QotD: Blog Awareness
Posted January 4th, 2005 @ 10:53am by Erik J. Barzeski
Question: When did you reach "Blog Awareness"?
My Answer: Slashdot carries the news that "Blog Reading up 58% in U.S." Slashdotters are quick to report on the far more telling quote: "Despite the explosive growth, more than 60% of online Americans have still never heard of blogs, the survey found."
I first became aware of blogs in 2001. Of course, I knew of personal "diary" sites before that, and "home pages" years before that, but I'm not sure I knew that they would be called "blogs" until 2001. I wasn't aware of RSS and syndicated content until a few months after that.
Your mission today is to find one person who is not aware of blogs and syndication and introduce them to it. If the person you choose to indoctrinate is a Mac user, then of course we recommend showing them PulpFiction. Just tell them to download it and take the survey before they buy, wink wink. If it's a PC user, well, I'm not sure what the best one over there is. Perhaps FeedDemon.
I shall do two better and indoctrinate three people to syndicated content and blogs today.
You are encouraged to answer the Question of the Day for yourself in the comments or on your blog.
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Posted 04 Jan 2005 at 11:05am #
I second (first?) the sheer mountain of kickass skills when it comes to FeedDemon. However, you might want to ease new guys in with stuff like SharpReader [requires the .Net runtime, which is the tool of either satan or jesus depending on who you ask, and may be a separate big download at 22MB] or Feedreader, because it's both simpler and won't require you to have made up your mind in 30 days.
Posted 04 Jan 2005 at 4:03pm #
So, Bloging is big news in 2004
I think that it will take a bigger push than just bloggers telling other bloggers to get RSS and syndication out there as a common place resource.... I know Firefox, has the ability to recognize RSS feeds and create live bookmarks and the next ver...
Posted 04 Jan 2005 at 8:53pm #
Trackbacks wonky? My reply is here.
Posted 05 Jan 2005 at 9:11pm #
I suppose I didn't answer the question. I sort of had a clue of what weblogs were around late 2001 and knew what RSS/syndication was in mid-2002 when I started publishing an experimental weblog of my own.
Posted 05 Jan 2005 at 10:30pm #
I started a blog using Blogger in April 2001. I only have the archives on my current blog from when I switched over to MT in January 2003. However, this is probably a good thing since I'm rather embarassed of the quality of my content when I first started and my writing style. But, hey, I was only 14 when I started so I can excuse myself that way.
I think I had found out what weblogs were about a little while before I started mine. I think my dad probably got me onto the concept in some way.
As an aside, a lot of commenters on Slashdot evidently don't understand Blogging and why it's a great thing.