February 01, 2004

Ever toiled with the idea of writing your own WebLog? So did I..

How difficult is it really to write a weblog and what do you write? What is an RSS feed? These and many more questions were answered by Robin and Mihai, helping a 'newbee' to blogging to make good use of an outstanding offer: expert space at Kolabora and Movable type.

What is Movable Type?

Six Apart's powerful, customisable publishing system which installs on web servers to enable individuals or organizations to manage and update weblogs, journals, and frequently-updated website content.

Also I needed to get to know RSS feeds. What is RSS?

RSS is a format for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites, including major news sites like Wired, news-oriented community sites like Slashdot, and personal weblogs. But it's not just for news. Pretty much anything that can be broken down into discrete items can be syndicated via RSS: the "recent changes" page of a wiki, a changelog of CVS checkins, even the revision history of a book. Once information about each item is in RSS format, an RSS-aware program can check the feed for changes and react to the changes in an appropriate way. RSS-aware programs called news aggregators are popular in the weblogging community. Many weblogs make content available in RSS. A news aggregator can help you keep up with all your favorite weblogs by checking their RSS feeds and displaying new items from each of them.

Robin showed me how to subscribe to a weblog reader, a so-called RSS Aggregator bloglines and he demonstrated how to feed Bloglines' search engine with the RSS Aggregator URL, which you can get by right-hand-clicking on the RSS feed button and then select 'copy shortcut'.

There are numerous aggregators and you will find a list of RSS Aggregators on the Kolabora homepage. If you scroll down to the very bottom of this long home page, you will find this link: RSS - Subscribe to these news through your RSS newsreader - if you pause your mouse on top of this link a list of aggregators will display. Many are free of charge.

Another means of reading new bloglets is an email subscription: You can put your email address into the 'KOLABORA Email updates' field found on the homepage of Kolabora on the top right hand side. After subscribing you will receive an email each morning about new entries in the forum of Kolabora plus all of the other RSS feeds which Kolabora has subscribed to. This email is being forwarded by bloglet. Very nice indeed.

What should be written into a weblog? This is the question I asked Robin and he explained it nicely:

Some use their weblogs as a personal diary, writing content from scratch. Others re-publish what is already written, acting as a filter for information about certain subjects.

How can I make good use of this free space Robin and Mihai make available to experts at Kolabora at no further costs? Basically I would like to do just this, what it is meant to be: a personal information service which benefits others.

How will I capture the interest of my reading audience?

a) A filter for news items all around web-conferencing, specialising on German news items, providing summaries in English if needed and I would like to keep watching the German market for new products/ new technologies. Not that I am a keen German myself... but I happen to speak this language and feel this is how I could be useful. Watch for the story about foroso... coming soon

b) When it comes to writing a weblog completely from scratch I would like to concentrate on the use of webconferencing in daily life. Always on the look-out for the killer application, I would like to focus on business models of successful implementations and its challenges. How is this great tool being used already and what future models of presentation/ collaboration may be realised.

c) Finally you will find news about WebTrain - the technology I am using right now and their extraordinary journey. I will tell you more about their chief developer, a walking genius, who has written all of the 6 mill lines of programming code single handed. There will also be news items about WebTrain's partnerships and resellers as well as releases of new versions and much more.

I am hereby accepting the offer of Kolabora to join them as an active member in their quest to create a platform that not only talks about collaboration but also does it.

This will be my small contribution.

Posted on February 01, 2004 at 04:41 PM

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