Blogs

Who?

The August 2006 'State of the Blogosphere' report by David Sifry for Technorati provides the following statistics:-

• As of July 2006 there were over 50 Million Blogs worldwide;
• This number is 100 times bigger than it was just 3 years ago; and
• The 'blogosphere' is doubling in size every 200 days

How?

Blogging software can be maintained on a variety of web servers. It is possible to maintain a blog on your server, on a hosted website or use a blogging service such as blogger.com or typepad.com (If you are interested in setting up your own blog you might like to look at Setting up a web log: Simple as falling off a blog on the Guardian Unlimited Website). Blogs are typically updated using templating software that allows people with little or no technical background to update and maintain their text using a conventional web browser such as Mozilla Firefox2 or Internet Explorer 7.

Why?

A number of writers have used blogs (the shortened form of 'weblog' - a preformatted on-line diary) to create a new audience for their work. Some blogs have been so successful that they have led to their previously 'unknown' author signing lucrative book publication deals.

• Belle de Jour:Diary of a London Call Girl

Of course, not all blogs are diaries and a number of writers have poked fun at the genre by creating fake blogs or marginal interest groups. For example: -

• The dullest blog in the world
• hamsters photo

The flexibility of the medium, and of the RSS feed in particular, mean that you can have further fun by joining blogs together into personalized news pages. I use a RSS aggregator ('newsgator') to create 'news' site from feeds from a number of blogs.

My Blogs are at:-

http://betwixtandbetween.blogspot.com/

http://writings-wimps.blogspot.com/

You can also have fun by blogging with other writers (see grandtextauto,for example).

WIKIs

What and Why?

WIKIpedia defines a wiki as "a type of web site that allows the visitors themselves to easily add, remove, and otherwise edit and change some available content".

Like blogs, WIKI software can be maintained on a variety of web servers. It is possible to maintain a wiki on your server, or on a third-party wiki farm server (Pascal Van Hecke has provided a list of the features and functions of the free wiki farms at 'free hosted wikis: comparison of wiki farms' ). Setting up a WIKI is as easy as setting up a blog - wikispaces, for example, simply ask you for a space name (for the URL) and whether it is a public, protected or private space.

Wikis are an interesting tool for developing on-going and collaborative writing. However, they are not without there problems. WIKIpedia notes "The open philosophy of most wikis—of allowing anyone to edit content—does not ensure that editors are well intentioned. Wiki vandalism is a problem for wikis."

Link to http://soyou.wikispaces.com/

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