Technosailor.com

Blogs run from individual diaries to arms of political campaigns, media programs and corporations, and from one occasional author to having large communities of writers. Some are maintained by single authors, while others have multiple authors. Many weblogs allow visitors to leave public comments, which can lead to a community of readers centered around the blog; others are non-interactive.

The totality of weblogs or blog-related websites is usually called the blogosphere.

The format of weblogs varies, from simple bullet lists of hyperlinks, to article

summaries with user-provided comments and ratings. Individual weblog entries are almost always date and time-stamped, with the newest post at the top of the page. Because links are so important to weblogs, most blogs have a way of archiving older entries and generating a static address for individual entries;
this static link is referred to as a permalink. The latest headlines, with hyperlinks and summaries, are offered in weblogs in the RSS or Atom XML-format, to be read with a feed reader.

Great blog tools:

www.pluck.com
– this is free and integrates into IE. Plus, it uses perches to track Ebay and
Amazon if you are shopping junkie and don’t want to waste time. Perches are
extremely powerful and show the e-commerce potential that RSS can provide. If
you are new to RSS and you use Explorer, this is the way to go.

http://www.jetbrains.com/omea_reader/
- This one is new on the scene and very powerful. It is designed for the
ultimate information junkie. It includes RSS, Newsgroups AND web links. The web
links even sync with your IE, Opera and Firefox list – very cool. They have a
trial and are giving free licenses away for a short time. Give them a try.

www.newsgator.com
– this is partly free for the web and has the most robust solution to access
your feeds. This is the only one that integrates with Outlook. It has a trial
and then you have to pay. However, be warned, it will slow down Outlook
dramatically.

www.newzcrawler.com
– this has a 15 day trial but it is really sophisticated and costs $30. Think
of this as an advanced blogging tool once you have been around the block. Plus
you can publish directly to your blog from this. This is good for the power
blogger and the tool to go with if you need one interface to work with.

Pick up your copy of the WordPress Bible, a wildly popular resource for beginners and experts alike.

Written by Steven Fisher on March 1, 2005

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