The technology is here. But, where are you?
My last article talked about some reasons why company should start blogging. This time, I want to share my opinion about another topic — it’s still related to my previous one. This time, I will write something a little bit technical, and — of course — it’s related to blogging activities.
If someone (or even a company) wants to start blogging (after having the concept), the very first questions to answer is: “What’s the best platform?”. The simple answer should be: “Use a blog engine as its platform. Period.” But, sometime, some companies go to an opposite direction. They created their own platform, getting someone make a custom content management, etc. For what reason? Because “it’s just cool to have our own application”? Think again! Personally, if it’s related to — again! — blog, it’s useless to build blogging application from zero, especially today. Why?
- There are already many applications available like WordPress, Movable Type, Blogger.com, Typepad, Expression Engine, Textpattern, VOX, Mephisto, or even from social networking service like Friendster, etc.
- We can choose from two types of applications: self-hosted and hosted service. Self-hosted means that we download and install the application to our own machine. Hosted service means we use the service from the blogging provider. I’ll write more about the comparisons later.
- And, the best thing is that those applications are built for blogging. They have the technologies.
Again, blogging is about content publishing. And, there are many options the platforms available. When we deal with blog, sometime it’s not only about “writing contents, and publish them”. There are still more, e.g. RSS, archiving, conversation, search engines, spam filter mechanism, etc. And the technologies grows very vast. If a custom platform are created, there is a big question to answer: “Can it survive and catch up the blogging technologies?”.
To be more specific, for a company, the biggest challenge is not about creating a blogging application. But, it’s about producing contents and building readership. While people start talking about many great topics, companies do not start it yet… still thinking about building a blogging application? Ah, come on! Where are you?
Arief Fajar Nursyamsu #1
April 25th, 2008at 11:40 am
I did the same for the company I work for. Build the website on top of WordPress platform. It’s shorten the development period. I am still using “News & Article” instead of “Blog” as the link anchor. The reason is if using “Blog” then you have to open discussions to visitors