So you’re new to this whole blog phenomenon. I assume you know what a blog is, or you wouldn’t be reading mine. Nowadays, every Thomas, Richard, and Harold have their own blog to talk about their lives online. Or, more succinctly, every Janie, Ashlynn, and Katie, ages 10 – 16, have their own blog online.
Okay, so maybe that was a low blow. Not all bloggers are whiny, teenage girls. In fact, a small number of bloggers are now blogging professionally. With services like Myspace and The Facebook gaining in popularity, it is now easier than ever to get started with blogging.
If you’ve ever tried starting your own blog, you probably want other people to read it, even if it’s people you don’t know. But you may be stuck wondering why only your Mom (no offense, Mom) and a few friends are the only people who know about your blog.
Besides venerable content, you’ll need to let the world know you’ve got something to offer. Enter trackback and pingback, two features of most modern blogging software.
Trackback is a service that notifies, usually in the form of a comment post, any site to which your blog post links. For instance, if you were to quote this post on your blog, and link to it, you could send a trackback to my website, and it would appear in the comments for this post.
A pingback is a delicious thing. It notifies blog searching and indexing sites that you have updated with a new blog post. That way, people looking for new blogs to read can see when you updated last, and what you’ve written about.
Jeremy Wright (ensight.org) has a list of services that you can configure your blog to ping when you update with a new post. You might find yourself flooded with comment spam if you use all these services, so use with caution and turn on comment approval, if your software offers it.
Ping Services (via Ensight.org)