How to Create a Blogosphere — II

In this post I will consider under the hood components for each of these technologies. In another post, I'll consider human interface and client-side issues. Let's consider each technology in turn.

Technologies that connect people

Obviously, you need some sort of blog hosting software. These are almost too many of these to list at this stage. Blogger and Typepad/MovableType are two systems that come to mind as being both popular and very low cost. Further, they support open standards such as atom and the metaweblog api that make connecting to them easy. The key point here is popularity and ease of connection.

Virtually every system supports some form of content syndication using either RSS or atom, so that is not a deciding factor. Content syndication allows you to make your content available to be published and or processed by other sites. This effectively allows you to join a community without exerting any additional effort, a subtle but very significant point. The whole idea is to create a low cost network that makes it easy for everyone to connect.

Personally, I prefer a system that allows trackbacks. MovableType/Typepad was the first system to do this. Trackbacks allow you to write an entry in your own blog commenting on an entry in someone else's blog and have a link to your entry appear beneath the entry you are commenting on. Obviously, this type of automatic linking is very nice for creating connections among separate blog items and sites, i.e., community building.

Creating links between sites is in fact the central technology component for community building. The chief reason to syndicate your content is to get people to link to it and thereby draw additional, new people to you. Given the criticality of links, one might wonder if there are other methods than trackbacks for making links. Not every system supports trackbacks. Even on systems that support trackbacks, site owners may turn them off to prevent trackback spam.

As it turns out, there are a number of systems for tracking how sites link to each other. The best known of these (and also the most reliable) is technorati. To use technorati, you have to register your site. Technorati will then tell you which other sites are linking to you. You can then post these links beneath the relevant entries (with a little programming). You can also get it to list what you are linking to.

Why is it worthwhile to track which sites are linking to you and post them? After all, the value of the network is to get people to come to you, not to send people to other spots. Well, the fact that you get people to come to you derives from the fact that there is a network in the first place. Basically, you must link to other people to help create the network, or there will be no network to derive value from.

Getting “information” value from the blogosphere

So far, we have been talking about how to get value in terms of visitors from the network. The implicit assumption is that you have some product you want to sell or some information you want to spread, maybe both. Let's focus on the information end of this. Most people focus on directly monetizeable products, but the thing the web does most easily and directly is spread information. This holds for blogospheres, which are web-based. Even if you are selling products, people surf the web for information, and that is what will attract them into your blogosphere.

Here, the key thing is making your site searchable. A lot has been written on search engine optimization. I think most of that is wasted effort attempting to game a system that is really aiming to help people find relevant content. Search engines know that there are folks trying to game the system and so constantly change their evaluation criteria for determining what is relevant. It's a sort of arms race, and it is very easy to spend a lot of time and money optimizing your site, only to find the investment go down the tubes when the search engine changes its relevance evaluation algorithm.

Why not just focus on the content end of things in the first place? It will make your information more accessible for search engines and more accessible for people who ultimately wind up there. It will make people want to link to you without necessarily getting reciprocal links from you.

So, how to focus on content? Some of this goes back to writing 101. Produce a short summary of each blog post. Use relevant keywords. Add categories. You need a blogging system that makes all of this possible or will do some of it for you. In this regard, MovableType/Typepad beats blogger. The blogging system's search function should support searching on this meta-data. MovableType/Typepad is weak here because categories are not searchable. Blogger is even weaker because it does not support categories.

Thinking further in terms of technology, technorati, mentioned above, is optimized for searching blogs, offering many services for finding related content. Google is an obvious choice.

This has been a long post, and I have had ideas for writing other posts while at it, particularly about the make or buy decision. I'll leave these additional thoughts for later.