Page 191 - Mediapedia Mobile

PART I1I SHARING YOUR WORK
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web and blog hosting
WordPress 2.0 offers good control over the final look of your blog. Its software is highly customizable through plug- ins and template editors. WordPress can be used with most blog hosting services or with WordPress’s own servers. As is typical of freeware, there is limited or no technical support.
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CHAPTER 6: DISPLAY AND DISTRIBUTION
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A blog (short for “Web log”) is the Web site of an individual on which he or she writes entries in the style of a diary or journal. The postings are often done in chronological order.
Tumblr claims it can have you signed up and posting in ten seconds. It connects mobile uploads, RSS feeds, audio posts, videos, instant messenger, and custom domains.
Blogs have become hugely popular, and many of the most successful are now commercial operations with full-time staffers. This does not mean that there is no room or value in personal blogs. Quite the contrary: Blogging is the very best way to display and distribute personal media.
wikis and collaborative tools
Blogging software comes in many forms. The good news is you can blog for free. The better news is that most blogging sites offer a distribution protocol called RSS (Really Simple Syndication). RSS is a feed format that lets you publish (and receive) frequently updated content in an automated manner. RSS readers are built into all of today’s browsers.
Wikis are a generic form of software that permits a distribut- ed group of individuals to author collaboratively via the web.
Building your own Web site can be a lot more complicated than doing a blog. The most popular application for site lay- out is Adobe Dreamweaver. It makes progress in automating the complexities of working in hyper text markup language (aka HTML). However Dreamweaver remains among the most difficult to master software applications. So if you want to try out a full site of your own, I recommend you start by using one of the Web services listed below, or, if you are a Mac user, go immediately to Apple’s iWeb application, which is a marvel of integration and flexibility.
Wikipedia is the largest and best known of the wikis. It’s a remarkable resource that can be extremely helpful in learn- ing more about personal media. More than forty thousand individuals have contributed to the database, and you may want to join them. The term wikipedia brings together the words wiki (from the Hawaiian language) and encyclopedia.
Here are four very manageable ways to give yourself a home on the Web:
Del.icio.us focuses on bookmarks—yours and everyone else’s. It is an open-ended system that allows you to ac- cess your information from any computer anywhere. People use it for research, list keeping, pod-cast collecting, and, of course, collaboration.
Blogger.com is one of the leaders in blogging, Blogger was purchased by Google and the original team continues to fo- cus on organizing the world’s information from the personal perspective.
Google has become a multifaceted tool for Web life. There’s the Google search engine, which is baked into
many browsers. There are also Google Maps, Video, News, Groups, Image Search, Earth, Toolbar, G-mail, Book Search, Page Creator, Creator (Web pages), Picasa (photo editing), SketchUp (three-dimensional software), and Weblog (spread- sheets, calendar, and word processing).
LiveJournal.com presents itself as a site that operates as a private journal, a blog, a discussion forum, and a social network. Fifteen million journals and communities have been created since 1999.
PB Wiki is a free service targeted at businesses, but it works great for groups of any kind. It allows collaborative work on shared documents and databases. There are many similar services.