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1 Movable Type (www.movabletype.org) from Six Apart is a download for management on
your servers. Paid service.
2 Typepad (www.typepad.com), also from Six Apart who also offer this as an online service
like most of those below, which is easier for smaller businesses. Paid service.
3 Blogger (www.blogger.com), purchased by Google some time ago – the best free option?
4 Wordpress (www.wordpress.com) – open-source alternative. Highly configurable. Used by
many personal bloggers.
5 Other open-source CMSs more often used for corporate sites, e.g. Plone, Drupal and Mambo
or corporate content management systems such as Microsoft Office SharePoint server (see
Chapter 12 for discussion of the management issues).
The blogging format enables the content on a web site to be delivered in different ways. For
example, the E-consultancy blog (Figure 3.10) has a lot of rich content related to Internet
marketing which can be delivered in different ways:
By topic (in categories or topics to browse) – example, online PR category;
By tag (more detailed topics – each article will be tagged with several tags to help them
appear in searches) – example, ‘blogs and blogging’ tag;
By author (features from different columnists who can be internal or external) – example,
guest column from Andrew Girdwood on SEO;
By time (all posts broken down by the different methods above are in reverse date order).
This shows the importance of having a search feature on the blog for readers to find
specifics – this is usually a standard feature.
These features are useful from a usability viewpoint since they help visitors locate what is
most relevant to them.

Tagging and folksonomies
Tagging A defining characteristic of Web 2.0 closely related to blogs is ‘tagging’ whereby users add their
Users or web page own meta-data to content they produce, consume and share. On Flickr (www.flickr.com) and
creators categorize
content on a site through Del.icio.us (del.icio.us) for example, any user can attach tags to digital media items (files, book-
adding descriptive terms. marks, images). The aggregation of tags creates an organic, free-form, ‘bottom-up’ taxonomy.
A common approach in The information architect Thomas van der Wal coined the term or ‘folksonomy’ derived from
blog posts.
the idea of a ‘folk-taxonomy’ (Fitzgerald, 2006). Folksonomies are flat (that is, they have no
Folksonomy hierarchy, and show no parent–child relationships) and, critically, are completely uncontrolled.
A contraction of ‘folk- A key implication of their lack of structure is that they do not support functions such as drill-
taxonomy’, a method of
classifying content based down searching and cross-referencing. A key implication of their ‘anything goes’ approach is

on tagging that has no the potential for highly idiosyncratic classifications. The growth of folksonomies has generated
hierarchy, i.e. without
parent–child relationships) a great deal of discussion regarding their potential to interfere with ‘official’ taxonomies and
thus to generate ‘search noise’. However, there is also much discussion of the potential for folk-
sonomies to coexist with and complement the‘official’ taxonomies (Johnston, 2008).

Electronic mail or e-mail

E-mail is now an essential business communication tool and is also widely used for personal
use. The popularity of e-mail as a communication tool has resulted in billions of messages
being sent each day. For the individual, managing these communications in their e-mail
inbox is rapidly becoming impossible! For the information services manager and indeed any
business manager, there are four main controls that need to be considered to reduce the
amount of time staff spend reading e-mail.
Inbound e-mail Controls for managing inbound e-mail can be introduced as part of an e-mail manage-
E-mail received from ment policy which aims to minimize the volume of:
outside the organization
such as customer and 1 Spam (unsolicited e-mail).
supplier enquiries.
2 Internal business e-mail.