This is the introduction to a much longer post which is held as a reference page and which I promised following my post about Richard Murphy’s new site.
Charlene Li’s overall take on blog platforms is a great starting point for considering how you’d implement this medium and what you’d select. The individual platform assessment resumes may not be enough for you to make a decision but they’ll give you some excellent clues. Before continuing, I am coming at this from an SMB perspective so my comments should be seen in the context of relatively small firms and the experience I’ve gained over the last year.
I don’t pretend to be super geeky but I have needed to develop some basic programming skills. For those getting into this stuff, you need to decide whether you’re prepared to make the investment in time, and if so, the extent to which you do that. Otherwise, get someone to help you out.
This is still a world where geeks rule. Also, this is a largely non-Microsoft world so if you want to get the most from these platforms, chances are you’ll need PHP and possibly MySQL skills. These are relatively easy to pick up but will usually be the purview of your IT department or provider.
This is a world where change really is constant. I expect to see a convergence between blogs and wikis – the question being who will be first to the gate. If and when it happens, this medium will take yet another step forward in its overall usefulness.
As Charlene says, you need to think about the environment in which you’d use a blog platform. Will it be community based? Stand alone? A collection of disparate blogs? An experiment? All are equally valid approaches and each has a different answer.
[The detailed stuff follows on from here]
One thing I should stress having spent the best part of half a day helping out a colleague – geekiness is pretty much a requirement once you get past the no-brainer freebies. Instructions for add-ins like Technorati, FeedBurner and so on are not as clear to end users as they are to geeks. But then it is important to remember that despite the ‘age’ of blog technology (it’s been around for 5 years), it is still evolving and end user assistance hasn’t caught up yet. Using an experienced person will save hours of frustration and, hopefully, a pleasant and useful presence.
Technorati Tags: blog platforms, innovation
