June 10, 2004

Weblogs for families

Posted by Scott at 06:57 AM

The Wall Street Journal discusses web logs today: (sorry, but linking would send you to a paid subscription page...)

"Online Web logs, or blogs, have long been a bastion of techy types, those prone to political rants, and assorted gossips. But now they're making inroads among families who want to keep up on each other's doings.

Blogs are personal Web sites where you can post things, including photos, stories and links to other cool stuff online. They resemble a journal, with information arranged chronologically based on when you post it. The simple form is a major virtue -- you don't have to think too hard about how to organize your blog.

I've used a variety of Web sites in recent years to share photos of my children with their grandparents and other family far way. Lately, I've wondered if it wouldn't be better to put photos, digital videos and other links I want to share with my family on one Web site, making it easier to manage and access them from afar.

With this in mind, I've been testing three of the most popular blogging services, which are available free or for a small monthly fee."

While I do read some of the tech and political weblogs, it was the family connected-ness angle that got me really interested in the first place. The article today reviews the easy to use web logging services at Blogger, Typepad, and AOL Journals. For me, it was a great way to put up news and pictures while learning a bunch about web technologies such as Apache, http compression, HTML, CSS, MySQL databases, Javascript/ECMAscript, webscraping, content management systems, and brush up on my rusty perl skills, but the three web logging services above (along with many others) make it so that you don't have to know any of that. You just write, and in the end that's all that really matters. As with cell phones, a small bunch of people know about MIDI, CDMA, TDMA, GSM, packet switching, and other wireless technologies, but most just want to know how to call someone. ;-)

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