Blogs

You have probably heard the buzz word blogging, it has even featured in television advertisements locally and has gone from being a grassroots movement to and established mainstream practice with larger forward thinking companies making use of the service.

Wikipedia gives us the following definition:

A blog (a portmanteau of web log) is a website where entries are commonly displayed in reverse chronological order. "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (artlog), photographs (photoblog), sketchblog, videos (vlog), music (MP3 blog), audio (podcasting) are part of a wider network of social media. Micro-blogging is another type of blogging which consists of blogs with very short posts.

As of December 2007, blog search engine Technorati was tracking more than 112 million blogs. http://en.wikipedia.org

The modern blog has been derived and is an evolution of the online diary, it has never been easier to get your opinions out there. Blogs have allowed the average person or small company to enjoy the same privileges as traditional publishers in an online space. We now have an array topical blogs publishing content on Travel, sport, technology, religion, business or just about any other topic you can think of.

In South Africa the community is still relatively small, but growing due in part to blog aggregators such as Amatomu and new boys on the block Afrigator, a blog aggregator allows for the aggregation of vast amounts of posts to be compiled and sorted, so that this information is available in neat little bundles.

From a business perspective companies will be able to grow a stronger relationship with their target audience. It allows you the opportunity to position yourself as an expert in your field, builds better customer and media relations allows for internal collaboration and knowledge management.

Test the waters with new products or services and rank higher with search engines since Google rewards websites that are regularly updated, have many inbound links and are rich in relevant and topical content.

Sightings will set-up, design and host your corporate blog and provide advise on how to optimize its performance. We make use of the very popular Wordpress a stable and very robust platform. Contact us today to setup a consultation to discuss how this technology can improve your business and be sure to vist Sightings blog.