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Blogging Tips for Oracle Employees
How can a start a blog of my own?
Here are a few of the easiest ways that you can start your own blog:
- Visit blogs.oracle.com and click on the link to request a blogging account there.
- You can use free, hosted blogging services like Blogger or Live Journal
- Other popular hosted blogging services are Typepad and Radio Userland, but these have a small fee.
- If you are adventurous and want to setup blogging software on your own server, then some packages are MoveableType, JRoller (used by blogs.sun.com and others), .Text (used by blogs.msdn.com), Das Blog, or Blojsom.
If you opt for a solution other than blogs.oracle.com consider dropping Justin Kesteyln an email anyway with the link to your weblog. That way he can make sure that it's content is aggregated into the feeds as well.
How can I stay current on other people's blogs?
Some sites let you subscribe to receive email alerts with new stories, but RSS transcends the clutter of the inbox. Of course you can visit each of the web sites of the blogs you want to follow when you remember to do it, but if instead you arm yourself with an RSS News Aggregator, you can have this software bring the news from all of the blogs you follow to one convenient place for reading. You can refer to either Yahoo Directory or Google Directory for a list of available news reader software. All of these programs support the popular RSS format for syndicated news that all blogs expose to subscribers. Many support the alternative Atom format as well. RSS news feeds are typically identified on a site by an  or  icon, or Syndicate This Site link.
How can I search the content of blogs?
There are a large and growing number of blogs. Since blog software, by convention, pings a central www.weblogs.com server to notify it of new entries, generally Google is quite effective at indexing blog entries in a day or two. Some sites like Technorati and Feedster specialize in providing searches only over blogs, so their results may be more targeted.
The handy PubSub site lets you create a personalized search whose results are exposed as an RSS feed that you can subscribe to. This allows the results of your search over all of "blogspace" to trickle into your news reader as new matching entries appear. This is particularly useful for keeping an eye on competitive info or what other bloggers are saying about the products you work on.
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