The word "blog" actually refers to a whole of technologies centered around a journal. I've been playing around with many of these in recent months. Partially for my own entertainment, but also to get a handle on what sorts of technologies can be used to support my research, publication and teaching.

One really useful thing is syndication, but it takes a second to explain.

The world wide web was made possible by the html language, which abstract content from many forms of appearence. LaTeX has a similar approach to text presentation, keep content seperate from form. This has many advantages, different readers might have different capabilities and you don't want to loose a reader based on their reading platform. In the early days of the internet this was important because a reader could be a university or major defense contractor with a blazing fast connection, they'd look at pictures, or they might be at home with a primitive dial-up modem (apologies to all those still in this circumstance). These folks would generally browse with pictures turned off. So, it was useful not to have to think about how many pictures a reader could access. Today, this has the advantage of allowing many pages to be interpreted for handicapped readers.

Another advantage for straight text is that a writer can concentrate on writing and leave page design to designers (even computer designers by proxy). Amateur page designers can famously create an unintelligible mess.

Syndication does the same thing for blogs, the data (aka what you right) is abstracted from its presentation (aka the format of your blog). Instead of just getting around problems with particular browsers, blog syndication allows for all sorts of interesting tricks and alternatives to ordinary web browsers.

Aggregators, for instance, pull in blogs feeds and keep tally of the new posting on all the blogs that a reader is following. Aggregators generally display the headlines for each new entry with some indication of wether or not the entry has been read. This can be quite handy for someone whose reading a lot of blogs, such as a professor who's encouraging students to keep blogs. (hint)

You'll need to consult the instruction for which ever blog service you're using to get instructions on how to enable syndication. The blogger instructions are here.

You can find a link to the rss feed for this blog in the upper right hand corner where it says XML.

Right now, I'm using an aggregator called SharpReader, though I'd be very interested in hearing about other applications that people might be using.

There's a huge number of possible stupid things that one could use to extend, improve or impoverish one's blog. There are links to several littered around my blog over on the right hand side of this page. I just added sitemeter today. I'll let you know how that works out.


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