The Hindu : Business/Professional blogs

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Feb 16, 2004

Business

Business

Business/Professional blogs

THIS WEEK NetSpeak sheds light on the new crop of professional/business weblogs emerging on the Net and features a new weblog creation tool.

Weblog or blog is a frequently updated web site where an author regularly posts links to interesting articles or information available on the Net with his comments. The content gets automatically organised in the reverse chronological order _ the latest entry appears on top, followed by the immediate earlier one and so on.

From being a simple, personal publishing tool that enables netizens with writing skills to express their thoughts/opinions on anything that attracts them, blogs are getting into new spheres. According to Web Talk Radio, "The blog technology and uses will expand in 2004 to include more professional journalists, online experts, major media and corporations". It rates professional blogs as one of the top ten Net trends for 2004 (http://www.webtalkguys.com/10604.shtml).

Instead of just publishing web links with some commentary, this technology can be used by business organisations/professionals to capture/share their knowledge. As anyone can easily post entries on a blog, it provides an opportunity for everyone in an organisation to publish his or her thoughts/tips/views. The potential of blogs in sharing/harnessing knowledge available with an organisation's employees was discussed in an earlier column (http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/ biz/2002/08/05/stories/ 2002080500030200. htm).

Apart from enabling its employees to share knowledge, a company can employ its blog application to do tasks such as product announcements, getting customer feedback and publishing product tidbits.

One can find several resourceful business/professional blogs on the Net. The portal `blogs.msdn' (http://blogs.msdn.com/) that contains links to blogs of several Microsoft employees is a good example. Here you can find all kinds of information related to various MS products along with entries that express the views of the bloggers.

ITToolbox (http://blogs.ittoolbox.com) that provides deep insights into the "daily challenges faced by real world IT professionals" is another example of a professional blog.

Then there is the `Editorsweblog' of World Editors Forum (http://www.wan-press.org/rubrique8.html) created to discuss issues/solutions related to news editing/reporting.

Another service worth a look is the `Weblogs Inc.' (http://www.weblogsinc.com/) that hosts several business weblogs.

Before winding up this discussion on business blogs, we can have a brief look at a new free tool for launcing blogs. The tool `b2evolution' is a PHP-based software that can be implemented on a web server with MySQL support. To float a blog with this tool, create a database, download/extract the archive on to the web server's document root and access the link: http://localhost/b2evolution and follow the installation instructions. During the installation process the system will provide you the log-in name `admin' and a random password, which has to be used to log-in to it. Now, log-in to the blog application's administration page and customise its features. For example, through the admin interface you can make the blog public, protected (members only) or private. For more details: http://b2evolution.net/index.php.

On-line bookmark manager

A few weeks ago this column mentioned an on-line bookmark service (Delicious-http://del.icio.us/) that enables a netizen to post his favourite links on to its server so that it can be accessed from anywhere on the Web. Apart from helping a user access such bookmarks on-line, the service enables a browser to read bookmarks of other users of the system also. `Feed Me Links' (http://feedmelinks.com/portal) is a similar service recently stumbled on by this author.

After signing up with the service, you can start adding your bookmarks to the `Feed Me Links' database. While adding the bookmarks, the service provides the option to make it private or public. If you place it in the public folder other users can read your bookmarks. Apart from private/public folders you can create your own folders and keep the bookmarks on appropriate ones. The service also provides a bookmarklet called `Add Link' for posting the bookmarks directly from your browser.

Mozilla Firebird

becomes Firefox

Mozilla Firebird is one of the popular browsers among savvy netizens. Recently Firebird has been renamed Mozilla Firefox (http://mozilla.org/projects/firefox/firefox-name-faq.html) whose latest release is available for free download at: http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/. Firefox also has such features as tab-browsing, pop-up advertisement-window blocker, built-in search tool bar and caret browsing (a feature that allows you to place a movable cursor on web pages; this feature, which can be enabled by pressing the F7 key, can be used to select/copy text using the keyboard).

Another salient feature of this browser is the availability of many extension tools that enhance its power. For example, the extension `IE view' (http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/ieview) can be used to invoke IE if you are on a web page that is best viewed through IE. After installing the module, restart the browser, and to load the current web page in IE, right-click on the page and access the option `View this page in IE'.

Nexcerpt: A news

clipping service

Thousands of articles get published everyday on several Net sources such as news sites, news groups, databases and web sites. Manually monitoring these articles for specific information is rather impossible. We need a service that can automatically monitor specified web resources and collect relevant information based on the text of our query. The on-line news clipping service, Nexcerpt, which daily monitors your query over `30,000' articles and fetches the ones that match your keyword is one such product. A trail version of the product is available at: http://www.nexcerpt.com/ nexcerpts.php

GhostSites

On the Web many sites come and go. Sometimes you may want to have a look at an old favourite but dead site. In that case, check out Ghost Site (http://www.disobey.com/ghostsites/index.shtml) where you may find an image of your dead site.

J. Murali

Email the author at:
murali27@satyam.net.in

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Business

News Update

Stories in this Section

Imperatives of efficient gas use

Expenditure control remains intractable

Transparency vital in power policy formulation

Business/Professional blogs

Cyclicals keep bourses busy

South Indian Bank: A bank with traditional flavour

Capital gains exemption on investment prior to sale permissible

Are RBI bonds securities?