A coffee and a blog for breakfast
How do you start your day? Coffee, tea or fresh OJ? Perhaps a slice of toast and the morning paper? For a lot of the population, it’s not only the morning wake-up routine, but it’s also their chance to get their daily dose of news and events.
Newspapers are still a fresh and consistent source of local and regional news and events, with their wide range of columns and inserts, but (you *knew* there was a ‘but’ coming, didn’t you?) newspapers are edited for the general population, with general interest and general topics that generally please everyone…
Let me show you a way to pick and choose your own topics of interest from around the world, and roll-your-own newspaper, so that you can start the day with your perfect selection of news, columns, and advice - and begin your day with coffee and a blog for breakfast.
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OK, so what is a blog?
In the ‘olden days’ (about 5 years ago!), when someone kept a diary of their daily thoughts on the Internet, it was called a ‘weblog’ - and in recent times, the word weblog has simply been shortened to just ‘blog’.
The good news is that blogs have been evolving in style as well as in name in recent years, and now blogs aren’t limited to simply following someone’s teeth brushing habits - they now cover the gamut from hard and fast news blogs, through to fan-based cooking or movie blogs, and all the way to deep-thinking feature-length blogs by ’serious’ writers. The even better news is that blogs cover just about every topic known to mankind: just when you thought you were the only person in the world who loves ’something’, you can be sure that there’s already someone or some group who also share your unique passions and interests, and have already devoted a blog to the latest news/events/happenings surrounding that unique interest. Essentially, even though you thought your unique tastes and interests were one in a million, the internet lets you find those other 1000 people from around the world who also love what you love - and blogs are one way of keeping you up to date.
Three subtle but important features also help to define ‘what is a blog’: the first is that the articles/stories/recipies, etc of the blog are presented in backwards order, which is helpful, since it then lets the most recent entry/post/article/recipe float to the top of the site, so that’s the first thing you see when you visit. The second feature is that all blogs have what’s called an RSS feed - essentially, it’s a news feed - a way of keeping up to date with the blog without having to visit it every day - I’ll explain more in a second. And the third subtle feature of hat makes a blog and blog is that it will often have the ability to add comments to each article/post/recipe/etc - so that you and other readers of the blog can leave your thoughts or improvements, or simply start an argument online. The author of the blog can respond, and assist people, or can intervene to break up the flame wars if required. But, in general, the ability to leave comments makes the blog able to be a two-way conversation, rather than simply just a one-way author-to-reader conversation.
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How do I find good blogs?
Finding blogs is not the problem: finding *good* blogs is. By that, I mean that many blogs might be on the topic you love, but aren’t updated, like, ever; or sometimes blogs start on the topic you love, but slowly migrate to a different topic over time. The direction and content of the blog is all in the hands of the blog author, so it’s like your favourite journalist going from the sports section to the the IT section, often with the same weird results.
For starters, there are many sites with list other good blogs - in fact, there are sites which list *sites* that list good blogs, but on the Internet, anything is possible. To start somewhere, I’d head to a great resource first: http://alltop.com It’s a directory of ‘decent’ blogs, based around over 100 topic areas - you’re sure to find a topic area that’s close your your personal area of interest. It covers culture, sports, people, business, ‘geekery’, as well as geographical areas, although not Australia at this stage, but no doubt soon.
Within Australia only, the web site http://theaustralianindex.com lists over 3000 blogs, letting you drill down into categories, or simply search for a topic you like.
Then there’s Google - no matter what you search for, there’s a high chance that half of the web sites it finds are in fact blogs. That’s because blogs are pure content, and Google *loves* content. Keep an eye out for a ‘RSS feed’ or ‘Subscribe’ button, and you know you’ll be able to have the blogs alert *you* of updates…
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How do I keep up to date with them?
Ah, the $64,000 question. As above, one of the defining features of a blog is that little ‘RSS feed’ button. (RSS stands for ‘really simple syndication’ - syndication as in selling the TV show M.A.S.H. to over 200 TV networks each year for the last 30 years!) The RSS Button may appear on the site itself, as the ’standard’ orange icon, or it may appear in your browser’s address bar, when your browser detects a news feed on that site.
Once you click on an RSS Button, your browser will ask you what to do with that feed. It’s exactly like subscribing to Podcasts, and for the very first one, choosing iTunes as your player of choice for all future Podcasts. You can always choose to add the news feed to your browser: Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer will all let you add RSS Bookmarks. Or you may use an online New Reading web site like Google Reader (http://www.google.com/reader) to store your favourite blog news. OR, you might choose to use a very iTunes-like program on your own computer. This is my favourite, as it lets me sort my blogs that I read into folders of similar topics: design, business, marketing, etc. The most popular programs for reading blog news feeds are both from http://newsgator.com - scroll down to ‘Free News Readers’, and choose either FeedDemon for PCs, or NetNewsWire for Macs.
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Most days, I follow about 200 blogs, with some in there just for fun, while other blogs are the little nuggets of advice or the little insights that make learning and keeping up to date with the world so much fun. If I’m not billing a client, I’m ‘researching’ by reading my blogs: it’s the number one way I stay informed about news, trends and techniques out there in the rest of the world.
So I’d encourage you to keep an eye out for blogs of interest to you, and don’t be afraid to hit that ‘RSS Feed’ button - you never know how well it’ll go down on a lazy Sunday morning: a good coffee, some marmalade toast, and a good blog - sunny side up, of course.
AB out
