Uses of weblogs

 Uses of weblogs

1.Selection of material

A tremendous amount of content is published daily, in print as well as on the Web, piling on top of an already enormous amount of literature. As it is impossible to read even a fraction of it, people need means of filtering this output to find the material that will be most relevant to them.
Specialized publications, focusing on a particular domain of interest, provide one such means. A weblog operates in much the same manner. By reading a weblog that is edited by someone with interests similar to yours, you obtain a view of possibly relevant material without having to scan that person's sources. By combining the output of several chosen weblogs, you obtain a tailor-made publication that gives you more "personal relevance per unit volume" than any news source that caters to large demographics.

Since weblogs offer reviews of other material, they give an informative perspective on this material. Especially noteworthy material gets several mentions in different weblogs, along with views from each of their editors. This helps a reader gauge the significance of a particular document before even having to look at it. (This process is called triangulation.)

It is important to note that this filtering is a post-publication process, in sharp contrast to traditional publishing, where some content is culled at the source, never to be seen by anyone other than the editors. Thus this process can produce obscurity, but not censorship.

2.Personal knowledge management

A weblog that you edit also serves as a chronological record of your thoughts, references and other notes that could otherwise be lost or disorganized. When the need arises, you can either look up the weblog's contents using a search engine or visit it chronologically. Links between different posts that were put in by the author help trace threads of thought. Further discussion of this aspect can be found in My Blog, My Outboard Brain by Cory Doctorow and the next section on personal knowledge publishing.

3.Conversation

As I have already mentioned above, weblogs have evolved to become a medium for public discussion, in the process making the two-way nature of the Web much more prominent. A custom has evolved of linking to sources, paralleling the academic practice of citing other works. As a result, outsiders can more easily track the conversations and get involved in them.

4.Social networking

Weblogging affords an opportunity for social networking. Over time, weblog editors come to be known quite well by their regular readers; these personal ties may prove invaluable in giving them opportunities that they would not have had otherwise. For instance, it is not uncommon for a weblog editor to ask for, and receive, advice or help from his readers.
Networking among weblog editors is most evident in two aspects. First, hyperlinked conversations can be found everywhere and attest to the existence of a web of relationships. Second, blogrolling lists go further, essentially asserting that a particular weblogger has enough interest in another to regularly read what he or she has to say.

By collecting and examining data on what pages linking into their weblog were used to reach it (commonly known as referer lists), people often find like-minded people by following the links in the other direction. Thus they can connect with "who found them". Sam Ruby provides an account of this in Manufactured Serendipity.

5.Information routing

Taking a bird's eye view, we can see that the global system of weblogs has the beneficial effect of letting information circulate more freely across communities. The reader and editor of a weblog often do not belong to the same community or organization. Nothing prevents, say, an european architect from reading and quoting from an american gardener's weblog. Ideas, information and inspiration at the intersection of architecture and gardening can enter a community of architects thanks to such a relationship, which could be hard to establish and maintain outside the system of weblogs.