How It Works Under The Blogosphere
BlogMech is all about putting some order into the world of feed & marketing platforms for the blogosphere and explaining what types of services fit where and what they do for you in plain language. Consider us a glossary of blog technology terms on steroids linked to a warehouse of the best examples in each category.
Blog Mech is proudly hosted by saasu.com as part of their mission to help simplify life.
Blog Networks
A network of blogs, usually categorised into sub-networks to improve relevance. A widget on your blog (often simple javascript you cut and paste) gets you credits each time it is shown. Links to your blog are shown in return elsewhere on the network and can drive traffic back to your blog in return.
Blog Feed Management Platforms
Bloggers often prefer to create custom RSS feeds and then gain the ability to observe statistics on their site traffic in order to improve their readability and advertising performance.
Blog Feed Readers
Commonly referred to as aggregators, feed readers or news readers collect RSS feeds from various blogs, feed platforms and websites into one common application on your computer. Feed readers are either software based or web based. Some are fairly fixed format like Google Reader and other are user defined like Net Vibes and My Yahoo.
Their main attraction is time savings through automatic collection of news, blog posts and website updates without you have to surf around the net on individual websites to find out what’s new or changed.
Managing your feeds in a reader is rapidly becoming the new information overload problem. Much like email there is many interesting web logs and new websites to keep up to date with so your reader can get clogged just like you mail box. The good part is feeds are better than email because you turn off feeds you don’t like unlike email spam which needs to be constantly repelled.
Blog Publishing Platforms
In the old days of the web you had to code your website from first principals. It was time consuming or else expensive to have someone do it for you. Now content publishing is automated through Content Management Systems (CMS). Some of these are specific to blogging.
Social Tagging & Marketing Platforms
Democratically created search engine, news feeds and more. A new kind of search engine is emerging. The are social in nature in that you select which websites you like, share them and bookmark them. Bookmarking a website or blog is like voting for it. The more bookmarked a website the higher it goes up the rankings. The beauty of this system is that it stops people who like to play games with search engines by working around the rules the search robot follows and accordingly artificially raising their profile above what it’s worth in rankings. Of course smart people try to think up new tricks but this form of democracy is (currently at least) harder to fool.
Blog News Providers
Usually aggregators of other blogs and providers of other news on the blogosphere.
