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| Types of Blog |
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Blogs can be represented into three broad categories:
1.1 Personal
The author or blogger (we shall use this term from now on to represent the
author of the blog) maintains a diary style of events logged on a webpage,
he places into it commentaries of experience. To retain viewer attention and
appeal the blogger places images, links to relevant sites and very
importantly options for readers to leave their comments.
A personal blog can
be based on a specific event, or on a person’s view of a subject, some
bloggers maintain blogs stating their day to day life, since reading content
that is unique and non-commercial is appealing to a lot of internet users,
even a personal diary gets a good number of visitors, since blogs are
content rich (lot of readable original text), they get a search engines
attention when a person does a search on the internet based on the blog’s
topic.
A blogger has to start with researching through a lot of existing blog
sites, and familiarize himself with the ideas implanted by different
bloggers to get the interest and affection of readers, with the advent of
youtube.com and yahoo videos and many video host’s who relay video into your
website, bloggers have started adding the video element to their blogs.
A personal blog can be used for giving a unique experience to the visitor
based entirely on your personal perspective.
A few personal blogs are listed below for your reference – have a peek into
them if you want to know how a blog looks like or continue reading and check
later. You must come back to the guide, as a lot more really interesting
ideas await you here:
1. http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia
2. http://www.photoblog.com/user/divna/2007/05/29
3. http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/
Personal blogs can be made based on any topic; you can either set up your
blog on free blog hosting sites which are later discussed in the method of
setting up your blog or you can register for your own domain name and
hosting plan at different rates, you can either create the layout and
structure of your blog yourself or you could ask someone with the required
knowledge to do it for you, but a blog is a personal blog when it is the
offspring idea of a person and does not focus on a selling perspective. |
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Continue reading ‘creating a blog – a guide’ brought to you free by the IT
education section of calicutnet.com. Further we shall be discussing in
detail the next two types of blogs which are corporate and educational.
1.2 Corporate
Corporate blog is maintained by an organization, generally it acts like a
discussion board maintained by the company to either make a conversation
zone within the organization or to create a discussion zone between the
organization and its customers, in addition to the discussion board, the
corporate blog archives most of the content that is added into the main
website at different times and changed when new content was posted into the
site, leaving a better impression for the search engines looking for content
rich sites. Once an organization is able to attract a higher level of
interest to its blog it uses this area to place advertisements for products
or services relevant to the topic in focus.
Most commercial web sites update their websites often, as a result of which
there are chances of losing certain important information which was posted
on the site at various stages, maintaining a blog for a commercial
website assures that any data that has been posted on to the site remains
intact and available to web users searching for similar information.
The size and variety of topics on a corporate blog changes with the nature
of organizations, if it is an organization like Google or Microsoft they
have an entire range of weblogs with a variety of topics, into which
opinions and ideas are posted by 100’s or 1000’s of people and with feedback
from outside the organization sources. Whereas a smaller organization which
is not into the IT industry and less technical requirements has a smaller blog consisting of less than 10 pages at most. Depending on the size of blog
the number of people involved in maintaining it also changes, a large
organization as the examples mentioned above may have a lot of
administrators and moderators to continuously monitor their blog and a
smaller corporate blog is maintained by the webmaster of the site or the
chief of the organization.
The general practice followed by a corporate website is to intake feedback
from the readers but only selected feedbacks are posted back into the blog
and is regularly monitored, this is done to contain the size of the blog and
to make it interesting for the readers.
The advantages of having a corporate blog are:
1. Search Engine Rankings – Search engines list sites with more content in
the top of the search results, so websites having a blog feature have more
chances for an upper position than those without.
2. Company Image – To have a blog means you are moving with the technology,
making your company image stronger in the minds of customers, check the
comment here:
Guy Says:
May 12th, 2007 at 11:02 am
• I host six sites with Bluehost and will continue to not only use them
myself but recommend my friends. BH is truly excellent value for money,
offering a lot more than every other host of even far higher prices (over
10x!) do. But the customer service is really useful, the advisors
knowledgeable and helpful. And the CEO writes an honest blog, which I
appreciate My old host tried to stop my canceling my upgrading my account to
a similar package to with BH, but I figured why should I host with a company
which is always playing catch-up? Thanks for the great service. (source :
http://www.mattheaton.com this is the corporate blog of Bluehost.com)
3. Search Engine Optimization – when it comes to doing an SEO on your site,
you have to be careful not to offend your customers with the keywords
floating around everywhere on your site, but having a blog means, you can
strategically choose your keywords and develop on them in your blog.
4. Search Engine Visibility – One of the main elements of a blog is links-
in and out, we shall discuss links in the elements of a blog, and so having
your blog linked in from a variety of sources can send your website’s
ranking high.
One of the major differences between the Personal blog and a corporate blog
is personal blogs can be hosted on free blog hosting sites, but, it would be
inappropriate to host a corporate blog on free web space.
The following is a list of interesting corporate blogs; have a quick look
and come back to ‘creating a blog – a guide’ brought to you free by the IT
education section of calicutnet.com. This guide gives you all the knowledge
you need to kick start a lively and appealing blog of your own, you must
familiarize yourself to the design practices and methods by visiting as many
blogs as you can before you set out to create your own blog.
1. http://www.mattheaton.com
2. http://www.ysearchblog.com
Tips: Always make sure your corporate blog is honest and up to date, leaving
a corporate blog for good once it is made, may leave a ‘not efficient’
impression.
Allow space for user comments, but don’t permit direct publishing, always
review your comments before you publish them.
1.3 Educational
The third and last type of blog that we shall be discussing in this guide is
the educational blog. The educational blogs are created mainly as a
discussion area in which the author is an expert about the topic that is
being blogged, the author writes exclusively about the topic and includes
pictures and links to other sites and regularly updates the blog.
Since a blog is text extensive and contain less effects and large size
files, Blogs are used for expertise communication. The format of a blog
makes it easy to load and very useful for the student or the reader to
continuously read and update himself on the topic.
The links that are shown below are of educational blog sites, some large
scale educational blogs are maintained by different departments within a
university or school. If you check the internet you can see educational
blogs on just about any topic, from technical topics, like programming,
designing to subjects of art like photography, painting, musical instruments
etc.
If you have a passion and expertise in any particular area you could start
your own blog on it and if you make it specific to teaching then the chances
are you shall have a high number of visitors.
1. http://www.stevendkrause.com/academic/blog
2. http://www.acrlblog.org
3. http://www.2dayblog.com
The above three are the most commonly seen types of blogs on the internet,
but the concept of blog is branching out into many more areas now, there are
photo blogs, where the focus is on the photographs and the text is just
commentary on the photographs, then there are video blogs where videos are
streamed in from video hosting sites like youtube.com and yahoo videos.
To create a blog and have visitors regularly come back to you, you need to
know why people read a blog and who are the type of people interested in
reading a blog. Also, how you can make sure that you meet the requirements of
the people and keep them come back to you. The area’s we have covered till
now has shown you the possibilities that you can explore in the area of blogging.
Now we shall get on to the hands on, you are reading ‘creating a blog – a guide’, brought to you free by calicutnet.com IT education, this
guide contains all the knowledge you need to start successful blogging.
Next :
Why do people visit a blog page |
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