alek blogs

why blogging? just publish and forget?

some good observation: first noise reduction and ego maintenance

Blogs have been compared to newsgroups. It is interesting. In newsgroups there is no "uber" member. Everyone is equal. At first that seems great - however it makes it hard for people to filter out the noise. In effect, a blog gives me control over the "major" content of my newsgroup. I can post anything I want on the front page... anyone can add comments, link to me, etc - but no one else gets to be on the front. In this way blogs appeal to the ego of the blog owner, but also gives people visiting a blog a built in filter.

then RSS as Web Service:

The most fundamental building block of blogs is RSS. I don't know how revolutionary RSS is compared to HTML or TCP/IP, but RSS is the heart and soul of blogs. RSS provides a crude "alpha" XML web service. It will evolve and become even better. Today, RSS gives blogs a way to publish their content in a standard way. Sounds simple. Which is what makes it great. With RSS as a standard, you can now have aggregators that troll hundreds of blogs and extract relavant information. You can extend RSS (being XML and all) and add features like full message content, Doublin Core fields, etc.

but finally is this what i think really matters: publish and forget

One reason I believe that blogs are great for corporation internal communication is the question of distribution lists. Inside of Microsoft we live and die by email. However the constant spam of email to large distribution lists ends up drowning out the important information. For many types of communication (but not all) blogs provide a better way of communicating. There are many cases where you as the publisher of a piece of information don't know who would be interested. Blogs are a way to "publish and forget" - you fire the information out there, and interested people will find it. Once I add our internal blog server to the corporate search service, suddenly I could find people that worked on products that I wanted to communicate with. Amazing.

so blogging is simply next generation of communications weapons in our arsenal (like fire and forget!)

created 2003 apr 10 thu 1:30 pm cst [2003/4/10 13:30 CST] permalink

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