what use are blogs as communication devices? If you want to inform someone of an opinion you may have on a topic - they need to go to your blog to see it.
that is a ridiculous concept.
stick to emails I reckon.
September 28, 2007 at 10:42 am (Uncategorized)
what use are blogs as communication devices? If you want to inform someone of an opinion you may have on a topic - they need to go to your blog to see it.
that is a ridiculous concept.
stick to emails I reckon.
Rebecca said,
September 28, 2007 at 12:46 pm
I can see why you might think at this stage of the 23 Things that blogs seem pointless. In isolation, they are; having to return to a blog daily just to see if a new post has been added seems to suck up time that we really don’t have available to us.
However, we are only just beginning in this program to see what blogs can do. Writing a blog and commenting on other people’s blogs is just the tip of the iceberg. Week 5 (no details available yet) is about how to use a feed reader to subscribe to a blog. This service allows readers of your blog to be notified through their browser when you add a new post, negating the need to send an email to friends and family just to tell them to look at your blog!
I don’t want to encourage you to jump the gun on this activity yet when the help guides aren’t on the site yet, so in the meantime, here’s a taste of another way that a blog can act as a communication tool. Have a look at the bottom right-hand corner of the Swinburne Library website. There you’ll see links to the latest entries from the Swinburne Library blog. Placing links to your blog’s new posts on a frequently-used website can help to communicate news and updates faster and more efficiently than asking your webmaster to change the main website (if the message is urgent, you may not have time for this process).
Tony said,
September 28, 2007 at 2:25 pm
But if you have an interesting opinion, or an interesting way of writing it, people will come to your blog to read it.
danamckay said,
September 28, 2007 at 2:49 pm
Hi Trees,
I can understand your frustration at this thing that doesn’t make any sense to you, but I hope I can help you understand what people might use blogs for (even if they are not that useful to you). Email is great for communication between people who know each other, or who at least know each others’ email addresses. For an email to work, though, you have to know the email address of everyone who might want to read the email (or hope that your email gets passed on). Blogs also let you do include pictures (and music, and video, and depending on your email software, links) in a way that email doesn’t, and blogs have fewer ways to fail technically than email does (send fails, receive fails, email gets routed to spam). This makes a blog a popular choice for things like holiday diaries, where including maps and pictures makes it easier to tell a story, and people are less dependent on dodgy email software in languages they don’t understand in internet cafes charging $8/minute.
The real advantage of a blog over email, though, is the possibility of reaching an audience you might not even know are interested. In the library world this might mean reaching patrons whose specific interests you do not know, and telling them something interesting to them, or inviting discussion from library patrons (whose email addresses may not form part of their library records) about things that affect them. Some of this you can do with a website, but websites tend to be more formal, and communication flows in only one direction (and they can require a lot more technical expertise than a blog to set up).
In week 5 of 23 Things we’re going to look at software that means people don’t have to go to your blog to read it, but can instead have it sent to them sort of like email, so that might help this blogging thing make more sense too.
Now, none of these advantages might be useful to you–and that’s okay, not everyone has a use for these kinds of things. I do hope my (rather long winded) comment has helped you see why other people might find blogs useful, though.
new blogger said,
September 28, 2007 at 3:32 pm
Trees from Wood,
I understand what you mean and I partly agree with you. Yet!!!!
I think blogs are good and very informative, but honestly I don’t have the time and energy to read blogs or maintain one. When I am at work, if it is work related and if it will benefit my work then yes! If it is a friends blog then maybe!!
But when you work 8 hrs a day on the computer you don’t want to spend anymore time on the computer reading and writing blogs. I respect the opinion of others who love blogging and may not agree with my opinion but this is just my opinion.
I would consider blogging to be similar to maintaining a person diary - some may and some may not have one. It is a personal preference which will not and should not reflect the personality of the person.
Why blog? « Dana’s user experience blog said,
October 1, 2007 at 5:34 pm
[...] 2007 Uncategorized One of my 23 Things compatriots has recently asked a very good question: What’s the use of blogs? Why, he or she asks, should we not just share our opinions with each other using [...]
Feeding time, or why I won’t bother you for weeks « Libodyssey said,
January 18, 2008 at 11:26 am
[...] program here at Swinburne, the blogger known as Trees from the Wood asked a very sensible question: What’s the use of blogs? My response was that, in isolation, they probably aren’t very useful at all. Who has time to [...]