My First Blog

Keeping in mind the SEO and Blog lessons that I had recently learned, I started my first blog.

After playing around with Blogger, I decided to use Movable Type instead. There were two main reasons for this: 1) At the time, Blogger didn't individual post archives, a feature that would archive each blog entry on its own web page, and 2) Movable Type was much more customizable than Blogger. (Note: While the current version of Blogger does support individual post archives, the customization options remain limited compared to Movable Type.) Since Movable Type is a Perl-based CGI application, you must install it on your own web hosting space. For those who are not the most technically-oriented, the installation can seem a bit complex. It took me a little while to figure it out, but I was able to get it installed and running.

The topic of my first blog was inspired by a book that I had just finished reading: The Cluetrain Manifesto. Although the book was published several years prior, the messages about the power of Internet in social and business contexts, were very enlightening to me. For a book about the Internet, you would think that it would be out of date, but it is not -- even today, the message of the book is highly relevant. I highly recommend the book, if you have not read it already. I called the blog "Web Dawn - Rebirth of the Social Marketplace", the focus being the power of the Internet to become a social, interactive marketplace. Related topics include blogging, social networking, etc.

In my first entry, I explained topic and inspiration of the blog. In doing so, I linked to the blog of one of the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto, The Doc Searls Weblog. Not surpirsingly, Doc Searls blog was a very popular blog, with many readers, and many incoming links. Within 24 hours, Doc Searls had linked back to my blog! In his short entry, he commented how he found my blog -- which was very new -- via Technorati, the web service that I mentioned previously, which quickly tracks incoming links to blogs and other sites. It was a fantastic way to get a new blog rolling. Over a few days, I received a flow of visitors who following the links from Doc's blog, many of which (presumably) were interested in similar topics as Web Dawn. Some of them subscribed to the RSS feed for Web Dawn, as way to keep track of what future Web Dawn entries might be. The ball had started rolling, and I was beginning to think I was onto something with this blog stuff.

As you can see, this was some pretty solid confirmation of two of the blog lessons I had learned: bloggers love to link to other bloggers, and bloggers care about who is linking to their blog.