Sunday, May 15, 2005
Blogmania
I've spent the last few weeks reading about blogs for business. It seems there are as many opinions about blogging as there are individual blogs and with an estimated > 9 million blogs, that's a lot of opinions. What is a blog anyway? The word blog came from Web Log and from my perspective it more closely resembles a personal diary or journal than a log. I have read a number of them and even created a few just to see what the attraction is. It's kind of cool, you get your own little soapbox or pulpit online. Some blogs are confrontational, some are nothing more than the ramblings of people with no social life but there are a few gems out there if you look hard enough.
From my standpoint as a web developer and business owner I can see some value in blogs because it accomplishes what I have been telling my web customers for years, it provides a method and now motive to produce fresh content for your website on a regular basis. A website is great but if it's not updated it becomes static and worn out quickly. Blog-mania (my word for the new emphasis on blogging) is helping people pay attention to getting information out regularly and that has to be a good thing. It is also making the common web surfer greedy for current content and regular updates.
So what's this mean to the owner of a business online? I guess it means it's time to consider blogging. I'm going to try to blog here at SoKyBiz some of the considerations for business blogging as I continue my development of a good CMS + Community forum + Personal blogging application + mailing list subscription app +++.
Basically, for my business customers I want to be able to offer them a good clean website that is functional, accessible and easy to use not only for the audience, but also for the customer (customer being the website owner in this case). The site would have a method for the owner to administer the content easily, adding pages, images and content any time they want. Keeping it simple to make updates for the customer and accomplishing the hard stuff behind the scenes like image resizing and compression, spell checking, HTML validation and accessibility tags. I could spend months (and have) trying to teach a client customer why these things are important and I would still have to follow them around their website double checking validation and rules. So, do it reliably and automatically behind the scenes is important.
With the blogs becoming so popular and the aggregators coming of age, the site will have to be published in the standard methods but also an RSS feed provided. Methods to engage the client audience is also a consideration either through direct commenting on pages or user forums or direct email. It's going to be a big job... I can do it.
Where do I start? Okay, here's the deal. I have some pending projects I have to clean up first. I have a couple of clients that require my personal attention and also an Air Force Reserve "mission" on the schedule, toss in my 7 night stay in Punta Cana in June and it's going to be a little busy in paradise for another month.
So stand by... here we come!
(edited Thursday 01 Feb, 2007)
