How does it work?

How does it work? A blog can be thought of as an online journal, and maintaining a blog is as simple as using an online e-mail program. Bloggers enter posts into a blogging application, add formatting or hyperlinks, and save the post. The application adds the entry to the blog, making the content available online and alerting users who have subscribed to that blog’s content. Entries can include text, hyperlinks, images, or multimedia. Visitors can read postings, submit comments, find blog entries by date, and search the site by keyword. Most blogs allow visitors to subscribe using an RSS feed or another service. Effective blogs tend to be updated on a regular basis. Most bloggers solicit feedback, fostering two-way communication between readers and authors. Readers can provide feedback by leav ing comments on the blog page itself or by posting a response on their own blogs and linking back to the original post a feature called trackback. Trackback notifies bloggers when one of their posts is referenced by another blog, making it possible to determine the popularity of a post based on the number and diversity of incoming links to a post. Through linking, commenting, and feedback, good (or at least popular) ideas spread quickly through the informal network of blogs (the “blogosphere”), while unpopular ideas are simply ignored. Being referenced by a popular blogger brings instant attention and often credibility, and repeated linking enhances the reputation and authority of a blogger. Through this system of recommendations and referrals, a collaborative filtering capacity has emerged in the blogosphere.

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