So one question is what is BlogSpace. Is it the technology, the writing style or who's doing the writing. In part I think it's all three. Here are some of my answers to questions from BrettShand. -- AdamShand
- Bloggers are "journalists" - in the widest sense.
I'd agree with that in the "widest sense". Originally Blogs were "web logs", simple lists of links of what were cool that day. Many slowly evolved into being personal commentary on things that were cool that day. However a lot of blogs that you see on places like LiveJournal are basically just diaries and chronicals of that person's life and what they want to share.
- Bloggers are free (as in speech) and so independent of editing and production and advertising pressures. In the sense that any single person has free speech, yes. There are slowly becoming instances of blogs being used as part of corporate communication channels. Developers or other employees have been encouraged to have public blogs where they can talk about what they are working on etc. I think Macromedia does this and I know that Real (as in Real Video) has played with the idea.
Some people like DanGilmore use blogs as a tool for their journalistic writing.
- A blogger website has its information stored on a back end rather that than in standard html which needs to be updated.
Not necessarily true. Lots of software evolved to make blogging easier, but you can have (and I'm sure there are still a few around) a manually maintained blogs. It was the advent of free blog hosting sites like RadioUserland and LiveJournal which really triggered the widespread use of blogs. Of course everyone that's leet, hosts their own blog.
- Blogsites use XML to talk to the back end. Again not necesarily true. XML is a convenient (and trendy) way of storing data but has nothing to do with it being a blog.
The backend is not an SQL, but a specialised blog engine like this one. I presume there are others?
Again not necessarily true, using SQL or not doesn't really matter. There are lots of tools out there for blogging (and for weblogs which are sites more like Slashdot), I have some BlogSoftware listed on spack.
- Bloggers use a method of backlinks (which i cannot get my head around yet) which links one blogsite (part of blogspace) to another in some kind of self-replicative/recursive way. I just don't get what this is about. I undertand what the outcome is (sort of, maybe anyway) that blogsites "feed" off each other, but what is the process by which that is accomplished?
Everytime you click on a link and go to a different site, one of the things that your browser passes onto the site is called the referrer. For example, when you are viewing a page on EarthLight that points to Spack one of the things spack's Apache server logs is that the page which referred to it was www.earthlight.co.nz/spack.html. This is how the referrers logs are built by web statistics tools. Since most blogs are powered by CGI scripts that means that for every page you view a program is run. One of the things that the program can do is grab that referrer field and build it into the page. So now everytime you view a page the script shows you what sites other people have come from to view the page. It's useful because it tends to link similar discussions from multiple sites.
This is what you want(ed) WordUp to be isn't it?
Originally what I wanted WordUp to be is a site which (attempted) to seperate truth from opinion on political and social issues. The software to do what I wanted didn't exist though and I didn't have the energy to create it. So instead I created a MailList in the hopes of building the beginning a community around which I could do it later. Then I got distracted by PersonalTelco and it stayed a MailList.
The real answer to the question though is, yes. It's something like this that I'm probably going to try and turn WordUp into to try and make it a bit more interactive.
It is totally amazing. It seems the first really exciting thing to have happened on the net for a long time. this is for us.
No the first really exciting thing to happen on the net in a long time is PersonalTelco and other WirelessCommunities.
Blogging is cool, but bloggers tend to be a little narcissistic and self-involved (of course that's what we like about them, they spend all their spare time writing about themselves). What's really interesting in my opinion is how it's shaping the internet's searching tools (like how BackLinks mess with Google's ranking algorithm). As a whole blogs are a very powerful tool for spreading meme's.