When is a blog not a blog?
Last week, Legal Week ran a story about trainees writing a weekly blog at the law firm Watson Farley & Williams. Hurrah!
Ah, but wait a minute, isn’t that just a page with some pdf documents on it? That’s not really a blog then is it? Stuart Bruce and Justin Patten would tend to agree and have already expressed their thoughts very clearly on the matter.
I guess that it is a “log” and it is on the “web” so in that sense it qualifies … but it is at that point that the similarities end. So what are the special characteristics that blogs have which make them blogs and such a potentially valuable business tool. Well, the main ones are:
- Readers can leave comments: your readers can respond to your posts so that you can get feedback, start conversations and develop relationships with potential clients, suppliers or partners. The perfect opener to creating a relationship and a network, though the more cautious among us may decide to moderate the comments first;
- Automatically organised: Blog software (which it is sensible to use) will automatically display your most recent posts first, making them easy to find, as well as organise all your posts into ‘categories’ and ‘archives’. This gives great organisation and structure to a blog, perfect for visitors and Search Engines alike and allows you to concentrate on the content
- Permalinks: every post and every category has its own individual address, forever! This means that you can refer to them in articles, emails, newsletters etc safe in the knowledge that they will always be found. Another great feature for the Search Engines.
- Multiple Authors: not only can one person add content but you can allow access to any number of people so that you have several authors contributing to a topic or a series of topics. It also opens up the possibilities for blogs as tools ideally suited to internal communications within a company.
- No technical knowledge required: you don’t need technical expertise to write a blog. You add pages or articles directly to the blog through a “Windows” type of interface with no need to rely on a web designer to update it for you;
- Internal and External Links: blogs thrive by links and referring to other articles so that conversations and ideas can be taken up and developed. At its best, this allows a viral effect in terms of promotion and helps develop both relationships and networks.
- Search Engine friendly: with regular posts, categorised content and search engine friendly links and addresses, business blogs become ideal places for Search Engines to find the type of content they love … and you can rank very highly! An added marketing bonus for your blogging!
I would also recommend any company looking to start its own blog to take the Green Cross Code of Blogging approach and make sure that they are aware of how other are using blogs and what they should be considering.
I do, however, see that Legal Week has just started its own series of blogs including an Editor’s Blog and a Daily Diary which look to be much more what we would expect. Good luck with those!
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Thank you for the link, Mark. Very good piece in defining the attributes of a blog. Would you add RSS as a feature of blogs as well? Some blogs do not have them but I think would. What do you think?
Justin, Thanks for the comment and I also must congratulate you on your own post on the subject which I thought was excellent.
I think that RSS is hugely important and that all blogs should be using it – I debated whether to add it to the list and decided against it merely because I felt that it was an associated technology, a distribution layer if you like as I outline in this post on blogs and newsletters.
On reflection though, perhaps I was wrong not to include it because of its importance which is only going to increase … and quickly, I believe. Many thanks for pointing this out.
Justin beat me to it! I would agree that a blog without RSS is about as useful as the page with pdf’s.
Mel, Thanks for your comment. Out of interest, do you therefore consider RSS more important on a blog than the ability to leave comments?
Mark,
I am sure Mel will express a view but I will give mine.
I think leaving comments is more important than RSS because of the interactive nature of comments which I feel is a fundamental aspect of web 2.0 etc.
When I started blogging, I did not have a RSS feed.
Gosh those were the days…
Justin
A cop out answer – but it depends! Comments are fine on blogs where a dialogue is useful (for instance – here) but I have seen many examples of comments out of control and conversations which really ought to have taken place on email. On the other hand some of the uber-bloggers (http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/ springs to mind and there are others) don’t have comments – but they DO have a mechanism for getting in touch (email). I’m guessing what I am saying is that if a dialogue (public or private) can take place then it’s a blog.
The RSS thing is something that has really moved on in the last year or so for me. I had my very first blog over at tripod and I still think they don’t have RSS – but it didn’t bother me at the time. Now however, if a site I come across doesn’t have RSS I don’t bother with it. I have around 300 feeds in my reader at any one time (it’s a fairly fluid list and I’m ruthless at axing – limited attention and time, but also add whenever I find something interesting). I’m becoming really dependent on RSS. For instance, I knew that yourself and justin had replied to the comment because I track comments using CoComment and the RSS feed popped up in Bloglines this morning. I would otherwise never have remembered to come back and check what else had been written. Automation via RSS – it’s the future!
That is very helpful for me Mel and increases my understanding of the issue.
Mel and Justin – firstly thank you both for your comments which have been very useful. I also wanted to state my position on this and apologies for the delay in doing so.
While I should state that I would never run a blog without RSS, I don’t believe that intrinsically it is as important as the comments function. Why? Because RSS is essentially an aid, something which makes our lives easier by delivering the information we want straight to us from the sites/blogs/newsfeeds that we are interested in. The comments function, however, allows me, as a visitor, to express my opinion and add to the overall conversation that is happening. As such, I think that it facilitates “many to many” communication better than RSS which is a “one to many” broadcast and so is more valuable.
Those that turn comments off on their blogs (and Seth Godin is one that was discussed) do so for various reasons as you point out. Yes, email still exists as a communications method but at a “one to one” level and I believe that this detracts from the ‘community’ and ‘network’ elements that blogs promote. As we have here on a small scale – 3 of us participating in the converstaion could not happen without comments.
Could it happen without RSS and particularly CoComments using RSS? Yes, but you’d be right to say that it probably wouldn’t have. (The whole CoComments issue is hugely interesting but that’s probably best left for another post). And as for automation using RSS … oh yes! Marketing through RSS … yes as well! Lots of things to look out for in those areas in the months ahead.
Thank you both again.