Blogging for Personal Benefits
While there is a lot of debate about blogs replacing emails in the future, I would rather look at blogs in a different perspective. The purpose of all technology is to make life easier for the user. Blogging is an evolving technology which when harnessed by an individual could make it very easy for anyone to communicate effectively. It empowers the individual in ways hitherto not available so easily. Blogs are dynamic web pages which can be created by anyone without any hassles of technical knowledge about web design or HTML. It is an easy to use program like the email. Just type and click to be visible as a web page. All major email players like Yahoo, MSN and Google now provide a blogging service. Just sign up for free select a template and follow the customization instructions and within moments you are online with your web page. How can an individual use Blogging for benefit? Use it as a Method of Personal or Public Communication Use it to post your communications to a select group of people or widely and publicly to communicate within your specific area of expertise or business. Use It As Your Journal We all know the importance of writing a journal. You can make a journal of events and thoughts which you may feel will help others. You can write about your life and work, the society, your views on everything which you feel counts and others must know about it. In a evolving society individual expression and the freedom to self publish can bring about a global social revolution by shaping opinions jointly with the community and spreading like a viral. Knowledge Sharing Use your blog to write articles, views and comments on your industry. Use it to share knowledge about your industry. This will project you as an expert improving your business and career. Networking You can link to others in your area of expertise or industry by linking with similar blogs. This will help you network and create a wider context as well as content for your blog. With a comments feature added to your blog you can make it interactive with more joining your blog, adding fresh perspectives to issues. Business Tool It is the most cost effective tool for small business or professionals working independently. You can use the blog to promote your business, interact with your customers, give advice and develop business with an interactive web page where your readers can post their own comments and feedback. Linking to Content No more the hassles of book marking WebPages. You can simply put a link in your posting along with your comments which could be accessed by you as well as your community and social network. There are also simple technical aspects like using RSS, which can create immense exposure. An individual can put a blog to good use in ways only his own creativity and needs would limit. It is still early days. Just register and start blogging for your own self development. This article is copyright © of R.G. Srinivasan a Certified Trainer, Small Business Consultant, Writer and Author. He also writes a regular blog on home-business resources which you may check out at http://www.home-businessresources.blogspot.com for online marketing tips, small and home business resources, opportunities and online promotional strategies.
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Please note that in these examples I have used square brackets instead of angled brackets.
[?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?]
[rss version="2.0"]
[channel]
[title]The Widget news feed[/title]
[description]The latest news on widgets[/description]
[link]http://www.widget.com/[/link]
[image]
[title]Widget News[/title]
[url>http://www.widget.com/widget.gif[/url]
[link>http://www.widget.com/[/link]
[/image]
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[title]Which is the best Widget to?[/title]
[description]In this article we discuss the release of several new widgets, but which is the best widget.[/description]
[pubDate]Sun, 20 Mar 2005 14:38:50 GMT[/pubDate]
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[/item]
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Finally the file is ended with the closing channel tag and a closing RSS tag.
[/channel]
[/rss]
I have covered the basic tags to create an RSS file, there are other tags that can be used and these are explained in the http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss (RSS 2.0) specification.
Once you have created your file you will need to verify it is ok, to do this upload the file to your server and then go to this validator to validate the file. Your file is now ready. Now anyone can subscribe to your feed just by pointing their RSS reader to your RSS file.
That is the basics covered. I will be covering other areas in future articles as there is far too much information to fit into a single article.
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I've never been popular in my whole life. I think there must be something inside me that didn't get enough attention as a kid or something because I seem to find myself looking for it all the time. I think about some of the career paths I have walked down: I've been a musician, a pastor (who gets to get on a platform and talk to people ? getting attention ? even if I do have something selfless to say ? I like the feeling I get when I feel like people "get it" ? anybody else have this in common?), I've been a stand-up comedian (here, there's a real pressure to get people to like you because if they don't, they let you know fast). I even started "blogging" because a lot of great bloggers are out there and they seem to know how to type just the right things to get lots and lots of feedback. Heck, I figured I'd tried everything else, why not see if I get some feedback, too. And you know what I found out?
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