Publishing Your Information - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 284

Hosted Blogging Solutions

Blogs are mentioned throughout this topic. Short for Weblogs , they're very
popular ways for everyone from grade school kids to corporations to share
their opinions, insights, and news. You can set up a blog on your own
server, or you can get a hosted blogging solution. We'll look at both of them
here, starting with hosted blogging solutions. With hosted blogging, the
blog sotware is contained and maintained on a third party's server. You
can either have the blog itself at your own domain, or you can have the blog
hosted on the third party's Web site.

How is a blog diferent from a Web site? For the most part, blogs are Web
sites, but they're easier to maintain. You don't have to hand-code most blog
sites; there are templates available for the standard parts of your site—parts
like navigation and headers and footers. hat leaves you free to concentrate
on generating content—and free to change your entire site just by changing
the template. If you're allergic to HTML or you're nervous about moving
around and hand-coding a bunch of iles, blogging could be for you (espe-
cially hosted blogging).

How is blogging diferent from other information structures, such as a wiki,
that you maintain? A blog is ideal when you want to regularly publish news,
information, and links, with optional commentary. A wiki is more for a set
of information structures that you want to ill up.

For example, you might want to publish information on treatments for breast
cancer. You could publish a blog that would have running pointers to news
stories on breast cancer, press releases about new treatments, and commen-
tary on personal experience or research processes. On the other hand, you
could also publish a wiki, which might have pages for treatment, drugs, clini-
cal trials, and so on. he pages on the wiki would be illed in as the publisher
found information in various categories. he information wouldn't be date-
based, and there wouldn't be much room for commentary.

pros
.

With hosted blogging, you may not have to set up your own site; the
hosting site usually takes care of that for you. In the same vein, you
don't have to worry about server fees.