Blogs
To us, a blog is much more than just a “personal journal.” A blog is a powerful marketing and branding tool that has the power to attract new business and a like-minded group of individuals. This definition obviously has many more implications than just a personal journal.
The main misconception regarding the definition of blogs comes from people that associate blogs with their content. More specifically from people that associate blogs with the content from one particular type of blog: personal blogs.
In other words, those people think that blogs are online diaries where people share their opinions, ramblings and personal events.
Wrong! That is just one of the things that you could do with a blog.
Today blogs are being used for all sorts of purposes. You have companies that use blogs to communicate and interact with customers and other stake holders, Newspapers that incorporated blogs to their main website to offer a new channel for their writers, Individuals that created a blog to share with the world their expertise on specific topics. And so on.
The features that make blogs different from other websites are:
• content is published in a chronological fashion
• content is updated regularly
• readers have the possibility to leave comments
• other blog authors can interact via trackbacks and pingbacks
• content is syndicated via RSS feeds
Keep in mind that it is the bundle of those features that should define a blog. An online forum could also offer an RSS feed for example, but that would not make it a blog.
