If in blogging doubt, start here

‘Do not adjust your screen’ � this is a blog.

In case you are not clued-up on the blogosphere I will try to briefly and concisely outline some of the basics:

Blogs : weB-LOGS
The blog is the relatively new face of much of the web. In the fifteen years or so that the World Wide Web (WWW) has been with us, pretty much everything that has been conventionally published, has also been published, in one way or another, on the web. Of course the internet goes back much further and is often academically traced back to the ‘interesting times’ of the second world war. The web that we know, was a new layer of technology on the net that includes the bells and whistles to make cyberspace accessible and entertaining to us mere mortals.

Initially much of the web has been translations and excerpts of conventionally produced information. Translation into cyberspace in other words.

The infra structure and general acceptance of the web has gone ballistic. I think it is suggested that it was a US presidential aid who half a centaury ago, or there about, said “if it ain’t on tv, it doesn’t exist” � we are not far away from “if it ain’t on the web, it doesn’t exist”

Companies and individuals are placing ‘content’ online. It has become easier to publish to the internet – and automatically be listed in major search engines and be visited by individuals and ‘bots’ (like robots, only purely computer programs that, virtually invisible to the un-equiped eye, roam the breadth and depth of the net ) � than it so often is to find a pen that actually writes.

Typically, blogs are updated relatively frequently. Some are well organized relatively straight-forward to navigate. Many are not.

If you are used to the conventional top-down hierarchical structure of most websites, or the predominantly linear nature of conventional publications, you will probably find some of what the blogosphere (the collective virtual space of inter-connected blog-type sites on the internet) has to offer down right confuddeling.

There is two important things about blogging:
1. You can publish whatever you like
2. You can read whatever you like
There is a lot to be said for the difference between ‘can’ and ’should’ but I will discuss that elsewhere. There is also a tremendous amount I would like to say about the phenomena of blogging but for now I want to focus on just an issue or two concerning the idea of ‘navigation’ and ’structure’.

(You can build your own blog from scratch, get your friendly neighborhood ‘geek’ to set one up for you or take the easy route and simply join one of the very popular communal blogs. It�s a bit like having to choose between the frontier-lifestyle, getting a condo, or taking a flat in an apartment block, I prefer the relative piece and quite afforded me when tending my own fields, as opposed to the noise of neighbors and prescriptive ’styling’ of the cyberban metropolis sites. Of course we can visit and occupy various sites virtually simultaneously.)

Linear:
Remember they taught you at school that stories, letters etc. usually have a beginning a middle and an end. (Old-hat, and BORING)

Hierarchical:
But what if you don’t want to read the whole thing? Well the author may divide it into sections, which are further subdivided, and give you a neat table of contents which you can use to find the exact tid-bit you are interested in. This is obviously not linear anymore (and somewhat contrived). The idea is that the viewer will arrive at the top and work their way down, but what if they don’t? What if they arrive at the latest, freshest part of the information first?

Hyper-threaded:
Imagine a grid of dots. Each dot is a piece of information, typically a document. There are many kind of grids, perhaps the simplest is what is often referred to as a table, the good old Cartesian grid, with height and width, a two dimensional grid in other words. For example, the one dimension may be time, the other may be theme. This is I think the most obvious way to organize personal blogs.

Usually you will be able to see, often in a side-bar (distinct separate column on the side of a page) a list of categories into which entries have been ‘filed’, how hierarchical these categories are depend on the author. You will usually also be able, probably via the same sidebar, to go back in time to visit older entries usually under the heading archives.

But, and this is an important ‘but’, you the viewer, may be allowed to comment on any of these ‘posts’, regardless of how you arrived at the relevant document. Your comment may be indefinitely attached to this post, publicly, thus making you a co-author of that dot in the bigger grid. And your comment will probably be linked to either your own, or other dots on the grid.

Imagine all the lines being drawn between such dots, consider also that the blog-oriented search-engine Technorati is currently keeping an algorithmic eye on most everything happening on roughly 20 million individual blogs worldwide, drawing new lines to each of the posts in each of those blogs almost instantaneously, and that is still just the tip of the iceberg. Remember our neat little Cartesian, or recta-linear grid? Yes?

Good, because its gone, doesn’t exist anymore, sorry if you missed it.

(as they say in the classics, to be continued� (suggestion: in the meantime consider looking at front-end, relatively simple posts with only subtle meta-textual references, or backend, for more of the gory technical details, or personal, for a bit more about me � if on the other hand, you want to try and escape this whole blog thing consider going here.)