Blogging is a conversation. It has become a phenomenon because people love to communicate. It allows you to get closer to your audience, because when you say something they can respond back with what they think. In fact, the audience may well lead the conversation at times by suggesting new ideas. From the organization’s perspective, blogging can have two key benefits:

1. In an intranet, it can allow more and better conversations between staff, particularly between staff who are in different physical locations, and/or who are at different levels within the organization. It can thus break down hierarchies and silo-thinking.

2. It can establish a powerful interaction between the organization and the customer. A good blog can show that you are listening and responding to the needs of your customers. A good blog can make your customers part of the product development process.

From a personal perspective, blogging is like an extended CV. At a very basic level, a blog says “I exist and I have something to say.” At a more practical level a blog says “I exist, I have something smart to say, give me a (better) job, please.” “Blog” is a combination of two words: “web” and “log.” It is a Webbased diary or journal.

Some blogs are focused on the personal writing of the author; they are, in essence, an online diary. Others take an editorial approach. Editors trawl the Web for interesting content and might then write up a short comment and link to this content, or simply cut and paste the heading and summary from the original webpage, while also providing a link to it.

Blogs reflect a passion to communicate

They say there’s a book inside everybody. Well, the blog lets the book out! Bloggers, the writers and editors of blogs, are people with attitude. They have a passion to communicate. You can’t have a good blog if you can’t write well or if you don’t have well-formulated opinions.

The InfoDesign blog shown above focuses on information design and is a blog I find useful. The image, taken from that blog, shows how a classic blog entry is structured:

•Date and Time: A key distinguishing feature of blogs is that each piece of content is dated.

•Link heading: A typical blog entry will link to another piece of content on the Web. (The diary-like blogs don’t always do this.)

•Summary: Blog entries tend to be short and punchy; so the general rules of Web content you’ll find in Killer Web Content are ideal for writing blogs.

•Classification: A classification structure is important for blogs especially as they grow bigger. Otherwise, it becomes difficult find older articles. The InfoDesign example blog post is classified under “usability.”

•Permanent link: Blogs have a feature called “permalink.” This gives the blog post a unique website address so that it can be directly linked to.