Blogs Technologies for Enterprise Applications
Where is it going?
Blogs are proliferating at an exponential rate. Estimates suggest
as many as 50 million people are now blogging. Because blogs
are easy to create and modify, they occupy a unique niche in
cyberspace—that of highly personalized discussion forums that
foster communities of interest. Blogs are public and long-lived,
and they weave themselves into close relationships with other
blogs. As such, they may serve as an educational tool for reflec-
tion, knowledge building, and sharing.
Blogs continue to benefit from several years of experimentation
and evolution, both within and outside of education. By carefully
evaluating their strengths and weaknesses, educators are learn-
ing to set guidelines and expectations to maximize the benefits of
blogs. Structured exercises and clear goals are further enhanc-
ing the value of blogs in education.
What are the downsides?
Because blogs are often produced and maintained by individu-
als, they can include biased or inaccurate information. Users
visiting a blog might see it as factual or authoritative when, in
fact, it is the online equivalent of a soap box: a place to speak
and to be heard. Unlike chat rooms, blogs are unmediated and
therefore offer a different type of venue for individuals to express
themselves and air their opinions, ideas, and attitudes. While
this may be acceptable for a personal blog, it might be inap-
propriate for a blog hosted on an institutional server. Intellectual
property is another area of concern for higher education, given
the implications of hosting blogs that might include content that
has been used without proper attribution.
Blogs are also highly volatile. Bloggers can edit or delete posts,
and this transient nature can make blogs difficult to archive or
index. In addition, the time-limited relationship of students to
institutions influences the length of time a student blog should be
hosted, yet removing posts from the blogosphere once a student
has graduated could confound those who linked to the post.
Why is it significant?
Because blogs engage people in knowledge sharing, reflection,
and debate, they often attract a large and dedicated readership.
Blogs are becoming an important component of the Internet
landscape, providing authors and readers with an avenue for
unedited expression, reaction, and connection, without the cen-
sorship of mediated chat rooms or formal media outlets.
The simplicity of creating and maintaining blogs means that
open discussions can be established almost immediately, mak-
ing blogs an ideal venue for far-reaching discussions among the
Internet community on new or timely topics. Blogs foster the
growth of communities, and the dynamics of collaborative filter-
ing and recommending/referring may provide new ways to evalu-
ate, vet, and critique student-created knowledge.
How does it work?
A blog can be thought of as an online journal, and maintaining a
blog is as simple as using an online e-mail program. Bloggers enter
posts into a blogging application, add formatting or hyperlinks, and
save the post. The application adds the entry to the blog, mak-
ing the content available online and alerting users who have sub-
scribed to that blog’s content. Entries can include text, hyperlinks,
images, or multimedia. Visitors can read postings, submit comments, find blog entries by date, and search the site by keyword.
Most blogs allow visitors to subscribe using an RSS feed or another
service. Effective blogs tend to be updated on a regular basis.
Most bloggers solicit feedback, fostering two-way communica-
tion between readers and authors. Readers can provide feed-
back by leaving comments on the blog page itself or by posting
a response on their own blogs and linking back to the original
post—a feature called trackback. Trackback notifies bloggers
when one of their posts is referenced by another blog, making it
possible to determine the popularity of a post based on the number and diversity of incoming links to a post. Through linking, com-
menting, and feedback, good (or at least popular) ideas spread
quickly through the informal network of blogs (the “blogosphere”),
while unpopular ideas are simply ignored. Being referenced by a
popular blogger brings instant attention and often credibility, and
repeated linking enhances the reputation and authority of a blog-
ger. Through this system of recommendations and referrals, a
collaborative filtering capacity has emerged in the blogosphere.
Who’s doing it?
Although online journals have been around longer than the term
“blog,” they gained momentum with the introduction of services
that allow users to publish blogs easily, without needing to code
HTML. Today, thousands of people use services including Blog-
ger and Moveable Type to simplify, automate, and accelerate the
online publishing process.
Blogs are showing up in venues ranging from entertainment and
commerce to news and politics. Many blogs are the musings of
a single author; others focus on a particular topic and feature the
voices of several authors. There are group blogs, family blogs,
community blogs, and corporate blogs. WarBlogs (a product of
the Iraq war), LibLogs (library blogs), and EduBlogs (targeting
education) are just some of the emerging types of blogs. In edu-
cational settings, faculty are using blogs to express their opin-
ions, to promote dialogue in the discipline, and as an instructional
tool, and students are increasingly using blogs both as personal
commentaries and as a required part of certain courses.
What is Blog?
A blog—a shorthand term that means “Web log”—is an online, chronological collection of personal commentary and links. Easy to create and use from anywhere with an Internet connection, blogs are a form of Internet publishing that has become an estab- lished communications tool. Blogging has evolved from its ori- gins as a medium for the online publication of personal diaries to a respected vehicle for editorials on specific topics. In their latest incarnation, blogs represent an alternative to mainstream media publications. The personal perspectives presented on blogs often lead to discourse between bloggers, and many blog circles generate a strong sense of community.
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