Add content chronologically. The main components of a blog are posts, bits of commentary that are arranged chronologically, with the most recent at the top. Most blogging services and software like Blogger and Movable Type employ easy-to-use Web-based forms. But bloggers — those who create blogs — can also submit posts via email and can even post photos from their camera phones.
Manage links to and from other sites. Blogs often contain links that reference other blogs, Web sites, and files — which is why news spreads so quickly across blogs.
Many services also offer “trackback,” a feature that shows when other sites link to a specific post. The benefit: Frequent linking in and out of posts means that the posts can be found more readily and can be ranked more highly by search engines like Google.
Syndicate and distribute the content. Most blogs come feed-enabled, which makes it easy to distribute blog postings in RSS, a simple content syndication mechanism. As a result, blog readers don’t need to make a special trip to a Web site to read the blog — instead, they can scan headlines that are pushed to feed aggregators like NewsGator , Bloglines, or My Yahoo!
