Paper summary:
The development of blogs can be traced as far back as 1994 and the creation of the term weblog to 1997. However, while for pioneers of ‘logging the web’ the process of hand-coding pages with regular updates was of little consequence, for the majority, this was and remains to be a difficult and tiresome experience. Consequently, it was not until the development of hosted and streamlined blogging tools that that the popularity of blogging became more widespread. Indeed, this popularity in use has led blogging to become, for many industries, a key, educational, professional development and communicative activity.
In these contexts, however, the generic hosted blogging services offered by ‘blog providers’ such as Blogger, Live Journal and Typepad do not meet the requirements of most organisations. Universities want ultimate control over the content that might be published on student (and staff) sites, businesses want commercially-in-confidence information to be blogged securely on the intranet and most corporate and institutional users want greater degrees of customisability, control and flexibility than these services are able to offer. In this context there has been a surge in the development of open source and for-profit multi-user blogging tools which allow organisations to provide, develop and control the use of blogs as a business exercise.
This paper examines the development of these tools from a technical and practical perspective. It asks which elements of these tools have developed in importance over time, which have ceased to be used and which have been added. It explores current and future possible applications of these tools in light of existing and developing functionality and asks what the future holds for the uses of organisational and institutional blogs and blogging in education, communication and business.
Presenter profile:
James Farmer is a social architect with a particular interest in the development and use of web 2.0 technologies. He’s the founder of the edublogs.org group of sites, runs the web consultancy business Blogsavvy and works in the public and private sectors looking at how technologies can shape the way organisations and individuals communicate. He’s also got a sideline in events management having co-organised the 2005 conference Blogtalk Downunder and being the founder of The Edublog awards. When not involved in running all of this under the incsub flag, he keeps the blog Incorporated Subversion, spends a fair bit of time wandering up and down Melbourne’s Yarra river and will quite happily bore you death on the subjects of football (the real version) and poker, but beat you at neither.