One of the most highly touted features of the Web 2.0 era is the rise of blogging. Personal home pages, personal diaries, and personal opinion, have been around since the early days of the web, so what is the fuss all about?
RSS Extends Web Page Viewing Away from the Browsers
It used to be that web browsers were the only way for people to view web pages. Now RSS (Really Simple Syndication) technology extends that capability. RSS aggregators can be web-based (like Bloglines), desktop clients, and even portable devices allow you to subscribe to constantly updated content.
RSS is now being used to push not just notices of new blog entries, but also all kinds of data updates, including stock quotes, weather data, and photo availability.
Permalinks Point the Way Toward Discussion
But RSS is only part of what makes a weblog different from an ordinary web page. The permalink (or the ability to click through to the entire post’s page) effectively turned weblogs from an ease-of-publishing phenomenon into a conversational mess of overlapping communities.
For the first time it became relatively easy to point directly at a highly specific post on someone else’s site and talk about it. Discussions, chats, and friendships emerged or became more entrenched. Therefore, the permalink was the first – and most successful – attempt to build bridges between weblogs.
The “blogosphere” then can be thought of as a new, peer-to-peer equivalent to Usenet and bulletin-boards, the conversational watering holes of the early internet. Not only can people subscribe to each others’ sites, and easily link to individual comments on a page, but also, via a mechanism known as trackbacks, they can see when anyone else links to their pages, and can respond, either with reciprocal links, or by adding comments.
Web 2.0 Harnesses Collective Intelligence
An essential part of Web 2.0 is turning the web into a kind of global brain. The blogosphere becomes the equivalent of constant mental chatter or voice we hear in all of our heads.
The blogosphere has begun to have a powerful effect because search engines use link structure to help predict useful pages, and bloggers (as the most prolific and timely linkers) have a disproportionate role in shaping search engine results.
Considering what Wikipedia does, blogging then harnesses collective intelligence as a kind of filter or what James Suriowecki calls “the wisdom of crowds” or Dan Gillmor calls “we, the media.”
What it Means for Your Blog Efforts
Your blogs, which will evolve into a multi-authored, broad channel collaboration site, where it becomes your focus group and spokespeople for your brands. Because they are leveraged, not a regurgitation of the web site content, you’ll get input, reviews, shared pictures, etc. as you control and manage the conversation.
Adapted from Tim O’Reilly’s What Is Web 2.0