Blogging this, blogging that

By: Jonathan Brazil
After a short absence I have returned to cast yet another slanted opinion on something technological. The internet, the net, the web, the WWW, call it what you will; its presence in our everyday lives has amounted to a very serious influence in the way we communicate and source information. Unfortunately like most other technological advances over the past number of decades, the web has also contributed to the decline in direct social interaction between people. Everything with respect to human communication has become abstract and impersonal.
How many times have you e-mailed a friend in a foreign country to exchange views or simply chat and instead of phoning him or her? Most of us would prefer the e-mail option and the reason is quite simple, It’s not a sociological issue but more an economical issue. It is far cheaper to send an e-mail than it is to make a phone call. This thinking has been instilled in us via a number of different channels. We send text messages rather than making voice calls, e-mail rather than phone, the direct human to human interaction has been stripped out of many conversations and has been replaced by a new, and often abbreviated, electronic language.
Some time ago I started some experiments involving the automatic publishing of information on my website. It was a convenient way for me to store information so that I could access it any place at any time. Later on a colleague of mine in the TSSG, Mícheál Ó Foghlú, pointed me in the direction of a more elegant solution to my problem, a software package that was reasonably well-developed and stable. It provided a mechanism of publishing information to a website with no more than a few clicks of the mouse. This mechanism has now become known worldwide as web logging or “blogging”.
The nature of blogging is to reference and describe interesting information from somebody’s website on your own, thus establishing a link between the two websites. All the entries in a weblog are ordered by date and possibly by category too. So as your weblog grows it is still easy for others to find information on a certain topic. If your weblog contains interesting or valuable information that is bona fide, then it may become a trusted source of information and be referenced by many others throughout the world. A community is born yet again! Where the web gave us anonymity blogging has given us back a means of cyber-social referencing the same way in which we back-up spoken conversations by referencing our source of information.
Some weblog packages offer the ability to perform what are known as “trackbacks”. Put simply a trackback is a way of telling the originator of the information that you have referenced their weblog. The originator will be informed of this linkage and may decide to keep up to date with any extra information you may have entered in addition to the original material. An open, learning community of social interaction is established!
What sets this apart from web-based bulletin boards is that a weblog is as public or as private as you want it to be. You have total control over what information is published to it and it is your own personal space to express opinions or to build a substantial information library. My own weblog (jbwan.com/weblog) is powered by Movable Type (www.movabletype.org) which is a very nice freeware package with plenty of features to keep my information store expanding with occasionally useful snippets.
Many journalists have weblogs and some of these are invaluable sources of information for the general public. Most of these weblogs can be sent as news feeds (RSS) so that people can download the latest entries and review them. RSS is basically an XML file containing personalised content in a standardised format. A fuller description might appear in a later article. Information can often trickle through weblogs quicker than other channels of communication simply because it comes from a trusted party with very little time delay. The XWebs browser from the Young Scientists competition this year was the talk of the blogging community before it ever hit the newspapers. Other information is also passed on through blogs about useful utilities and services that appeal to online users.
One such example is GeoURL. This interesting service provides a listing of websites by logical geographical proximity (i.e. your home location) rather than physical location of the web server. This is a useful way of find out who your neighbours in cyberspace are. Recently I found a link to an interesting article by browsing the weblog of my nearest unknown neighbour in cyberspace. Without the geographical link I probably would never have found the article and so the value of the service is proven. There is also another interesting service known as Blogtree (www.blogtree.com). To avail of this service you simply register the URL of your weblog and cite who inspired your weblog’s creation. Over time a family tree of parent weblogs, child weblogs and sibling weblogs will be established. You can track your weblog’s genealogy and see if you have become a parent or even a grandparent. Moreover you can read the weblogs of your siblings (i.e. those who were inspired by the same parent as you) and see if their inspiration has carried on the same line as yours or whether you diversify. Below are a number of interesting weblogs that I frequently read.
1) Jon Udell’s Weblog
2) Mícheál Ó Foghlú’s Weblog
3) Mark Pilgrim’s Weblog
4) Bernie Goldbach’s Weblog