If You Meet a Blog on the Road, Kill It.
This is an excerpt from “Three Internet Trends To Watch in 2006″. Visit The Business Ledger to read the whole article.
Hopefully you’ve already heard of blogs, short for “weblogs,” the do-it-yourself Web publishing platform that has been gaining traction for the last few years. They’ve been around long enough that I’m sick of talking about them. However, as they age, blogs are pointing to some interesting possibilities.
The first is that blog software is becoming more like content management software. More and more companies use blogs not just to post their latest thoughts about their products or industry (both of which are still good ideas), but to manage their entire Web site, both static and dynamic content.
Most blog software makes this trivial and automatically includes advanced features like comment management and user registration right out of the box. All you do is create a template and add content.
The second is RSS feeds. RSS, standing for “Really Simple Syndication” or “Rich Site Summary,” provides a way for visitors to subscribe to your site with very little effort. Modern browsers (like Firefox) have sophisticated support for RSS built-in. You can visit a site, subscribe to its feeds with a couple of clicks and then see a list of recently added content whenever you want. Blog software handles all of this in the background—no special programming required.
Join the evolution!
Most of what happens on the Internet is touted as revolutionary but is, in reality, evolutionary. Spend some time outside your Web comfort zone. Use Firefox for a couple of days. Subscribe to Del.icio.us’s “Popular Links” RSS feed. Map your competition or customers using Google. You might be surprised at how the world looks when you’re a few steps ahead.