Photo Blogging May be the Pinnacle of Modern Technology

Many people feel that photo blogging is the most
exciting kind of blogging that exists. Building and
maintaining a photo blog is no more difficult than
creating and updating a text-based blog, and many
people feel that the internet's high speed, full-color
technology reaches the pinnacle of its appeal with the
transmission of images. Posting photographs in a blog
format on a daily, weekly, or occasional basis is a great
way to express yourself while reaching viewers in an
emotionally charged and aesthetically engaging way,
and surfing photo blogs can help you to get a whole
new perspective on the world in which we live.

Many people who run image blogs are photographers by
trade, but photo blogging is also very popular among
hobbyists and amateur shutterbugs. To be certain, a lot
of the most popular photo blogs have gained attention
because the pictures on them are of the highest artistic
caliber, and a lot of the people who run these striking
blogs are graduates of prestigious art schools and have
impressive professional portfolios. However, some of
the most well known and most often visited photo blogs
are as notable for their concepts as for the pictures
themselves. Certain photo blogs, like the popular "Cute
Overload" which features picture after picture of
adorable animals, are more about the thematic content
of the pictures than they are about the style in which the
snapshots are taken.

The fact that photo blogs range from forums to display
the work of highly skilled artisans to playful collections
of curiosities shows that photo blogging is a truly
diverse form. The fact that photo blogs are so easy to
build and to update makes this kind of visual
communication very democratic, and enables people at
all skill levels to become a part of the global
conversation about the nature and value of photography
today.

Whether you are an artist or hobbyist who wants to
create a photo blog, or whether you are just somebody
who enjoys learning about new places and things,
spending some time looking at the most popular
photography blogs on the internet can be a very
rewarding endeavor. You can travel to another place or
another time by seeing pictures of faraway locations and
long-gone eras. You can see your own neighborhood
with fresh eyes by discover how local artists have
photographed the town or city in which you live. Photo
blogging allows people to communicate all of these
things and more, which makes it a very exciting part of
the modern blogosphere. If the best thing about web
technology is that it allows people to reach each other in
a very personal way from across great distances, then in
many ways photo blogs are the most successful kind of
web sites.

Blogging: Free Internet Marketing Method

It's been years since blogging has been practiced. But it's just recently that it has been considered as one of the addicting fads. Many teenagers have resorted to blogging as an outlet for their emotions, a little online nook where they can blurt out whatever just bugs them or whatever makes them feel elated. Savvy marketers have discovered that blogging is one of the best Internet marketing methods that won't cost you a cent.

What exactly is blogging? Blog is the widely used term that refers to web log. Basically, a blog is an online journal. A blog could be set up to no cost at all, and can be used for just for the fun of it or for business reasons.

Blogging for your Internet business is one surefire way to boost the visibility of your products and services. Here are a few ways to boost your internet advertising with the help of a blog:

1. Make your clients or customers abreast on your website's alterations. Your new products and affiliate websites could also be announced through your blog.

2. Keep track of your business objectives and plans through open writing. Your blog content can be easily stored through archives. What could be better than searchable information that could be easily accessed by anyone browsing the web, right?

3. Air your opinions, advice or reviews on specific services or products that are related to your business. Publishing is a very easy process with blogging.

4. Include links that will fetch back links and subsequently improve your ranking on search engines. This could be better executed through putting well-written articles in your website. Affiliate links could also be included in your blog to earn more extra income.

5. Collect response through the ability of blogs to fetch comments from your blog readers. You can learn and improve your products and services through with the feedback from your readers.

6. Connect easily with other bloggers. When other bloggers notice that you have something good in your blog, they will put you in their favorite lists that will automatically link you to their blogs.

So, how do you set up a blog? Here are some of the options you can make use of to take advantage of this fun way to advertise your Internet business.

Either you load a blogging software or let a blogging hosting service do it for you. Host services such as LiveJournal and Blogger.com are the most popular in this field. Those hosts will provide you with easy instructions on how to put up your blog.

What make a good Blog ?

1. Making screenshots

I often illustrate my posts with screenshots of sites I’m linking to. I’m doing this not only so the post is easy to recognize when you scroll a longer page, but also so that my blog will make a good archive in years to come – when quite possibly, a good portion of the sites I’ve linked to ceased to exist (or changed so much that it’s interesting to see what the site looked like years ago). 2. Not hot-linking to images

I try to avoid to include images from other sites straight within my posts because the other site may move (and, of course, object to this type of inclusion). So even when I’m not changing a picture (which I do most of the time) I’m putting a copy on my own server.
3. Not hosting elsewhere

I’ve moved so often from free sites before I arrived at this, my own (non-free) server, that I can only suggest for you to put your data – images, articles, and so on – nowhere else but on a space you own. On a space that can’t suddenly change the ToS, add pop-ups or other ads, or shut down. For this reason, even when I was blogging on Blogger, I’ve let them FTP-transmit their data to my server so I have a domain (outer-court.com) that’s mine. For this reason, I’m somewhat reluctant to use services like Flickr.
4. Clean code

I’m using as little JavaScript as possible and as much standard-compliant (XHTML + CSS) web code as possible. I want to ensure that in the years to come, I have a good chance browsers will understand the HTML here, or if not, that I’m able to easily convert it.
5. Choosing a top level domain, and sticking with it

Actually, I did this one wrong: I’ve chose a sub-domain on my own server instead of going for a domain name easy to recognize. On the other hand, I don’t want to move as I want the archive permalinks to be indeed permanent. If you’ve still got the choice I suggest you name your domain like you name your blog, and then, never move – your PageRank will increase over time, and your archive will be stable.
6. Explain more than necessary

I’m sometimes explaining obvious words (like “SEO”) simply so that people, years from now, coming from a search engine that doesn’t even exist yet, and stumbling upon one of the articles here, have a chance to understand what the article is all about. (And it also helps those today who may come here from sources such as Google News – in other words, readers who potentially are new to this blog and the search engine world in general.)
7. Prominently writing the date on the page

This one is quite obvious for bloggers: you must put the full date on the page whenever you publish something. But have you noticed that in some mainstream sources, there’s no year given in a date? This creates a terrible archive because in some years, you won’t be able to tell if you stumbled on a “December 8” article from 1999, 2000, 2001, ... and so on.
8. Separating content from layout

As far as it’s possible (and it’s not completely possible), I try to separate content from layout on this blog so that when I later have a redesign, my archive won’t pose a problem. For example, I have an element with a class “more” which is at this moment displayed with a red arrow. When I decide this doesn’t fit the blog layout anymore during a redesign, I can simply think of another visual to represent “more information to be found here.” (If I would have included a “red-arrow.gif”, redesigning the site would be a headache.)

9. Putting the right amount on a page

I don’t want to create yet another page for every little link I post. That’s why I use a multi-post-per-page style for smaller posts. For longer posts, I’m using a separate page. I feel this keeps my archive from “exploding.” (The down-side is that when you arrive on a multi-post-per-page style page from a search engine, you must scroll to find the post you were looking for.)
10. Using your own blog software

As I’m using my own blog software, I have complete control over all past posts. I can create my own archive view, search and replace in older posts when technical changes need to be made. I can also export & back-up to different formats so my archive is save. My suggestion would be whenever possible, install blogging software you have complete control over – i.e., software you wrote yourself, or an open source blogging package running on your own server.
11. Referencing the surrounding

If you want your old posts to make sense you need to be careful about talking about the surroundings of the post. For example, a sentence like “click on the ’Archive’ link below to get to the archive” would be rendered meaningless if you change your template and move the “Archive” link from the bottom to the left, and rename it to “Old posts.”
12. Avoiding too many CSS classes

In the beginning, I’ve used many different CSS classes for many different purposes. After a while, I redesigned the site – and the CSS file felt cluttered and hard to work with. I’m now keeping to a minimum of complexity within the CSS. More creativity can be put into illustrations accompanying the post. But be careful; unless your images are all square, you are stuck with whatever background color you chose for your template (unless you want to redesign all images from your archive whenever you redesign the site). That’s one reason I think white makes a good background color: it’s very neutral, and you’re not that likely to find it annoying. As soon as real PNG anti-alias (smooth transparency effects) work cross-browser, images might be prepared so they work on any background.
13. Avoid too-clever headlines

Easily understood headlines are very important for a successful archive overview page, or search engine result pages, where the visitor has little more than the headline to decide if that’s the wanted content. Puns take some seconds longer to be understood, or can’t be understood at all without further context of the post, and should thus be avoided within headlines for blog posts. On a side-note, headlines without context (microcontent) is also why I repeat the word “Google” in headlines whenever I post about Google.... because reading it out of context, you may not know my blog is about Google.
14. Vary keywords

If your blog has a lot of posts, you find searching it is important to reference older posts, put new posts in context, or find out if you already blogged about something years ago. An easily searchable archive of course helps your visitors too. But how do you guarantee your blog to be easily searchable? When I write posts, I often try to vary keywords I’m using. For example, when I link to a tool called “My Google Portal” at MyGooglePortal.com, I might use both “My Google Portal” in the headline, and “MyGooglePortal.com” in the main copy. This way, when I later search for either variant, I’m able to find the post again. (Naturally, I think the variation is also good style because it doesn’t make readers feel like the introductory sentence to a post is a mere repetition of the headline they already read.)
15. Nice URLs

URLs are visible to the visitor, so having “nice” URLs is not a mere technical issue. Especially with a large archive, a clean URL structure – including the date of the post – improves a blog.

16. Discussing links

Similar to point number 1 – making screenshots of sites I link to – I want to give a nut-shell of the link as well (“the page contains a video about ...”). This is because the site linked to may stop existing, and then it would be hard to understand what it was about, and a worthwhile idea may be lost. Why not make your blog archive into a digital museum for future readers?
17. Providing context

On the web, there’s no easier way to provide context for those who need it than using links – because it’s unobtrusive for those who don’t need this context (they may simply not click on it and ignore the link).
18. Link to the archive

To show newer readers what you’ve posted about in the past, it’s valuable to provide summarized link collections (“all my humor links from the past 2 years...”), to link to the archive in one of the most prominent places on your blog, to make the archive easily searchable, to link to related items from the past from within newer posts, and possibly, to provide “items this time last year” or “best of" style link collections. I often find that for a new readers of this blog, an old link or Google tidbit can be just as interesting as a fresh one.
19. Categories

These categories may then be linked to from the archive or the navigation bar next to every post.
20. Help others do something with your archive

While for all of the above approaches it was mainly you responsible to improve the archive and render it meaningful, there are also strategies to let others help out. For example, by providing an easy download to your whole archive in a structured data format, you are giving creative developers a chance to analyze and visualize your data.