February 19 2009
How to create a blog channel
Definition: A blog channel is an RSS feed or content derived from an RSS feed the brings you content from 2 or more blogs.
Blog channels are underutilized. We could even say they are underappreciated and undervalued. In fact, blog channels are just about under- everything. I don’t know of an easy way to create a blog channel — at least not a useful one.
Blogrush offered people an opportunity to sort of participate in a massive blog channel but it was not very well refined.
Some sites treat their blog as the channel itself. They might have a video channel, a blog channel, maybe a Twitter channel, etc. In this sense, where they are categorizing content by type, their use o channel is acceptable but underwhelming.
The people who have made the most use of (and derived the most benefit from) blog channels are AdSpam Web site operators who aggregate other people’s blog posts in their own “blogs” and “forums”. But these are still crude examples of blog channels.
A blog channel should ideally be a widget or plug-in where you add a window to your CMS (or static HTML page) and you choose which blogs will be featured in it. You should have the freedom to specify how many blog links appear at a time and whether you include some text snippets.
Think of a blog channel as a blogroll on steroids. It’s pointing people to your favorite blogs and helping to promote those blogs’ latest posts.
Another way a blog channel could work would be to funnel individual posts, tags, or categories into the display queue. You could do this with one blog (but would that make sense for most blogs?) although it should be done for many blogs. Unless you’re tying a blog in to another site.
Suppose you have an ecommerce site, for example. You COULD just drop an RSS feed display window on every page, but you could also craft a channel from your blog to each section where the blog channel is relevant to that section.
Think of blog channels as tools to augment, supplement, and complement your primary content regardless of whether it’s a blog site or some other type of site. Blog channels should offer a variety of articles that are relevant to whatever is on the page.
It’s great if the content is indexable (that is common with mashup pages) but you can implement it through Javascript or Flash if that’s easier for you. The visitor experience should come first.
Written by Michael Martinez
