Integrating with Blogs

Abstract

Blogs (also known as weblogs) have become lightweight, general-purpose platforms for publication, self-expression, and collaboration. Bloggers push the limits of new-media production, especially in the area of integration, because they want ultimately to discuss anything they can see or think or hear—without any effort, of course. Because you can directly tie blogs in with other systems—often without any programming on your own part—you’ll now study how to combine blogs with other applications and data sources. In this chapter, I cover end-user functionality that lets you publish content to a blog from a web site or a desktop application. In Chapter 7, you’ll study how you can program the relevant web APIs to read and publish blog content. I close this chapter by applying lessons from blog integration to wikis, which I believe are ripe for a similar type of remixing.