this is a copy of an email i posted on a yahoo group about social networking and blogs (hence the author reference) – i thought it pertinent enough to post here too …

My take on the whole social networking thing is this (coming from a tech POW – i’ve been using computers for nearly 30 years now – both professionally and personally (yes – pre bill gates/windows/dos etc))

* there is a difference between a blog and a social network site
* social network sites are just that – places for people to connect – myspace/facebook/bebo – they’re social networking sites
* a blog is exactly what the name suggests (comes from web-log) – a journal or diary or something like that
* people use myspace like a blog when they really should be using one of the blogging tools – livejournal, blogger, wordpress, etc

i think blogging has taken off because people want a presence on the web – there is a huge revolution happening in teaching (we caught it from the tech people) called web2.0 – so many things now that you can do online – heck you can now edit your photos online (there’s a new online version of photoshop!)

back in the day we used to write our own web pages – i hand coded in html (and still do cos i’m not really into the WYSIWYG editors) and updated my website weekly

that was too hard for most people

then came yahoo/angelfire/geocities with their built in editors and many people still use them – but there’s still a bit of an effort required to go in and edit etc

along came blogs – {insert a quick blast of the hallelujah chorus} – they are easy to manage – easy to post a quick message – and there are quite a number of ‘desktop clients’ – programs that allow you to post to your blog without having to open your browser – i’m trialling one at the moment that allows me to post to any one of my four main blogs

i think that if you’re an author rather than going the webpage and myspace way you’d be better to have your main website and a blog or if you don’t want the website then just go for a blog – you can swish it up as much as you like

i am almost at the point when i won’t go to a myspace website at all – even on my fast computer page loading is horrendous – especially since lots of people have music and videos and things like that automatically playing – and those pages i don’t return to

to people with websites and blogs – i’m more likely to return to your blog rather than your webpage – i’m more interested in the day to day stuff than returning to see if the webpage has been updated

what i do with blogs i’m interested in is i use an RSS feeder and add them to that feed – then i can see at a glance – on ONE page – which blogs have been updated – i don’t have to visit each one every day to see if it has been updated (but that’s another thing all together)

… blogged using MarsEdit