Blogs, and Vlogs - Can They Save You Time?

by Lenny Charnoff <lenny@learningtips4u.com>

INDEX:

.01 What Is A Blog?
.02 Dave Winer – Blog Pioneer
.03 W.I.I.F.M. – What's In It For Me?
.04 Blogging Tools
.05 Summary
.06 Endnotes

.01 What Is A Blog? (return to index)

One day your grandchildren are going to sit on your lap and say "Grandpa (or Grandma), What did you do during the great blogging revolution? " [1] Today, we realize that blogging has become mainstream when Doonesbury pokes fun at this practice. [2] According to Rebecca Blood, author of The Weblog Handbook, "Blogs are bringing creative expression to everyday people when they need it most." [3]

Some of you may have taken a nap when the blogging revolution started. Here is a simple definition from marketingterms.com web site. "A blog is often a mixture of what is happening in a person's life and what is happening on the Web, a kind of hybrid diary/guide site, although there are as many unique types of blogs as there are people. Sometimes Blogs are referred to as Weblogs."

.02 Dave Winer – Blog Pioneer (return to index)

"Weblogs are often-updated sites that point to articles elsewhere on the web, often with comments, and to on-site articles," says Dave Winer who has the longest running blog on the Internet. "A weblog is kind of a continual tour, with a human guide who you get to know. There are many guides to choose from, each develops an audience, and there's also camaraderie and politics between the people who run weblogs, they point to each other, in all kinds of structures, graphs, loops, etc."

.03 W.I.I.F.M - What's In It For Me? (return to index)

You are attending a conference and someone at the conference delivers a statistic that your class should immediately know. You could have a distributed list on your computer of the whole class. However, that is on your desktop computer and even then it would be hard to e-mail everyone with the proper attachments. If you had a blog, you could go to any computer connected to the Internet and make an entry into your blog. My blog (Digital Disscussions) [4] has the capability of automatically e-mailing a list of people with a posting announcement. One can even use a cell phone to update the blog with an audio file. Archiving your blogs is an easy process [5] and doesn't require any special knowledge.

.04 Blogging Tools (return to index)

I have used both Pmachine [6] and Blogger [7]. I find that Pmachine is more powerful but is targeted at people who are very comfortable with technology. Blogger is very simple to use, has many templates. Now that Google [8] has acuired the Blogger software, the service and support should improve dramatically. You can find a complete list of Blogging Software at the Writers Write Site [9], also listed at the DMOZ Open Directory [10].

RSS News Feed

According to the web site webopedia, RSS is Short for Rich Site Summary, an XML format for syndicating Web content. One of the bonuses of using blogs is to allow other sites to publish some of its content. Both Blogger and Pmachine have an RSS generating component. A user can read RSS-distributed content and use the content on a different site. Syndicated content includes such data as news feeds, events listings, news stories, headlines, project updates, excerpts from discussion forums or even corporate information. In plain English this means my weblog software can automatically output a file so that your website can import and use this knowledge via a news aggregator.

Vlogs

As you might suspect a Vlog is a Blog with added video. The guru of Vlogs is Jeff Jarvis. You can see examples of his vlogs on the Buzz Machine Site [11]. Vlogs are bandwidth intensive and especially need a robust server to be able to handle multiple streams. One resource is Screenblast, a free service provided by Sony. You can see Jeff Jarvis's vlogs at his area of Screenblast [12]. I also use Screenblast for storage of my videos [13].

Vlogging Tools

One of the best tools for creating your first Vlog is Communicator Pro created by Serious Magic [14]. This program is windows only, unlike the other tools that were platform independent. Serious Magic provides the novice videographer with sophisticated tools to produce near broadcast quality productions. One Serous Magic's powerful tools is the ability for the novice videographer to produce chroma key backgrounds. Make sure you see the different industries that can benefit from using Visual Communicator on the Serious Magic website

.05 Summary (return to index)

Stop reading this article for a minute and think of all the times you wanted to share some vital information with students, colleagues, children or the world in general. Blogging and Vlogging allow the non-geek to easily post interesting data or information without having to learn HTML, FTP or go through a system administrator.