Blog before you Think!

IT Conversations hosts the complete audio archive of the Bloggercon III held November 2004. My first stop was the Newbie Session, hosted by Rebecca MacKinnon.

quick notes:

• many use cases for blogging (keeping an open (text or rich media based) diary for oneself as an outsourced memory device, establish a way of communication between a defined set of people, establishing a sense of local community, addressing a global audience with ones expertise, increase marketability via corporate blogs, political activism, blogging as complementary practice for news organizations,...)

• when is a blog a blog and not just writing or a homepage? (sense of sharing, possibility of feedback and interaction via trackbacks and comments, broadening ones conversational networks,...)

• what is a good workflow for posting? which tools support them? (blogger.com good for starting out but lacks trackbacking [1], as you get into blogging and want more control over your layout you might want to look at Typepad, Movable Type, Radio UserLand, Wordpress – but these tools do require some technical skills, some are hosted, some require your own server, lot of confusion…)

• RSS, aggregators (for taming your private information overflow, for improving the overall web experience, as filtered feeds in a corporate scenario, summary vs. full article feeds,...)

• blogs are not the only tools for communication, connecting interest groups, supporting corporate collaboration out there (Wikis, various groupware products, forums,...), but they do contain a hell of a lot of potentiality

[1] if anyone is interested in how I set up trackbacking here (a blogger.com blog), drop me a note.