So what’s a blog anyway?
July 8th, 2004 by Todd Van Hoosear
Most of our clients are pretty tech savvy–after all, we ARE a tech PR agency. But there are still a lot of folks out there who don’t understand blogs. And then there’s the whole RSS thing. There’s a great overview on the Contentious Weblog. But to get you started, think in terms of a typical syndicated newspaper cartoon strip, say, “Garfield.”
- Garfield is the “blog”, and
- Jim Davis is the “blogger,”
- who updates the blog with a new “post” (i.e., cartoon) every day,
- which is distributed (or syndicated) by Universal Press Syndicate, the “RSS feed” or “webfeed.”
The major difference, beside the obvious medium of communication (web vs. print), is that (typically as of yet) no money changes hands when you blog. That may well change as the medium gets more sophisticated.
This entry was posted on Thursday, July 8th, 2004 at 2:53 pm and is filed under PR. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
July 9th, 2004 at 3:17 pm
Companies that do not blog will die a slow painful death. Blog or perish!
July 9th, 2004 at 3:33 pm
Little drastic “Optimist,” but once Microsoft does it others do follow.
For my clients, these opt-in news and opinion delivery channels are welcomed by audiences that are flooded in e-mail. Think of these as a distributable “What’s New” for a Web site. It leverages the Web’s most valuable asset, content, and makes displaying high-quality relevant news on a Web site easy. RSS and blogs can also be the basis for additional content distribution services or even commercial offers.
September 21st, 2004 at 3:55 pm
This analogy breaks down a bit when you focus on the technology. RSS, technically, at least as we understand it, is simply a format for presenting information in a consistent manner, similar to what HTML is to the Web–a markup language (based on XML for you acronym lovers). The actual distribution process is still handled by good ol’ HTTP (the same protocol you use to send HTML code to your Web browser). But you get the idea. Hopefully.