Tuesday, December 5, 2006

Getting this hosted blogger account up

My interests in channels like RSS started while evaluating 'push' and 'pull' technologies for IBM (somewhere in the '96-'97 timeframe). This deviated into two distinct channels - 1) that became publish and subscribe, messaging - data - and business processing/logic between BIG service architectures - machine to machine or service to service, and 2) those applications delivering more and more updated content to people (or rather to the interface / program receiving the 'subscribed' updated content).

  • Today's RSS, that's gained tremendous response in the last few years (the next generation up from Backweb or Pointcast) is a now mainstream 'anonymous' 'opt-in', like taking your seasonal catalog or weekly flyer. Essentially, I believe that the technology just had to wait until there was a better channel to 'categorize' active data feeds (the changing... up to date... real side of life from real people.... and a way for marketing to extend its' true creative hand into active marketing)
  • With early push and pull technology, the updates and interfaces were obnoxious, always coming up at the wrong time, and each competing to gain eyeshare and mindshare in the consumers' eye - there were just too many even if you only had a few auto-updaters. Today by contrast RSS is organized and categorized via special readers, or much more likely - within the browsers themselves ---- live bookmarks they call them.
Blogs today are one of the main sources of RSS/Atom 'feeds' but what they represent to websites is critical. I've written a dozen articles evangelizing the use of blogs, primarily for special support, but their value to your visibility related to search engineering was never made more clear to me as when I started this blog on Google's blogger.com.

  • There are a lot of definitions of what a blog is today... all agree it is chronological, proceeding latest to prior... and that the site today often supports each posting with a separate page attached to a main body startup page with a limited (5-15 or aweek or a month) number of entries. There is archive support built into this always 'shifting' page, and often also the ability to add additional functionality in the sidebars. Lastly, most blogs support external ATOM and/or RSS feeds.
  • There are a number of key things that blogs do for any company's search efforts, but the most important thing is that while Google often makes you think that they distinguish between 'web sites' (that often don't change much monthly) and 'blogs' (that may change and be re-published up to several times per day)...it may not just be so. Blogs are typically content packed entries that literally invite feedback and commentary - isn't that just perfect spider food? .... hot and current but less overall 'flavored' compared to what we call news or advertising.
Most important is that when you start a Blogger.com account, you realize where Google is eventually going with this. They don't seem to 'judge' a difference.... they say, in fact, I quote:

  • " A blog is your easy-to-use web site, where you can quickly post thoughts, interact with people, and more. All for FREE.
... notice they said a blog is a website... or maybe that was just 'figurative' speaking ?

Lastly on the SoapBox for blogs... major search engines like Google and Technorati have a more aggressive schedule for updating indexes, and index keywords like blogs with Technorati tags. There a lot of blogs but it's small compared to the number of websites, and blogs are chronologically based (not often a long set of changes in old posting). Blogs also have separate but very coordinated channels for submitting blog updates and RSS feeds.

OK... that should be enough.... ready to RSS ? .... consider a weekly specials update ! Best luck to all...


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posted by SearchEngineer_eBizGuru @ 2:19 AM 0 Comments