It’s the 8th day in our 12 days of microblogging blog post series. Most Micro.blog accounts use the author’s name — personal blogs, writing about everyday topics or sharing stories and photos. But since Micro.blog-hosted blogs can have a custom design, separate pages, and a domain name, you can also have a microblog for your business, or use it as your main web site.
Because one of the goals of Micro.blog is to encourage people to post to their own blog more often, using a blog for your business site can also help keep it up to date, so that when customers visit there is recent news or product updates. The Omni Group has taken this one step further for their microblog at microblog.omnigroup.com, posting not just links to new software releases and screenshots of features, but also fun stuff like what they’re having for lunch at the office and cat pictures.
For Micro.blog, we realized recently that we were missing a company blog. We have the help account and we have my personal blog, but not everyone should have to follow me to get important news such as the latest iOS update or even the blog post series you’re reading now. So today we’re adding a new blog: news.micro.blog.
This new microblog will mostly link to other blog posts from me or Jean or Jon, as a way of collecting everything in one place. As we expand it, we’ll integrate it into the help site and Micro.blog home page.
Previous posts in this series included topics like podcasting, photos, travel blogs, and sharing your content to other social networks, which is particularly useful for business blogs. See the full list here.
Rob Fahrni Out of curiosity, why are you putting these on your weblog instead of the MB weblog?
Manton Reece @fahrni I try to answer that a little in today's post... There was no official Micro.blog blog until today! The approach going forward will be to have news.micro.blog pull together posts from my personal blog and elsewhere.
Rob Fahrni That's awesome. Thanks, Manton.
Smokey Ardisson How can someone follow news.micro.blog on Micro.blog? Don’t those posts just get lumped in with , since it appears to be a second(ary) blog on your account, so that someone still have to follow you? micro.blog/news says user not found. (Actually, I don’t see news’s posts on micro.blog/manton, either; is the feed not connected?)
Simon Woods @smokey Looks like the idea is you're supposed to follow people on Micro.blog, and then you follow something like the news as a blog via RSS, JSON, etc. It makes the anonymous personification of 'Help' a little fuzzy but I assume it kinda fits in that way. Perhaps 'Help' will in fact be the prototype for "group blogs".
Manton Reece @smokey You can't follow it from within Micro.blog yet, ironically. And the posts don't get included under my username (because that would be redundant when it just re-posts some of my own posts). I wanted to start with a standalone blog first and then see what is needed.
Manton Reece @simonwoods @smokey Right, in the back of my head I'm thinking this could form the first test of "teams" on Micro.blog. But not all the pieces are ready.
Simon Woods Sweet. I knew the second year of public life was gonna be special. 👌🏻
Smokey Ardisson @simonwoods OK. My thought/concern was just that some “non-technical/non-RSS” members here might want to follow platform news but not you and that the easiest way for them to do that would be to follow news on M.b. I’ll look forward to seeing what develops as you plot this functionality (“Planet Micro.blog” in old-school parlance?) out :-)
Felipe Cypriano I’m confused, you can have a blog but not be a “user”? E.g.: news.micro.blog and not micro.blog/news. The same seems to be true for omnigroup
Manton Reece @fcy Yes, because a single username can have multiple blogs, the username and site URL do not need to match, but they usually do. @omni does have a username plus a custom domain name.