What Can Blogs Do?
October 13th, 2005 by Karen Jackie
- Add content chronologically.
The main components of a blog are posts, bits of commentary that are arranged chronologically, with the most recent at the top. Most blogging services and software like Blogger and Movable Type employ easy-to-use Web-based forms. But bloggers — those who create blogs — can also submit posts via email and can even post photos from their camera phones. - Manage links to and from other sites.
Blogs often contain links that reference other blogs, Web sites, and files — which is why news spreads so quickly across blogs. - Many services also offer “trackback,” a feature that shows when other sites link to a specific post.
The benefit: Frequent linking in and out of posts means that the posts can be found more readily and can be ranked more highly by search engines like Google. - Syndicate and distribute the content.
Most blogs come feed-enabled, which makes it easy to distribute blog postings in RSS, a simple content syndication mechanism. As a result, blog readers don’t need to make a special trip to a Web site to read the blog — instead, they can scan headlines that are pushed to feed aggregators like NewsGator , Bloglines, or My Yahoo!
