TechShow: Online communities (take 4)

What app do you use? Tom uses pMachine, Sabrina uses Movable Type. Both Tom and Sabrina are talking about the value of meta-data (i.e., categorization) to posts to add value. One question from the audience – does your weblog app support multiple categories? MT does, Tom isn’t sure if pMachine does. (The pMachine site isn’t clear on this.)

They just showed a screen shot of Ernie’s directory of law blogs.

Business applications of weblogs (Tom):

• Marketing tool for clients
  
  
  
  • breaking news
    
  • provide timely items of interest in client’s industry
  
  
• Internal tool for law firms
  
  
  
  • discuss cases, evidentiary issues, a “virtual trial advocacy course”
    
  • learn what other lawyers in teh firm are doing – encourages/promotes cross-selling (I think Tom’s over-stating this aspect of a blog – but I’ll address that in a later post)

Weblogs – the future (Tom):

• Audio blogs
  
• Video blogs
  
• Mobile blogs (moblogging) – “If real journalists aren’t using this, they should be. Moblogs are breaking news ahead of the press.” (Side note: Ernie just posted this morning about how SARS broke, courtesy of Dan Gillmor. Yeah, that sounds about right.)

Weblog applications:

• Movable Type
  
• pMachine
  
• Radio Userland
  
• Blogger
  
• LiveJournal

To find out about weblogs in general, Tom suggests going to Weblogs.com, MetaFilter, EatonWeb (lists 10,000+ weblogs by category), Daily Whirl& ;(focused on legal news and weblog information). Tom shows NewzCrawler as a good news-reader, and recommends a few others (included in the program materials).

Before you blog:

• Etiquette
  
  
  
  • Don’t attack
    
  • Give proper attribution
  
  
• Faithfully cite your sources
  
• Avoid defamatory statements (cites a Virginia case handed down in the last week that address journalist’s defamatory statements; Tom suggests that same analysis would apply to blogs)