Topsail Island, NC -  

Author Diane Chamberlain’s blog (www.dianechamberlain.com/blog) has all the components of a great blog.  Her blog is informative, instructional, social networking, friendship, and most important of all, inexpensive marketing and advertising.

Diane keeps in touch with her readers about their likes and dislikes in what they read.  "Before I had a blog, my contact with readers was limited. I wrote books and sent them out into the world, but rarely received personal feedback. Now I have a real give-and-take with my readers about their likes and dislikes."  Diane shares her writing progress for her current WIP (work-in-progress) and asks readers what they think about using current events or different points-of-views or flashbacks.  The opinions of her readers count too!

In a post dated January 1st, 2009, she asked readers to weigh in on "Using Real Disasters in Fiction."  The discussion that ensued was engaging and enlightening, in addition to being friendly.  Many points of views were put forth that helped Diane decide how best to incorporate a disaster into her work.  A few of the commenter’s were frequent readers of her blog but had never before participated.

A blog (short for weblog), is the newest emergence of the Internet technology for businesses and individuals to connect with potential buyers.  Although weblogs have been around since the very first use of the Internet, they are mainly used to track web site usage.  Weblogs still exist as log files in the behind-the-scenes web site administration.  This helps webmasters to determine geographic locations of visitors and what those visitors are viewing.

Left - Book cover for "Secrets She Left Behind" due out June 2009.  Sequel to "Before the Storm".  "Diane Chamberlain is the Southern Jodi Picoult -says New York Times Bestselling author Mary Alice Monroe".

Today’s blogs are a spin-off from the early weblogs in that they are the next generation content management and publishing systems.  Blogs use a database to store the published content and the readers’ comments.  This makes the retrieval and display of articles much easier because an administration tool is used to manage the content, thus negating the need to know programming languages or how a web server works.

The newer generation of blogs makes use of RSS or "Really Simple Syndication" in which the article (content) is published to news feeds that are then pushed to the on-line search engines.  Each and every article is then a stand-alone piece of information or link that is indexed by all the indexing services known as search engines.  Think of this as an electronic card catalog system by which you can enter a phrase and get back a list of all the references to that phrase that was ever published.

To see this in action, go to your favorite search engine (I use Google and Yahoo!).  Enter the search phrase "using real disasters in fiction", which is a post made on Jan 1, 2009.  Just using this phrase without the words "Diane Chamberlain" should have as the first link to her web site blog (as of Jan 6, 2009).  This link was available within 24 hours.  It may take up to 2 days depending on the frequency of the updates or posts to a blog.

Another example of this is using the phrase "topsail island Christmas", which is a post made on Dec 31, 2008.  This was the first listing on Google as of Jan 6, 2009 pointing to the blog "Topsail Island Christmas" on www.Topsail-Online.com.

Even though Diane is celebrating 20 years as a famed author and has been using a blog for over 3 years, anyone can take advantage of this technology to create a syndicated web site, connect with their customers, or simply publish your writings.

Diane says: "I love knowing that I can reach many of my readers via my blog. Although only a handful comment on a particular post, I know from my statistics that I have more than 500 visitors to the blog each day. A year ago, it was less than 100. It’s turned out to be a wonderful way not only for me to connect with my readers, but for them to connect with one another."

About the author: Glen Pierce is an independent computer consultant that designs and maintains blogs for his company, Topics Internet Café, Inc.  With over 25 years in the computer industry as a programmer and systems architect, Mr. Pierce owns and operates www.TopicsCafe.com, www.Topsail-Online.com, www.PlanetILM.com, and www.TravelTeamBlog.com.  Mr. Pierce resides in Surf City, NC.