Burson-Marsteller Crossmedia

How to read a blog

von Mark Howells-Mead

There is just so much information online these days. So much information, so many things to read, pictures to look at and videos to watch, that it can quickly become impossible to keep up with the incessant flood of information. To manage such a tide of updates, it’s essential to find a way of keeping the information at a manageable, focused level.

In the early days

When I began working in the internet business, most people didn’t have a clue what was available online, or what the internet was all about. Some had heard of this place where all sorts of strange and pointless information was stored and accessible: from crummy jokes to adult images and a plethora of websites which fans had dedicated to their Hollywood idols.

Many of the earliest websites were created by programmers, who were sorely lacking in graphic design and communicative skills but interested in the technical capabilities of the “World Wide Web”. Back then, most websites were horrifically ugly: based around new tricks like flashing text, animated icons and the most basic, pixelated animations. That was the challenge those days: to see just what was possible in the internet and how the medium could be used to make a leap forward from print publication.

Back in the early 1990s, the issue of how to filter online information wasn’t of primary concern. The internet, in those days, was still small enough that regular users would often bump into one another whilst browsing: you’d often come across websites by friends and colleagues of people whose website you’d just been reading. Back then, it was easy to keep up to date; there were few newspapers and few websites which were regularly updated. Much of the regular online communication was in members-only groups of the Bulletin Board Systems (BBS), akin to modern day forum sites or chat rooms. As more and more people began coming online, they came into a world where websites and interactive communication were separate. BBS users often stayed within their familiar environment, while website owners created their meisterwerks before leaving them unattended for weeks or even months at a time.

The development of blogging

In the mid 1990s, things began to change and programmers began experimenting with online journals. The earliest recognized regular personal journalist – referred to these days as a “blogger” – was Justin Hall. Justin’s website, launched in 1994, began as an online guide to the internet before turning into more of an online journal. (The earliest entry for Justin’s website in the independent archives of the Wayback Machine online archives, from 17th December 1996, is easily recognizable as what we’d call a blog entry today.) With the rapid, coincidental launch of online tools such as Open Diary, LiveJournal, Pitas.com and Blogger in the late 1990s, the rise of online diarists (or “bloggers”) rose dramatically. Whereas website owners had previously needed to update their websites by hand, re-uploading pages as the content changed, such “blogging” systems made it possible to write and publish news and diary-like updates easily, without recourse to technical knowledge.

Stemming the tide

Thanks to the rise and massive popularity of such free systems, the online landscape changed forever in the early part of the current decade. Today, ten years after I tentatively launched my own first website, there are an almost unimaginable amount of blogs online. From the humble beginnings of online personal publishing, the well-known search website Technorati was tracking over 100 million websites at the end of 2007 (source). On average, according to Technorati data, there are 18 blog posts added to the internet from somewhere in the world every second. Naturally, such a huge amount of information is impossible to navigate without help. “Tags” (synonymous to “keywords”) are widely implemented to help users find the information they are searching for and blogs are grouped – either formally or informally – into specialist themes. From technical reporting to creative portfolios, many internet users tend to focus on one particular area of interest, many of which are accessed through online grouping tools or communities. Tools by companies like the monolithic Google have enabled people to easily monitor their favourite websites.

Save time on keeping up-to-date

Even if your internet reading is focused on one specific theme, there is an almost limitless quantity of information available. To help manage that, it becomes almost essential to use tools such as the free Google Reader to keep up-to-date on what’s happening across the websites you visit. After adding links to the websites I want to track, I can load the introduction page in the Google Reader and see, at a single glance, which websites have recently updated. Not only that: I can, in many instances, read a short snippet of text from the update to see if it’s worth clicking through and reading the whole article. By working in this way – defining an automatically updated overview of what’s going on – I can save myself time and effort, focusing on the articles which interest me whilst quickly discarding entries which don’t interest me. Where I could spend half an hour reading a dozen of my favourite websites ten years ago, I now use the Google Reader to accomplish the same feat over hundreds of websites; some of which are updated every day and some of which are rarely updated. If one of my favourite authors only writes once each month, I can still follow their writing without having to visit their website daily.

Keeping up-to-date with the Burson-Marsteller Crossmedia team

Alongside this blog, we also regularly post links and cross-references to interesting articles, photos, film and presentations using a variety of free online tools. You can constantly see the newest entries from all these services gathered in one place here in the sidebar of our website, or you can add one or all of our RSS feeds to the reader of your choice.

Burson-Marsteller Switzerland: RSS/Atom feeds

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