Blogging: Transformation of the Enterprise at Port 80: Boardwalk

On this page, you can learn more about the social aspects of Web logging, Weblogging, blogging.

If you want to learn how to set up a blog at Blogger.com, you'll find detailed instructions and screen shots in the Webmaking section of the Gizmos, Inc., Toolkit. Don't miss Blogger.com's own help and how-to section.

At base, Blogger is the doorway to a fundamental Internet truth: there are two Internets. One Internet is the brochure-ware of the corporate world. This is the Internet of the everyday. On this net, corporations talk of "customer satisfaction," "providing unparalleled X," and "caring about our employees." It is the Internet of corporate PR departments. And, quite frankly, it sucks.

One of the country's most respected training grounds for professional reporters has become the first school to offer a class on the 21st century symbol of do-it-yourself journalism.

Next fall, a handful of students at the University of California at Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism will convene weekly to learn about blogging from John Batelle, a co-founder of Wired magazine, and Paul Grabowicz, the school's new media program director.

Students will create a weblog devoted to copyright issues, from "deep-linking" to online music trading. They'll also debate whether blogs are "a sensible medium for doing journalism, and what does that mean?" said Grabowicz, who contributes to the Poynter Institute's online media blog.

This year, Macromedia -- the company that makes Flash and Shockwave -- has posted a $305 million quarterly loss, laid off 110 people and lost a $2.8 million copyright infringement suit to Adobe.

But for all the company's apparent troubles, in the last week there's been a lot of good feeling directed toward the firm, with people saying that Macromedia is one of the few companies to appreciate the new topography of the Web.

That's because Macromedia is blogging.

Not only has the company started to tailor its software to the needs of people who run their own weblogs, but it's also dived headlong into the much-hyped "blogosphere" itself, setting up its own weblogs as a way to nurture ties with its customers.

Macromedia calls this "the blog strategy," and some see the company's moves as the start of a trend. These days, it's almost unfashionable for a self-respecting Webophile to not have his own blog; if Macromedia's effort is any indication, soon a tech company that doesn't embrace weblogs may seem equally dated.

WeblogsInEducation@SchoolBlogs.com : SchoolBlog News -- Unleashing the potential of weblogs in education!

Evidence of a staggering shift from an age of carefully controlled information provided by sanctioned authorities (and artists), to an unprecedented opportunity for individual expression on a worldwide scale.

Weblogs are often-updated sites that point to articles elsewhere on the web, often with comments, and to on-site articles. 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 comraderie and politics between the people who run weblogs, they point to each other, in all kinds of structures, graphs, loops, etc.

The Weblog is the future of home pages, and having a blog may very well release the same brain-chemicals as home ownership. Weblog authors are continually renovating and looking for ways to improve their blog. So if your blog is kind of blah, here's some ideas that I've come across to help inspire the "Blog Vila" in all of us.

Online diarists rule an Internet strewn with failed dot coms. A few months ago, I was at the Camden Pop!Tech conference, and the guy sitting next to me was typing incessantly into his wireless laptop, making notes on the speakers, finding relevant links and then hitting the send key—instantly updating his Web site. No sooner did he do so than he would get responses back from readers around the country. He was a blogger.

blogdex is a system built to harness the power of personal news, amalgamating and organizing personal news content into one navigable source, moving democratic media to the masses.

Blogs are personal and unfiltered. Real people, rather than corporate PR departments or ad agencies, write them.

Manila is an Internet server application that allows groups of writers, designers and graphics people to manage full-featured, high performance Web sites through an easy-to-use browser interface.

Manila lets everyone who works on a site focus on what they do best. Finally users can do simple edits on their own. Overworked webmasters get out of the bottleneck. Communication within an organization and with the outside world improves. The team gets on the Web, without wasted time or confusion.

As the Macintosh made desktop computing easy, Manila makes Web content management accessible to non-technical people. Manila turns any Web browser into a powerful Web content workstation.


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modified: June 27, 2002 by Douglas Anderson http://RicciStreet.net/port80/boardwalk/blogging.htm