The only way that we have to understand a new technology is by playing with it, understanding its current capabilities, imagining future functionality and championing the cause, if merited. Like many emerging ideas, we're half-tempted to ask "What's all of the fuss?"

A blog is an easy to publish website (from desktop to the net in a push of a button) that uses XML to build pages and store items by date and category. Widely used as online diaries (loose estimates suggest that there are about 500,000), the phenomenon clearly resembles the early days of the web in terms of adoption rates (higher) and buzz.

The stuff is in a primitive state. It takes a leap of imagination to "get" where the trend is going. Frankly, when we look at the results of a couple of weeks of work, we're tempted to wonder if it makes any difference at all.

That's the way our first newsletter felt 8 years ago.

If you take a moment to look at the experiment, you'll see familiar sounding content sorted by category (on the left) and date (on the right). Each article is "tagged" during the writing process so that it flows into the right date-time configuration. In addition, the tagged data flows into a newsfeed.

Our particular "blogging software" includes a "news reader" that allows you to gather sources of information (from other blogs, mostly) and read them the moment that the sites are updated. Technically, it's an "RSS feed".

Interestingly, the whole thing works because there is now an active webserver on one of our machines. 

Blogs are particularly useful for organizing projects (not for public consumption) and communicating in tightly focused groups. There are a huge number of kinks yet to be worked out but our experience is that the solutions tend to appear just as you understand your need for them.

Take a look at the work-in-progress. We're interested in your comments.

 -John Sumser

Workstream Recruiting Systems - Make the right choice!