Net Results: Technology is a great leveller. Take your eye off the ball for one moment, get complacent and start thinking you are on top of the trends and new developments, and you get slapped back into the reality of your disengagement pretty fast.
Such has been the case for me over the past couple of weeks with weblogs. Now, weblogs are something I think I know a bit about. Several years ago, I followed with great interest the development of the first software programs for creating these online journals. I've interviewed, e-mailed and sat on conference panels with some of the key people involved in the growth of the blogging phenomenon. I set up my own, called Technoculture, three years ago this month.
I'm even heading over to Brussels next month to join a panel on blogging and ethics, part of a celebration of the relaunch of the EU website. That should be a provocative and lively debate, or at least I'll be doing my best to make it so.
Then along comes a friend, and a rather proudly untechnical one at that, who shows me that I have been looking at one end of blogging while totally missing what has been happening at another end. It's all very nice to talk to an audience about worthy subjects like blogging and ethics, but what about blogs as a nice, simple, user-friendly tool for keeping in touch with friends when you go on a long trip?
Never even crossed my mind, but my friend came up with the idea as the perfect solution to a communication conundrum. He was being posted out to work in Japan for four weeks, where he wouldn't be able to get text messages or calls from pals at home as the mobile networks are incompatible. Nor would he have easy access to a computer for e-mail.
He could do occasional group e-mails, and post out pictures as attachments. And we could e-mail him back our own personal e-mails, or cc the whole group.
But a blog, using one of the many free software programs available online, was the perfect solution. Friends and family can check in as they like, and view pictures and posts. If he wanted, he could post video or sound files as well. Plus there's something very attractive about the colourful, clean design of weblogs (and usually, a plethora of design templates to choose from, which make your blog look like you really know your web design languages, when all you need to be able to do is roll a mouse and click).
Friends can post comments on the site as well, which makes the experience more like a group chat among pals. A blog is an always-on conversation with your readers, be they friends and family, or the wider web world.
No sooner had I begun to rethink blogs and their uses than a friend e-mailed to say she was thinking about using a blog for the news section of her website and asking for advice on blog programs.
Oddly enough, that was exactly what was on my mind, too. I'd just set up a website that had a news section and quickly realised a plain old html website page was going to be a major pain to update on a regular basis. I'd have to call up the original file in a word processing program, add in the news item, set it all into the standard format for the site, then start up a file transfer program, upload the file, and check to make sure everything was in working order on the page.
With a blog, I needn't do anything more than open up a browser page, click the button to add a new post, type it in, and click once more to publish it. In seconds, it's on the site, automatically formatted. All the posts get archived automatically too. So yes, a weblog works perfectly as a dynamic news section of a static website. You can see mine at http://sm.cavalier talk.com/news.htm.
I used the free software provided by Blogger (www.blogger.com), which has undergone a major overhaul since being bought by Google, and is now a very elegant and easy to use program. This is a contrast with the last time I tried it two or three years ago, when you really needed to be fairly tech-adept to set up a Blogger weblog.
I know blogs are getting big in teaching, too, and as a workgroup collaboration tool, and - well, the possibilities are limitless, really. If you've never tried one of these programs, test-drive a Blogger site and see if it doesn't get you thinking. After all, if you hate it you can simply delete it. But you might find that, like all good technology ideas, a blog solves a problem you didn't know you had.
