I received an email this morning from a woman who has a web site for a nonprofit organization setting up a traveling museum exhibition on contemporary American glass art beads. She was confused about how and why she should switch to a blog or how she could use a blog network. Here is my reply to her email:

Here are the reasons to consider switching to a blog from your html web site:

Blogs are built on RSS which is the next generation of web technology. Each entry is given a unique and permanent URL which means that information can be indexed and searched on an entry by entry basis (as opposed to page by page).

RSS which stands for Really Short Syndication is a technology that enables readers of your site to get information from it in new ways: each time you post an article, your blog will ping central servers that store data that there is new information on your blog. Readers of your blog will use a new tool called a news aggregator or RSS aggregator to poll your blog to see if there is anything new. (You can also notify them by email.) If so, their aggregators will show the updated information. This is very useful for tracking multiple blogs and web sites. (Many newspapers now publish information in RSS.)

Each blog also has an RSS feed—a URL that is used by the aggregators and ping servers to track new information. For your blog network, you can aggregate these feeds into glass bead aggregator that would track new information in all blogs in your network. (To see an example, go to http://pingwellesley.com, and in the upper left hand corner click on the newsgator icon. When you log in, you will see all the new posts from every blog in the Pingwellesley network.) You can also use our “advanced search” tool on Pingwellesley to search only the blogs in this network.

One of the biggest advantages for someone in your situation is how the blog manages photos. It is very easy to post an image within an article. And it is simple to upload a group of photos into an automatic slideshow. For an example of how this works, check out my blog http://kathleengilroy.com and click on the topic Hawaii in the right hand column. If you click on the slideshow icon under “next” the blog will automatically create a slide show for you.

The blog is not a “dumb” windows program. It is actually a very powerful content management system that allows non-programmers to have a sophisticated, easily updated web site with no programming skills.

Pingware is our blogging platform designed specifically for groups. We have built a set of components (like the aggregators and search tools referenced above) that make it easy for groups to find information about one another.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 16th, 2005 at 3:16 pm and is filed under PingWare. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be moderated but will appear as soon as humanly possible.