SOFTWARE
People used to be surprised that I didn't have a weblog. I regularly posted links with short comments to mailing lists and conferences like the Well. I contributed items to Justin Hall's zine, bud.com. But my HTML skills were stuck back in 1995, so the idea of updating my site a few times a week didn't seem realistic.
Finally, Idecided to get up to date and used Blogger to start my weblog, Tiger Beat (www.well.com/~srhodes). I was surprised at how easy it was to set up a weblog with automatic archives, and I posted five items on the first day. To set up the software, you just register at Blogger, specify the site you want to publish your idea chunks on, and the Web page is created. To add daily comments, just sign in at Blogger's Web page.
Blogger also lets you choose from several templates, and its Blogspot feature provides free hosting for people who don't yet have their own Web sites. Blogger Pro has additional features for a fee, including the ability to post via email and to add images and RSS output in XML for easy syndication through services like My Netscape (my.netscape.com). The new version also lets users coming to your site add their feedback to any post.
There are other free tools to maintain a weblog, including Pitas (www.pitas.com), GrokSoup (www.groksoup.com), and Dave Winer's Weblogs.com. But Blogger has the most flexibility and allows me to update my weblog at the site while hosting it in my space on the Well. I've used Blogger to revive sfblog (www.sfbg.com/sfblog), the weblog of the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the weekly newspaper where I'm online editor. The team function allows anyone on the staff to easily publish on the site.
People are also using Blogger's software to create an astonishing range of weblogs - from the traditional link- and commentary-style sites to teen-penned journals. By early October, 300 new blogs were being created each day, and a total of 45,000 have been put up since Blogger launched in August 1999. When you go into your weblog, you'll see a list of blogs that were updated in the previous minute or so, and you can click to view the 10 most recent creations. There are also links to articles like Rebecca Blood's excellent history of weblogs (www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html).
The news may be dominated by stories detailing the woes of Internet companies, but tools like Blogger put the fun back into creating things on the largest human network in existence.
Blogger: free if you link back to the site. Pyra: www.blogger.com.
STREET CRED
Bomb Squad
Behind the Green Doerr
Roll Call
Diverting the Audio Stream
Sole of a New Machine
On-Line Skating
(Re)Seeing Digital
ReadMe
Music
The Eyes Have It
Lost in the Scramble
Young, Fast, and Genetically Damaged
Just Outta Beta
Megatuneage
Bloggin' On
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