Blogging: New frontiers

No one can belittle the role of blogs in disseminating information. An organisation without a blog is fast becoming an unthinkable proposition. In fact, several organisations use blogs as their marketing/dissemination tool as well.

Generally, blogs are supposed to contain reasonably lengthy articles or commentaries and not merely links with short descriptions.The current blogging systems lack built-in tools for displaying entries in different styles/formats according to the type of content. For instance, an entry on a video link should look different from that of an Instant Messenger (IM) chat. The blogging system called `Tumblelog' is designed to overcome such shortcomings of the mainstream blogging tools.

Tumblelog

A Tumblelog allows you to create brief blog posts in a format specified by you from the given set. For instance, if your blog content is an IM conversation, the Tumblelog system provides you an input Window, appropriate for it and for a video post it offers an input screen with more fields. Once the content is posted, the system displays it in a style suiting the type of content.

Now, if you want to try out a Tumblelog, access the free Tumblelog hosting service, Tumblr (http://www.tumblr.net/).

A file conversion toolbox for converting files from one format to another is very essential. Though free conversion tools are available for some file types (like Wav to MP3), such free tools are still not available for certain other file types (like PDF to Doc). In this context, the availability of online file conversion tools makes our life less cumbersome. Media convert (http://media-convert.com) is one such file conversion service.

Another valuable free file conversion service, ZamZar (http://www2.zamzar. com/). You can convert image files, video files and PDF/document files with this free service.The facility (http://www.zamzar.com /tools/) allows to convert videos from video sharing services such as Youtube and Google video is another notable feature of this service.