally organize community events, which can range in scale from posting on a common theme to face to face meetings of community members. Taking part in events like these can attract visitors to your site. Events which allow you to meet other bloggers face to face can be particularly valuable in building up contacts.

The Friday Five

Many bloggers enjoy responding to the “Friday Five”, five questions posted every Friday at http://www.livejournal.com/community/thefridayfive/

You might also want to consider sending emails to the writers of weblogs which have caught your attention in some way. Most bloggers welcome specific comments on the topics they have mentioned and even if they don’t reply to you, they might take time to check out your weblog.

Another important technique is linking to other weblogs. If you link to another site then each time someone clicks that link, the author of the other site will find your URL (the referrer) in their server logs. Most bloggers check these frequently and they will often check out a new site that has linked to them. Many weblogs include a sidebar of links to other blogs. This can tell you a lot about the blogger and the kind of blogs they enjoy. You should also ensure that you credit other weblogs for any useful links you may find on their sites.

Rebecca Blood points out that there are two good reasons for linking to other weblogs:

“The first is to create awareness of your weblog within the community. Just getting your name out there is a first step to being remembered. The second is the hope that eventually the weblogs you link to will link back. They may find an article through your weblog and credit you with a "via" link. They may find so many interesting articles or like your writing so well that they add you to their portal. Even when a weblogger does not link you, he may click through when your weblog is listed on an update tracker or linked on another site.”

When you link to another weblog, always click the link yourself. When you update your weblog, click through to every other weblog you link to. At least you’ll ensure that the linked weblogs get some traffic from your site.

When you are trying to build an audience, always remember that it is more important to have the right audience than a large audience. Unfortunately, you may need to bring your work to the attention of many people in order to find the few who will really appreciate it. No matter what you do to attract an audience, your weblog will eventually be judged on its merits alone. None of the strategies listed above will do you the slightest good if your content is not worth reading.

Building an audience is a long, slow process. Every weblog starts out with an audience of one: the blogger. Although many bloggers have benefited from exposure in other media, such as radio, TV or press, in the long run the best way of gaining readers is through a link on another weblog. Visitors who are referred to your site from another weblog are already weblog readers and they may enjoy reading further weblogs.

[edit] Tracking selected blogs

[edit] Methods of generating newsfeeds

Over the last few years 'newsfeeds' have become a standard feature of the World Wide Web. Perhaps you’ve noticed websites or blogs with a little orange button labeled XML or RSS or simply Newsfeed. These are all examples of newsfeeds. They are links to text files with their content formatted in XML (eXtensible Manipulation Language), containing a set of items in reverse chronological order.

Many major news sources, such as the BBC, CNN and many others now publish newsfeeds and thousands of weblog authors publish feeds to keep themselves connected to their readers. Blogs are the main driving force behind the recent surge of interest in RSS and syndicated content.

One of the most common feed formats is called RSS 2.0, with RSS meaning Really Simple Syndication. An earlier version called RSS 0.91 or 0.92 is still in use at some sites. Syndication is the name given to the sharing of content among different Web sites. The term is borrowed from the media industry, where it is normally associated with content such as television programs, which can be syndicated to several different TV stations, and newspaper columns, which can be syndicated to several publishers.

Confusingly enough, another major newsfeed format is called RSS 1.0, but in this case RSS stands for RDF Site Summary. (RDF stands for Resource Description framework, a standard way of providing information about websites, but you needn’t bother about that.). There’s an updated version called RSS 1.1, but many sites still use RSS 1.0.

The third common format for news feeds is Atom 1.0, released in August 2005 by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). However an earlier release, Atom 0.3 has been around for a long time and some sites are still running this.

There are other versions of newsfeeds about, but RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0 and Atom are the commonest ones and the only ones we’ll discuss from now on. There are more sophisticated methods of producing and manipulating newsfeeds by using technologies such as ASP (Active Server Pages) or PHP, a scripting language used to create dynamic web pages, but these are outwith the scope of this course.

The format and use of newsfeeds is fairly simple. Each feed contains a number of discrete items, usually with a title, content, category, author and date. The overall feed also has information such as source title, last update time, update frequency, site owner and so on. Within these fields, there are various options that can lead to a good deal of variation between feeds, but this level of detail is outwith the scope of this unit.

Though newsfeeds are becoming widespread at many different kinds of websites, they achieved their current level of popularity today through their use in weblogs. It’s difficult to say which was the main driving force behind dated, time-limited, reverse-ordered entries: weblogs or newsfeeds. Most blogging tools provide the ability to generate newsfeeds in one or more formats.

We’ll take a look now at several of these tools:

Blogger

As already noted, Blogger was one of the earliest weblogging environments and it still accounts for a significant percentage of weblogs. Blogger provides only Atom as a built-in feed type, though Blogger Pro account holders can also select RSS 2.0. It’s also possible to add an RSS newsfeed by using third-party products such a FeedBurner. We’ll take a closer look at adding a feed to a Blogger blog shortly.

Six Apart

Six Apart is the supplier of three popular blogging tools, Movable Type, TypePad and LiveJournal. All three support both Atom and RSS 2.0.

WordPress

WordPress supports for all three major syndication feed formats: RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 and Atom as well as some legacy formats, like RSS 0.9x.

As you can see, most tools support RSS 2.0 and Atom, and some support RSS 1.0, along with widely used legacy formats, like RSS 0.92. If you are using a tool which only supports one format and you want to supply another type of feed, you may be able to find plugins or add-ins that can provide support for the relevant format. Another option is to use a service that converts a feed from one format to another, eg: http://2rss.com can generate an RSS 2.0 feed from an Atom feed.

Once you’ve set up a newsfeed, you’ll want let readers subscribe to you. Remember those little buttons labelled Atom, RSS or XML that we talked about earlier? They lead to a newsfeed and clicking on them will open that feed in your browser (or whatever other application you’ve defined to handle newsfeeds. Your blogging tool may allow you to add a button automatically to your site, or you can create a hypertext link with the appropriate label.

Another way of publicising a feed is to use autodiscovery. This involves putting a line into the HEAD section of each web document, giving the location of your feed. You must also provide information about the type of feed so that aggregators know how to find it. Your blogging tool may let you to do this automatically.

If you add this to a page, and your readers access the page with a feed-sensitive browser, such as Firefox, they will see an indicator that the site has associated feeds that they can subscribe to. If your readers put the URL for your site into whatever newsfeed aggregator they use, it should find the link to the feed, without further effort on your part.

If you are using Blogger, you can add an Atom newsfeed as follows:

The Site Feed Tab

1. Log on to Blogger.com and select the Blog you want to add a newsfeed to.

2. Click on the Settings tab, then on the Site Feed tab. The following window will appear:

3. Select Yes in the Publish Site Feed drop-down list to publish your feed.

4. Select Full in the Descriptions drop-down box if you want to publish the full posts in your site feed, or select Short to publish only the first paragraph.

If you want to publicise the newsfeed on by putting a link on the blog itself, the standard practice is to include the link in the sidebar. Many of Blogger's default templates already have a link section in them.

5. Log in to your blog and then click on the Template tab. Scroll down through the code until you see something like this in the sidebar section:

 '''<h2 class="sidebar-title">Links</h2>
<ul>
   <li><a href="http://news.google.com/">Google News</a></li>
   <li><a href="http://EDITME">Edit-Me</a></li>
   <li><a href="http://EDITME">Edit-Me</a></li>
</ul>'''

There are already a few links in there to get you started. You can delete or edit these as you wish and you can also add as many links as you want.

6. Copy and paste this code into your template to create the link:

'''<a href="<$BlogSiteFeedUrl$>" title="Atom feed">Site Feed</a>'''

Finally, save your changes and republish your blog. If your chosen template doesn’t have a links section, you can simply copy the code above and paste it into your template. You will probably want to put it in the sidebar, perhaps next to the archives or previous posts list. If you’d rather have an RSS link, try using FeedBurner. There’s a section on the home page (http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/home) entitled “Get started with”. If you click on the Blogger link you’ll find full instructions on how to put an RSS newsfeed on your blog.

ACTIVITY 3.1

Follow the steps outline above (or the FeedBurner instructions for an RSS feed) to place a newsfeed on your blog.

[edit] Using tools for aggregating newsfeeds

Newsfeeds, also known as web feeds or RSS feeds, are a method of syndicating (distributing) parts of a website to other websites or individual subscribers. Content from the source site can be displayed on another website or in a newsreader, sometimes also known as a news aggregator to differentiate the term from Usenet newsreaders. Newsfeeds are normally offered by sites that change or add content regularly, like news sites or weblogs.

RSS is generally held to stand for Really Simple Syndication, although some people insist that it really stands for Rich Site Summary and others claim it stands for RDF Site Summary. You can find out more about RSS by reading one or more of the following articles:

Guardian Unlimited: http://technology.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,781838,00.html
BBC News: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/3223484.stm
BBC News Magazine: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3503509.stm

ACTIVITY 3.2

Choose one of the above articles and read it to find out a bit more about RSS.

Weblogs and other websites can syndicate news items by making a RSS newsfeed available. Readers can use a newsreader to pick up or aggregate these feeds, allowing them to view headlines and usually the first few lines of the news story. If the story looks interesting, they can link to the full story at the source site.

Prior to the development of RSS there were only two ways of keeping up to date with websites. You had to either visit the website regularly sign up for email bulletins from the website. The first method is fine if you're only interested in a few sites, but once the number of sites goes into double figures it becomes a bit time-consuming. The second method is only offered by a few sites, and you may already get so much email that you're reluctant to add any more.

If you use a newsreader or news aggregator to check on newsfeeds, you can see a summary of what's new on websites without having to visit each site. If the new content looks interesting, you can go to the website to read it. Newsfeeds are also a handy way of keeping up with weblogs. Many weblog providers provide the facility for bloggers to syndicate their work by including a newsfeed.

RSS is based on XML (eXtensible Markup Language), a widely used standard for exchanging textual information between applications on the Internet. RSS feeds can be viewed as plain text files, but they're really designed for computer-to-computer communication.

There are two principal methods of browsing RSS feeds, desktop applications and online services. There are numerous desktop applications available including Awasu and BlogExpress. Popular online services include NewsGator and Bloglines.

News feeds can also be integrated into other applications, for instance NewsGator allows news feeds to be integrated with Microsoft Outlook and Mozilla’s Firefox browser and Thunderbird e-mail client can handle newsfeeds.

A list of newsfeed tools can be found at: http://blogspace.com/rss/readers

Wikipedia provides an extensive list of news aggregators, with links to further details and downloads at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_news_aggregators

Another list can be found at http://www.hebig.org/blogs/archives/main/000877.php

We’ll take a look now at some of the more popular tools.

[edit] Desktop News Aggregators

Awasu Personal Edition http://www.awasu.com

The Awasu Home Page

"Awasu" is Japanese and means "to unite". Newsfeeds can be assigned to any number of categories. Awasu can announce news via sound, tray icon and notification balloon. You can search news feeds like Feedster, Technorati, Google and others. Plugins can be used to allow Awasu to treat any source as an RSS news channel.

Awasu provides the following features:

Monitors sites that provide an RSS or Atom feed
Alerts you when new content is found
Keeps a record of what you have already read
Archives feed content and provides a search engine
Synchronises multiple copies of Awasu running on different machines
Workpads that let you save feed items for later.
Automatically detects new feeds while you browse
Automatically downloads podcasts and other related files
Integrates with Syndic8, a major directory for feeds
Provides rapid access to tools like Google, Feedster and News Is Free
Fully customisable user interface
Optimised keyboard interface and one-click mouse navigation
Wizards to help you get started with some of the more powerful features
Supports secure feeds using HTTP authentication and/or SSL
Comprehensive online help and documentation

ACTIVITY 3.3

Download and install Awasu Personal Edition, then click on the Tour option on the menu at the left-hand side of the screen to take a tour of the features offered by Awasu.

Blog Express

The BlogExpress Home Page

BlogExpress is a full-featured news aggregator which supports all RSS versions and ATOM. It can read content from any weblogs and any websites that provides XML files for content syndication. BlogExpress is easy to use, making it an ideal tool for anyone new to RSS. It has a built-in Web Tab feature which you can use it to view Web pages directly without opening a Web browser. Weblog writers can even open a Web Tab to post to a server-based blog tool such as Blogger.com or Movable Type.

BlogExpress features include the following:

supports all versions of RSS and Atom
complies with usability guidelines for designing highly usable software
lets a user categorise subscriptions hierarchically
fast synchronises many feeds simultaneously (multi-threaded)
supports unlimited feed subscriptions
can export subscriptions to HTML
has the built-in Web Tab function for fast viewing Web pages
supports drag-and-drop subscription from a Web page
supports drag-and-drop Web operations
is configurable to display the tree pane in the left or right side
sends emails directly from Web Tabs
supports off-line blog reading
supports automatic synchronization

[edit] Online news aggregators

If you use an online service to track and manage your feeds, you can access your feeds anywhere you can use a web browser or even on mobile devices. Any upgrades or new features are added automatically. However, some web-based services offer fewer features and performance can be slower than desktop systems. Well known web based readers include NewsGator and Bloglines.

NewsGator Online http://www.newsgator.com/ngs/default.aspx

NewsGator Online is a free service which allows users to search for content and read it on any device. It is a separate product from NewsGator for Outlook which allows Microsoft Outlook to be used as a news aggregator. Users can synchronise their subscriptions across multiple machines, meaning that subscriptions follow users wherever they go and users never have to read the same content twice. It even supports multiple subscription lists so users can have separate, but overlapping, subscription lists at home and at the office.

The NewsGator Online Home Page

NewsGator Online includes three distinct editions, allowing users to read their subscribed content any time, any place and on any device:

Web Edition: a web-based content reader, which allows users to their subscribed newsfeeds from any web browser.

POP Edition: allows users to read their subscribed feeds in any email client that supports POP3, the standard email protocol.

Mobile Edition: allows users to read their subscribed feeds on any mobile device that supports HTML, including mobile phones and PDAs.

NewsGator Online provides the following features:

FeedStation podcasting: download audio files to your media devices
Automatic subscription: click on any newsfeed with a NewsGator button
Synchronisation: synchronise your newsfeeds across multiple devices
Organise your feeds: get multiple newsfeeds and arrange them as you like.
Search for feeds: search over 10 million blogs, news and information feeds
Recommended content: recommended newsfeeds based on your preferences
Headlines: Newsfeed headlines on your Blog
BlogRolls: automatically show the blogs and newsfeeds you read on your blog
Smart feeds: set up Keyword searches for the information you need

Bloglines http://www.bloglines.com/

The Bloglines Home Page

Bloglines is a free online service for searching, subscribing, creating and sharing newsfeeds, blogs and rich web content. There is no software to download or install, simply register as a new user and you can immediately begin accessing your account from any computer or mobile device. You can make your own personalised news page tailored to your specific interests from Bloglines’ index of tens of millions of live internet content feeds, including articles, blogs, images and audio. Bloglines shields you from the technical details of newsfeed standards like RSS, Atom, and others.

Bloglines allows you to search for, read and share any updates from your favourite newsfeed or blog regardless of its authoring technology. It also provides you with the tools needed to create your own clip blogs and blogrolls. Bloglines is the most popular website of its kind, indexing millions of new online articles every day.

Bloglines provides the following features:

All-in-one Blog and news feed search, online subscriptions, news reader, blog publishing and social sharing tools
Available in 10 languages
Mobile version optimised for handheld computers and cell phones
Email subscriptions help manage your e-newsletter traffic
Package Tracking (UPS, USPS & FedEx)
Custom weather forecasts
Quick Pick Subscriptions get new users started quickly and easily
Personalised recommendations to find new subscriptions
Bookmarklet for single-click subscriptions to any source
Notifiers for all browser types to remind you when new articles have arrived
Bloglines Saved Searches deliver articles matching your key words and phrases
Most Popular lists show the day’s hot topics and which blogs are getting noticed
Handy add-on tools such as automated blogrolls and subscription buttons

ACTIVITY 3.4

Choose either NewsGator Online or Bloglines. Open an account and explore its features.

[edit] Creating and maintaining a personal list of newsfeeds

For the purposes of this course you are required to create and maintain a personal list of newsfeeds. You can do this by using tools selected from those described in the previous sections, or any others you may have come across. You can track newsfeeds by using tools as selected above. You can choose newsfeeds involving your academic work, hobbies and pastimes, recreational and entertainment preferences or any other topics that you find interesting.

Let's look at how you can create and maintain a list of newsfeeds using Bloglines.

First you need to click the Sign Up Now link on the Bloglines home page to create an account. This will bring up the following page. Complete the required details and then click on Register.

The Bloglines Registration Page

The Bloglines Subscription Page

An email will be sent to the address you specified on the registration page. You must click on the link in this to activate your account. You’ll then be presented with a page which let's you choose the newsfeeds you want to subscribe to. The available links include a list of Quick Picks put together by the Bloglines staff as well as a lit of the 50 most popular subscriptions today.

Subscribing to Your Selections

Bloglines Newsfeeds

Choose the newsfeeds you want to subscribe to by clicking on the appropriate boxes. We’ll look later at how you can find feeds which aren’t on the Bloglines list.

For the moment, pick the top six items on today’s top 50 list and click on Subscribe to My Selections. When the next screen appears there will be a box at the left-hand side listing your feeds.

The Slashdot Newsfeed

Click on one of these to see the content of the feed. Let’s choose Slashdot. The screen will now display the contents of the newsfeed. Only the first two items can be seen in the screenshot.

What do you do if you want to subscribe to a newsfeed that isn’t on the lists provided by Bloglines? Start by clicking the Search option on the Bloglines homepage. This will bring up a search box where you can specify what you want to search for.

The Bloglines Search Box

Results of a search on "firefly"

Imagine we want to search for newsfeeds relating to the cult TV series, Firefly. Simply type the word firefly in the search box and click on Search. This will bring up a whole list of newsfeeds related to Firefly.

The FIREFLYFANS.NET newsfeed

Let’s take a look at FIREFLYFANS.NET. As you might expect, this brings up a list of postings related to Firefly.

Notice that you can subscribe to this feed by clicking on the link near the top right-hand side of the screen. Clicking any of the links will take you directly to the post concerned. Let’s pick Firefly model kit in the works.

A single item expanded

ACTIVITY 3.5

Choose the news aggregator you prefer (either installed or hosted) and start building up your own list of newsfeeds. You should include at least five feeds.

You are also required to maintain a personal list of newsfeeds by adding new ones and deleting old ones which are no longer of interest. This process may be assisted by the use of newsfeed search engines like The Feed Directory (http://www.thefeeddirectory.com) or Feedster (http://www.feedster.com/). and should be carried out over an extended period.

Option	Meaning
Show	Specifies how many days or posts will be shown on the home page of the weblog.
Date Header Format	The format of the date shown for every entry.
Archive Index Date Format	Format of the date for archived articles.
Timestamp Format	The format of the time, ie: am/pm or 24 hours.
Time Zone	By default this shows the Los Angeles time zone. Choose your own time zone from the pull-down list.
Date Language	Selects the language in which the date will be displayed if you’ve chosen to display the names of the days and months.
Encoding	Encoding in Internet Explorer. Only useful if you are writing in a non-European language
Convert Line Breaks	If you’re publishing HTML code which contains line breaks, choose No, otherwise don’t change this option. Click Yes to convert carriage returns (the Enter key) in HTML pages to a new paragraph <p>.
Show Title Field	Allows a title to be shown for each article. If you choose Yes you must add the code for this option to the template.
Show Link Field	Allows an address field to be included in each entry. If you choose Yes you must add the code for this option to the template.
Enable Float Alignment	Allows you to add HTML tags to control the positioning of text and images.
Post Template	If you want load the same text or HTML code to each article that you publish, you can write it here and it will be added automatically.