Buzzwords and jargon – every technical field suffers from the phenomenon. Of course, the words do actually mean something and knowing that definition can help you figure out if the trend is something that can really benefit your business model and promotional strategies.
To begin with, blogging is a pretty generalized term. Typically, it is referring to a particular type of software that makes publishing to the web quick and easy. Most of the time, blogs will also enable user comments, trackbacks, and RSS feeds for visitors (subscribers) to get the latest update in their feed aggregators. Blogging might also refer to any type of website about the author’s personal interests and activities. We’ll keep that one to the side now and focus on the business application of modern blogging trends…
Micro Blogging – Twitter and the Twitter Clones
Yeah, there are a lot of micro-blogging applications already, but the one with market share is Twitter. What is Twitter? Well, its a way for people to post short messages up to 140 characters. Anyone who follows you can then see those messages, and people build up these social networks of leaders and followers (some people now have 10s of thousands of followers, not sure how they can keep up with everyone)
LiveBlogging
These are profile pages that pull from multiple RSS feeds and user accounts to create a single location for all your online and blogging activities. What now? Well, when you sign up for Lifestream.fm or FriendFeed, it will aggregate everything you’re doing on the internet as it happens (or within a few minutes anyway). When I post this page to my blog, it will be up on those sites shortly afterward, and if I bookmark the page, my social bookmarking profile will also contact Lifestream to update my profile.
There’s a social component again – you can network up your friends and keep track of what they’re doing, but there are also productive purposes like building a layer of foundation under all of your latest blog posts, social bookmarks, and certain kinds of blog comments that you make. Marketers can use to keep track of their activities and organize what worked or didn’t (since it keeps automatic historical records) and employers can even use it to keep track of what exactly their social media experts are doing all day long. (Sorry guys)
Just plug in your websites’ feeds, your social bookmarking and networking account names, and you’re all set.
Leave a Reply