Blogging and Other Social Media

Exploiting the Technology and Protecting the Enterprise

Alex Newson, Justin Patten

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Business
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351955188
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Blogging and other types of social media such as wikis and social networking sites have transformed the way we use the internet in recent years. It is a transformation that business is eager to exploit. In order to do so, a clear commercial strategy needs to be established; does your organization wish to use the media actively as a business tool, or do you need to respond to the use of social media by others? Blogging and Other Social Media will address this question with practical guidance on using social media as well as the risks associated with it. A collaboration by leading thinkers and business users of social media, the book contains detailed and practical advice on the various forms of social media - their applications, advantages and disadvantages, how these technologies are evolving, and whether or not their use will benefit your business. The section covering social media and the law explains the risks and remedies related to abuse of copyright, defamation, privacy, data protection and user contracts as well as the opportunities and threats for online reputation. If you are looking to encourage your employees but want to protect your business from the threats this emerging media presents, get a copy of this practical guide and study it before you start including social media as part of your corporate marketing or communications strategy.

PART 1
Blogs

Introduction to Blogs CHAPTER
1

Blogs have had a dramatic impact on the internet, whether we’re talking about personal or corporate, amateur or professional parts of the net. whilst we cannot be sure about what the first blog was, or when that blog was created, what we do know is that blogs have been massively popular since at least the year 2000. Writing this book in 2007–08, blogs remain an established part of the internet and do not look to be going away any time soon. in this part of the book, we discuss what blogging is, take a whistlestop tour through some of the main issues the prospective blogger need consider, and give guidance on how to set up and maintain a blog.

Whilst this book is aimed at the business user, many of the suggestions and comments given will be equally useful to those considering setting up a personal blog.

What is a Blog?

Blog is a term derived from ‘web log’. A blog is a website where information is displayed in date order, with the most recent information at the top of the page.

The reason for the analogy to a log or journal becomes clear when you browse through a blog; take a look at any of the blogs we mention in this chapter. when you open a blog, as described above, you will see the various entries ordered by date (but with the latest entry first). From the current entry, you can scroll down to read earlier entries. in this way, an actively maintained blog will develop and grow from day to day.

As well as the information being displayed in date order, one thing that all blogs have in common is that the majority, usually all, link to information on other websites. if a statement is made, a blog will typically justify that statement by linking to the source of the information behind the statement.

Authoring a blog, maintaining one or adding an article to an existing blog is called blogging. Individual articles on a blog are called blog posts, posts or entries. A person who posts these entries is called a blogger.

For those not of an overly technical bent, the blog concept could offer a fairly arid start to this book. To illustrate in more detail just what the concept means in reality, let’s examine some categories of blog and then some examples of blogs.

Categories of Blog

Blogs can be categorized in many different ways – most blog directories divide them by subject matter. The categories of blog are incredibly varied; here are some of the main categories:

• academic

• arts

• blogging – how to blog

• business and professional

• entertainment

• financial

• food

• jobs and careers

• technology

• personal

• politics

• sports.

Within these broad categories, there are often hundreds or even thousands of blogs, which can be further categorized. For example, within the business and professional category, there are blogs on every type of business and profession that exists. Taking law blogs as simply one example, these fall into at least three categories:

1. ‘Pure law’ blogs: Written by legal academics, the purpose of these blogs is to discuss a particular area or areas of law. Whilst most of the writers of these blogs are university academics, sometimes they are written by professionals from law firms, patent agents or trade mark agents.

2. Law firm blogs: Written by a specific law firm, or sometimes a lawyer at a particular law firm, these blogs generally discuss and provide information on legal areas that the law firm practises. These sorts of blogs are usually less ‘academic’ in feel than the pure law blogs, and discuss wider issues than the law itself. For example, law firm blogs often discuss the work of that firm and commercial subjects.

3. Personal blogs: Diaries and commentaries written from a personal perspective by people who happen to be lawyers. Whilst these may touch upon legal subjects, the main focus is on the person and their feelings rather than on the law from an academic or business perspective.

The same is true of many other blogging subject areas; blogs are as diverse as their writers. To get an idea of the spectrum of blogs, take a look at the vast directory on Technorati (htt­p:/­/ww­w.t­ech­nor­ati­.co­m).

Examples of Blogs

LIFEHACKER
(htt­p:/­/ww­w.l­ife­hac­ker­.co­m/)

Lifehacker is a popular US blog that tells you how to ‘streamline your life’, normally by using technology but sometimes by more ‘low-fi’ means. In a typical week, Lifehacker will blog on how to use your existing technology more efficiently or better, link to useful new software and websites, and even tell you an easy way to de-seed a watermelon!

The blog is owned and published by Gawker Media, an independent media company that produces a range of blogs. It is written by a small team headed by Gina Trapini. Lifehacker was launched in 2005. We spoke to Trapini, who told us that the blog was inspired by the term ‘life hack’, coined by tech. journalist Danny O’Brien in 2004. O’Brien did a presentation at O’Reily’s ETech conference called ‘Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks.’ You can see more about it at htt­p:/­/en­.wi­kip­edi­a.o­rg/­wik­i/L­ife­_ha­ck

Lifehacker is funded by the advertising that is featured on the blog.

Since its launch, Lifehacker has rapidly risen to be one of the most popular blogs. It has received many awards, including being rated by Time magazine as one of the 50 coolest websites of 2005 and winning ‘Best Group Blog’ in the weblog Awards 2007.

Like a number of successful blogs, the writings of the Lifehacker team have turned up in a more traditional form of media: the book. At the time of writing, Upgrade Your Life: The Lifehacker Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, Better was in its second edition.¹

IPKAT
(htt­p:/­/ip­kit­ten­.bl­ogs­pot­.co­m/)

The IPKat is one of the best-known and most successful of all law blogs. As its name suggests, IPKat is about intellectual property (IP) law and is written mainly from a UK and EU law perspective. A mixture of written-word and pictures, it is read by IP owners, administrators, law students, practising lawyers, patent attorneys, trade mark attorneys and even judges. It sometimes receives information on IP law developments from the people involved in those developments, so is often the breaker of news. IPKat has a large international readership; as of May 2007 it was receiving over 25,000 visits per month and had over 1000 subscribers to its email list, together with an unquantifiable number of readers via RSS feeds (we discuss RSS later in this chapter).

IPKat was founded in 2003 – a time when most people had not even heard of blogs – by Jeremy Phillips and Ilanah Simon while both were members of the Queen Mary Intellectual Property Research Institute in the UK (Jeremy is now Research Director, Intellectual Property Institute and Ilanah has since been appointed to teaching positions at UK universities Brunel and UCL). They still write a lot of content for the blog but have since been joined by another academic, Johanna Gibson and a patent attorney, David Pearce.

Jeremy and Ilanah founded IPKat in part because of their frustration, as law teachers, at having to tell students to refer to legal texts when even the most recently published of those texts were often out of date. The blog was a way of allowing students to keep up to date with the latest developments; it could report on a Court ruling even before it had made it into the law reports generated by the legal press.

Whilst the blog was not created for any purpose other than easily to distribute IP news, the writers tell us that it has significantly raised the profiles of the IPKat bloggers and is a springboard for the generation of revenue from activities as divergent as the holding of seminars on literacy for iP writers, the licensing of content, and collaboration in the production and promotion of commercial iP conferences.

COMMODITY TRADER
(htt­p:/­/co­mmo­dit­ytr­ade­r.c­om/­)

As you might have guessed from the name, this is a blog about commodity trading. The blog is regularly updated and contains concise and well-explained news on the commodities markets and the general financial markets. The blog’s tag cloud indicates that commodity trader’s pet subjects are futures and gold. the blog was named as one of the top 50 business blogs by uK newspaper The Times in 2007: htt­p:/­/bu­sin­ess­.ti­mes­onl­ine­.co­.uk­/to­l/b­usi­nes­s/i­ndu­str­y_s­ect­ors­/me­dia­/ar­tic­le1­923­706­.ec­e

These are just a few examples of business and professional blogs from the thousands in existence.

Blogs as an Information Resource

Blogs offer a new and easy way for businesses to stay in the know.

Until recently, businesses have relied on certain types of resource to keep up to date with industry developments:

• Subscription-only information services such as LexisNexis, which can take the form of periodically updated volumes of information in hard-copy form (e.g. law reports), and, more recently, searchable online websites and email updates;

• Newspapers;

• Industry journals and periodicals.

By and large, such information comes from a relatively small number of sources.

Blogs are an incredibly useful addition to these resources. In some fields, blogs arguably call into question the need for the traditional resources. Why buy a monthly trade journal when the trade blogs have already reported on the big issues and weeks ago?

Reading Blogs

What follows is an overview of the ways in which blogs can be used to find information and news about your chosen field.

ACCESS BY WEBSITE BROWSER

In their design, blogs are simply website pages, meaning that they can be viewed using a browser just like any other website. Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox are two popular website browsers (most current operating systems come with a website browser as part of the package).

RSS NEWSFEEDS

Browsing any number of blogs or other sites trying to stay up to date with developments in your field soon becomes laborious. For this reason, most blogs feature RSS newsfeeds.

Rss stands for ‘really simple syndication’. Dave winer has come u...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• How to Use this Book
• Foreword
• Part 1: Blogs
• Part 2: Social Media
• Part 3: Using Social Media Internally
• Part 4: Social Media And The Law
• Index