A Time of Magic

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New technology is all around us and most people don’t think much about taking up a new technology these days but some do.

For instance, in France the Internet hasn’t been used terribly widely for long and therefore it’s still quite common to come across people who have never used the Internet before at all ages. It’s so long since most of us first used the net to do something or other that we’ve long since forgotten those initial teething troubles that cropped up. For instance, many first timers booking a hotel online assume that it’s been paid because they’ve quoted their credit card number yet most people these days know that it isn’t. Perhaps more telling is that some (quite a lot in fact) of these people assume that when they’ve clicked on the “book it” button the hotel will know immediately that it’s been booked which has given us some very confusing conversations.

Or what about how the TV remote control works? I know of some people who on coming across it for the first time couldn’t get their head around that pointing it at the TV and pressing a button was enough to change a channel. After all, how could that work? Could you explain how it actually works?

And that’s perhaps the biggest difference these days: people generally just accept that technology works and don’t bother trying to understand how it works.

There are millions of blogs around the world so it’s obviously simple but then many simple things seem impossible when you don’t know where to start.

Fortunately, MumsFinance is getting going on a how to series which explains all the steps that you need to go through.

Rather than push you down the road of using one of the blogging services the series runs through exactly how to do it on a domain of your own. That probably sounds like it would be really complicated but in reality it isn’t: in effect there are only four steps to it…

1. choose and register a domain;
2. sign up with a hosting service;
3. install the software;
4. start writing your blog!

The cost isn’t high either: under $50/year will do it.

After you’ve been writing your blog for a few months an interesting thing happens. You start getting incoming links.

For the most part, they are very peculiar incoming links to be sure. They pick out posts where you’ve written a lot of drivel about loans or credit cards or some financial topic usually. Moreover, the site that’s doing the linking is a little peculiar too. Usually, it’s nothing but a whole series of short posts starting something like “I read an interesting story today” or suchlike followed by an extract from your post and finished off with a “courtesy of ….” with a link to your blog.

These are what’s called scraper sites although arguably that term could equally be applied to newspapers and particularly to the likes of Reuters. After all, both newspapers and news gathering organisations like Reuters take stories from writers around the world, add an introduction and finish it off “from our reporter in X”. Well, yes, but true scraper sites don’t apply any editorial control at all or at least much less than a newspaper would. It is something of a graduated market though in that this very blog is “scraped” by Reuters in, apparently, an automated fashion very similar to a scraper site.

The main difference is really that Reuters attempt to screen posts automatically and aren’t just gathering them as fresh content to feed their advertising income. Well, not as blatently anyway as you can see if you read our News around the world piece from a few days ago. And, of course, the readership base of Reuters is somewhat more substantial, providing us with over a quarter of a million readers in the last week which is somewhat more than even the best pure Internet link could provide as a matter of course.

Make no mistake about it though: it is a graduated scale from news scrapers to The Times.