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130 Part 1 Introduction

related to its topic. The capability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is
an important part of many blogs. Feedback (traceback) comments from other sites are also
sometimes incorporated. Frequency can be hourly, daily, weekly or less frequently, but sev-
eral updates daily is typical.
An example of a useful blog which can keep marketing professionals up-to-date about
e-business developments is the E-consultancy blog (Figure 3.10). Another example, with
articles summarizing the latest development in digital marketing structured according to the
chapters of a book, is Davechaffey.com (www.davechaffey.com). Business blogs are created
by people within an organization. They can be useful in showing the expertise of those
within the organization, but need to be carefully controlled to avoid releasing damaging
information. An example of a business blog used to showcase the expertise of its analysts is
the Jupiter Research Analyst Weblogs (http://weblogs.jupiterresearch.com). Technology com-
pany Sun Microsystems has several hundreds of bloggers and has a policy to control them to
make positive comments.

Services to enable blogging
There are many free services which enable anyone to blog (for example www.blogger.com
which was purchased by Google in 2003). Blogs were traditionally accessed through online
tools (e.g. www.bloglines.com, www.blogpulse.com) or software readers (www.rssreader.com)
but were incorporated into mainstream software in 2005–6.
The main tools, which are free or paid-for online services, to create blogs for individual
or companies, in approximate order of popularity are:

Figure 3.10 Econsultancy Blog (www.econsultancy.com/news-blog)