It's now six weeks since I started blogging and although the time pressures of Christmas have slowed my contributions down, I am still enthusiastic.
Blogging had seemed something for teenagers or people with too much time on their hands but my opinion first started to change when the OU lecturer of a couple of the Tate courses I attended during 2006 pointed me at his blog. Not only was it full of interest, there was a recommendation on there to read a book called "Blogwild". I did so and had my eyes opened to the special advantages of blogging for communication.
The point is that if you as a company, an organisation, or even an individual wish to communicate to several people, in recent years you could do this via either a website or via email. Both of these are low-cost and fast, compared with the traditional methods of paper and post, but both have disadvantages.
With a website, how do you tell people what you have recently updated ? Yes, you could have a list on your home page, but the relative rarity of such lists is an indication of how impractical this is.
With email, there are two problems : (i) potential readers of your information have to tell you that they want the email and (ii) even then, they will receive the email at a time which suits you, not them. Yes, they can leave the email in their inbasket until it is a better time, but that might be sufficiently long that they never bother.
But blogging gets round these problems. As a reader of blogs, you simply say once that you are interested in the blog. (This is done by clicking on the relevant icon on the blog website and copying the URL into the blog reader function in your browser). Then whenever you feel like catching up on the blogs you just click on the reader in your browser ("Feeds" in Opera, "Favourites" in Internet Explorer , though it has to be version 7) and you see a list of all the new blog entries. If any of them are of interest, you click on the entry to see the full text.
The other feature in blogs which looks of potential value is the Comment facility. Since this can be controlled by the blog owner, anyone can submit their comments but you don't have to suffer some of the less worthwhile contributions because the blog owner can filter them out. So hopefully a fruitful discussion can take place.
I am particularly interested in whether there might be value for our Parish Council. But perhaps that is a topic for another day.