Words: Pete Ashton
Illustration: Raymond Weekes
Hi, I’m Pete Ashton and I’ve been messing about with weblogs for years now. After The Guardian went and gave one of my blogs a fancy media award Nick at 4Talent magazine asked if I’d write this masterclass on running a weblog. Since the blog in question was Created in Birmingham (now run by Chris Unitt), linking up Birmingham’s creative and cultural communities, and that I do a fair bit of consulting and evangelising about the wonderful world of blogging, it seemed like a no-brainer really. So here goes.
The thing is I write for blogs, not those strange magazine things. How do you link to other stuff in a magazine? Where do the comments go? I’m sure it’s a perfectly valid form of communication but I’m really not at home there. I’m more comfortable on a blog: you wouldn’t ask a filmmaker to communicate through the medium of interpretive dance, would you?
Next in the series: the social internet >
Tags: award, birmingham, blogging, creative, magazine, print
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April 10, 2008 at 10:40 am
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April 10, 2008 at 10:02 am
ncarson
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(from Pete) An RSS feed is simply another representation of your blog that can be processed by a computer program. This makes it easier to monitor lots of blogs from one place. An example you might be familiar with is your Facebook News Feed aggregating all your friends’ activities into one place, so you don’t have to visit all their individual profiles. I’d recommend google.com/reader or bloglines.com.
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April 10, 2008 at 3:25 pm
nick lockey
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What I love about blogging is the ability to hyperlink directly to all of the things you want to reference so people can go and check them out for themselves. It cuts out all the waffle and just lets you get on with the point you want to make without having to wade through loads of descriptions about the stuff that’s gone before.
I guess blogs feels more like a “3D” experience than the “flat” experience of consuming stuff in print. Suddenly the things you read and write about exist in the context of tons of other stuff which, in turn, exist in their own contexts too. The ability to follow different chains of thought, to contribute to a conversation and to watch how one opinion or insight can impact on a whole bunch of other things too really differentiates blogging from print journalism.
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