Typical Features of a Blog and their Use

There are a handful of features that a typical blog makes available to its authors and readers.

From the authors perspective the most important feature is the ability to post new information. Most blogs allow authors to format text, provide hyperlinks, and upload files. Additionally, many features are automated by the blogging software for the author. Posts are automatically dated, archived, and made accessible through the Relatively Simple Syndication (RSS) protocol.

Authors are also able to manipulate the date and time associated with a post, edit the post, and even delete it.

A more subtle features includes the author's ability to allow or disallow comments from readers. These comments can be anonymous or required identification, usually through some form of registration. The choices an author makes in terms of how to configure these options can have an important effect on how readers use the blog.

A lot of research has been done on the impact of identity in online communities. One could guess that anonymity could really empower online community members to speak their minds in ways they would not otherwise do. This would help explain a lot in terms of the flame wars often seen in a vest number of newsgroups and online forums. It's interesting to note that the same degree of anonymity is available to blog users and yet, flame wars appear to be non-existent in blog comments. Without a doubt blog authors directly or indirectly discuss opposing points of view on various topics. And yet, somehow, these discussions remain very civil when compare to other online forms.

From the reader's perspective one of the biggest features of blogs is the fact that everything is presented in chronological order. The most recent post is always on top. Posts are often accessible day-by-day. That is, many blogs present the reader with a calendar that provides hyperlinks to each day's posts for the current month. Archived content, usually more than a month old, is often accessible by month.

Most blogs do not have builtin search facilities however, many aggregators (a utility application readers can use to consolidate their blog reading) help users perform searches and many search services (Google for example) will search blogs.

The strict ordering of posts (by date) and the lack of builtin search capability may pose a problem for casual blog readers or inexperienced blog readers to the point that it becomes a real barrier to entry.

The other feature of blogs that really involves readers is the ability to leave comments. The 'comments' feature is just that. Readers can leave comments directed at the author. The structure of the messages does not lend itself to an ongoing discussion on the part of readers. Blog comments differ from internet forums in that substantial way. Again, comments are left for the author and not in response to another reader's comment.

A feature named 'Trackback' is also used by some blogs but, not all. Trackbacks allows blog authors to notify readers of another blog that they are discussing the same topic in another location. This feature is a little bit confusing and some good reading on the subject of trackbacks can be found here:

http://www.commoncraft.com/archives/000568.html
http://www.movabletype.org/trackback/beginners/

Trackbacks are interesting in that while they do not make blogs more interactive they do help promote the reading of potentially different points of view on any given topic. While the trackbacks may be interesting in the sense that they may drive reader's activities they are not unique. Many news sites have "Related Stories" features which make news stories related to the article currently being read easily accessible. Additionally, e-commerce sites often use "buyers who bought x also bought y and z" which are very similar in terms of the desired result...driving the reader's/shopper's actions.