HW 16B: The Five Pillars of "Discoverability and other Golden Qualitites"

Robert Scoble, who worked at Microsoft believes that there were five main things that made blogging "hot". To begin with, Scoble speaks of something that he refers to as "RSS." He says, " RSS is the technology that corporations should pay more attention to than even blogging." (Burstein and Kline 130) The initials RSS stand for "really simple syndication" which in other words means it allows a blogger to offer his Weblog for people to subscribe to, as well as to attach valuable links and news that he finds from other websites. Scoble believes that there are many different things that went along with RSS that hepled to make blogging "hot" or as popular has it has become today. He refers to this as the, "Five pillars of controversial software." The first pillar is "ease of publishing." In order to have an affective blog you must be able to publish blogs that people will want to read and that they can easily access to post comments on. The second pillar is "discoverablility." You must put your blog out there. First, start with interesting title, colors, and pictures to draw people to your site. Most often than not, people will end up at a certain blog because they came across something that they liked or were attracted to. The third pilar is "cross-site conversations." Often when writing on one person's blog, multiple people will comment on the same topic or idea and you've already initiated a conversation with them wihtout even knowing it. It's actually quite neat how one person's ideas and thoughts can be intrerrupted in many different ways by various people across the web. The fourth pillar is "permalinking" or linking on your site. For exampe, if you have a quote, or picture you should include a link so that the readers can read up on more about it or find other sources that are related to the same thing. It makes your opinion and ideas a lot more understandable and believable. The fifth pillar is "syndication" which is the last S of RSS. Scoble states on page 130, "Syndication started in the late 1990s, and it means that I could see a large number of sites, and not only that, but I got them on my terms." (Burstein and Kline 130) He also states that he never had to give any marketing information or his e-mail address which is a good safety feature. All of these five pillars are what Scoble believes helps someone to run a safe, organized and correct blog.