Help me: I don't understand a word of this!

Dear Reader,

Everything is not lost. You are already reading a blog, this is a good start (see Wikepidea's definition of a blog if you are already lost).


Social networks:

Social networks are a new way to gather information through social groups sharing their favorite webpages (being a blog or a regular web page). In a social network, the information is "pushed" by the users to the user community arguably bringing out the more valuable pages. Compare this to Google which indexes and regurgitates it to you using some sort of secret recipe (not always successful).

In short, it is new, it is fun and it is hot. If you are not on it yet, you need to be very soon!

I suggest looking at Digg, Reddit, Technorati and Delicious which I found to be the most active.


Subscribe to RSS:

RSS is a an XML feed for your blog. Basically the blog is transmitted in that weird XML format to an RSS reader which displays the information in a readable format to the user (you). The difference with reading the same information right of the blog is that your RSS reader can pull the information for you from many many sources and put that together in a single user interface.

The benefits are obvious, you will get all the blog posts in one place at a push of a button, no more crawling the web trying to retrieve the URL of my blog.

Check out Google Reader (beta), if you are on that camp, I believe Yahoo and others would have a solution. Desktop applications exist as well.


Permalinks:

Permalinks - as you might have guessed - are permanent links. As opposed to dynamic links these links do not change. I suppose that does not help you a lot, does it?

You see, a blog is a sort of database application. It stores data (your blog posts) in a database and produces on demand a webpage (from the database of posts). The problem with that is that the ULRs are dynamic: read complex and susceptible to change. Usually that means problems as you cannot maintain a link to the page if the URL changes all the time thus the need for permalinks.

The permalink page (click on permalink below the post) actually creates a complete link for you to cut and paste into your own webpage: pretty cool.


Now, I am very hopeful that you will create a permalink to one of my posts, or subscribe to the blog itself or even better submit a post to a social network. Don't disappoint me!


I hope you enjoyed this post and found it useful.

Thank you very much,

Technorati Tags: blog, blogging, blogger, social networking, RSS, permalink