How Do Blogs Work For You

Blogs are like personal telephone calls crossed with newspapers. They're the perfect tool for sharing your favorite chocolate mousse recipe with friends or for upholding the basic tenets of democracy by letting the public know that a corrupt government official has been paying off your boss. 1

People write them for various reasons, but Yahoo! is designed as a social networking tool with friends/family or to meet new people. A blog is one of those tools. However, a Y!360 space that you can set up through your Yahoo account, is convenient but may cause more headache if you are not of the patient temperament to deal with its buggy nature.

A blog is short for a "web log" and that's a pretty description of it. A blog is simply an online diary or commentary that is posted publically on the internet. You can use a blogging site, like Blogger, or download and buy blogging software to host on your own website. You enter content and upload the text and links to the blog as often as you want, where the software will separate them into entries. Most blogs also allow for comments from others (either anonymously or those registered with the site) which you and other users can then respond to. It's a way of publishing your own thoughts, feelings, comments, etc.

Do you know how to use blogs within your organization to help you get work done? There are plenty of blogs out there that can tell you how to use blogs as a PR and marketing tool to communicate with your clients. But, when people actually think about getting work done within the organization, not a lot has been written.

Let's say you want to start a blog about your terrible work environment but you don't want to risk your boss or colleagues discovering that you're writing about them. You'll want to consider how to anonymize every possible detail about your situation. And you may also want to use one of several technologies that make it hard for anyone to trace the blog back to you.

Political blogging itself is often highly energized and partisan, with writers fighting over issues as they unfold hour by hour in the news. Yet bloggers are also starting to understand how to use these web sites to address local community problems. In one North Carolina community, journalists, politicians, activists, and ordinary citizens are increasingly using their own blogs as a main form of civic discussion.

Anyhow, debating the A-list really isn't that interesting, nor is it the point of this post. Instead it's to highlight the fact that blogs can have a real, tangible and surprisingly measurable impact on your business if they're done right.

In other words, a blog can be anything the author wants it to be. The thing that all blogs have in common is the reverse-chronological ordering of entries. A blog is normally a single page of entries. There may be archives of older entries, but the "main page" of a blog is all anyone really cares about.

The entries in a blog are usually stream-of-consciousness. There is no particular order to them. The tools that most bloggers use make it incredibly easy to add entries to a blog any time they feel like it.

Many blogging services, including LiveJournal, allow you to designate individual posts or your entire blog as available only to those who have the password, or to people whom you've designated as friends. If your blog's main goal is to communicate to friends and family, and you want to avoid any collateral damage to your privacy, consider using such a feature. If you host your own blog, you can also set it up to be password-protected, or to be visible only to people looking at it from certain computers.