As you probably know, I just created a second blog called FileMaker Fever and about two days later upgraded from the Plus to Pro level of Typepad. Upgrading, by the way, was a bit of a shock, but that's another story. Starting a new blog, I'm faced with how to get the word out and build a readership for it. I've already got a bunch of content and links there, but I'm linking almost 100% to plain old websites, not blogs.
What a difference a blog makes! In the blogging world, if I link to someone's blog, they'll find out about it in a hurry probably with technorati and come over to my blog and probably link back to me. With non-blog links, I have to write to people and tell them I'm linking them etc. It's just not as slick.
FileMaker consultants seem to all be back in the era of websites and haven't progressed over to weblogs. The reason I know this is that I used Technorati's search feature to look for "FileMaker 7" and my new blog was listed as the first 3 links out of a total of 8 links for the last week. FileMaker consultants and developers aren't blogging - yet.
At first, I thought, oh great, I won't have any competition! I'll become *the* source for current news about FileMaker 7. But then I realized a very cool thing. I want FileMaker consultants and developers to blog too. Then we can link each other, have some great conversations either in comments or by trackbacks and raise all of our profiles on the web. I'm hoping that my colleagues will see what I'm doing on FileMaker Fever and try it.
I guess I'm leaving out the biggest advantage of blogs over websites, the ease with which you can do chronological entries which make it much easier for your readers to see what's new on your site. Now that I've upgraded to the Pro level and can do whatever I want with my Typepad blogs, I'll be exploring how to make my blog more like a website (they have a couple advantages too, see my earlier post Weblogs vs. Websites).