In response to what are weblogs? from www.topniche.com

"Blogs encourage linking to each other frequently and often which is why the search engines are eating them up"

Weblogs, or "blogs" for short, are not operationally different than a regularly updated webpage. These are some key differences:

- the software usually creates RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds which are essentially XML feeds that allow others to read and/or syndicate the content from your website. Links, images, etc, can be embedded in these special feeds. This means that people can read either all or part of your content and never have to actually visit your webpage (think going directly to sponsor, and you'll see where this applies)
- blogs encourage linking to each other frequently and often which is why the search engines are eating them up. Pointing to relevant content and other blogs and news articles is the norm, not the exception.
- typically blogs, at least at the present time, seem to be treated by search engines as more newsworthy then a standard webpage and thus the reason the engines visit them more often. If you do a search for articles keywords I wrote within the last 48 hours for example, they will show up in Google like this one: http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=skype+review
- it is possible to take a site from nothing to Google PR5 with little to no linking from your existing websites and traffic base. I actually did this with my blog and I am showing folks how to do it on the ANS newbieboard in the thread entitled: "Blog brainstorming - want to start your own blog?" Also, the last 6 or 8 weeks at Script School I've talked quite a bit about blogging and evangelized webmasters starting weblogs. This isn't a subniche of a niche like TGP2, this is like an entirely different niche with a community of people interlinking and swapping relative traffic. It's like if you could start a link list back when link lists were first becoming popular because it isn't heavily saturated in the adult sector (yet).

I went a step further recently comparing messageboards to blogs in an article I am putting together on the subject. You can read a rough draft in my weblog if you use the feedster search along the lefthand side of the page.

The problem with messageboards is the content tends to fall off and the archives not be as SE-friendly as archived content inside a blog (and yes, even when it is a single script with query string call, Tom) which is not the way SE seem to treat many of the messageboards out there. It's like they only go one level deep and since some messageboards seem to move very fast, the spider will miss the tagline/signature or body linking of messages. Not like this in blogs.

Perhaps the future will have us all blogging and "trackback"ing each other from our blogs instead of communicating through a single messageboard area as we are used to today. I am not saying messageboards are going away, but I think blogging holds more use to individual webmaster business and relational traffic generation then posting on the messageboards does. There will always be the network aspect of messageboards which keeps them important.