Starting to "blog"

Few days ago I decided it's time to do what everyone else is doing. It seems most people I know have blogs - and it's getting pretty hard to know what they think without reading the weblogs. Mailing lists are very quiet lately, and the substance seems to move to dozens of weblogs.



I can see the benefits ( at least for the weblog authors ) - you get to organize the information, you don't have to google mail archives to find your own postings. There is a lot of noise in the mailing lists - and even if I just seen the first inter-blog flame war, it seems less likely to involve more that a few (2?) people.



Ovidiu is the one who convinced me - and provided the space. As a new blogger, I have a lot of open questions about this.



First, how do people put so many links in their blogs ? Is it just cut&paste, or some magic ? What about the "talkback" feature ? I understand how it works, but not how to do it.



Another question is how to get content back into mailing lists ( and if ). A lot of people are using the lists to exchange info - the blog shouldn't take this awa



What is the correct way to update entries ? Just change the date ?



With mail lists, you can filter out or skip things. With blogs I need to find the relevant entries and people - and then read them. RSS seems the answer - I found blagg and I am able to get a feed, but that includes all the postings by a particular person. I need to sort them on categories - or I won't be able to track more than a few people.



Using blogs instead of mailing lists to exchange ideas seems possible - I can see how a proposal could be posted in a blog, feedback and votes accumulated - and development status updated. I made many proposals that get almost no feedback ( and never got implemented ) - and many that I implemented, sometimes in a very different way than I originally expected.



Update: For updating, it seems people just change the date - so it gets up in RSS.

For links - it seems cut&paste is the solution. I'm pretty worried about the relation between weblog and mail lists - and the information chaos, but that will be a separate entry.



Many thanks to all who read and commented on this.