In my experience with blogging and seeing the value in such pursuits, people tend to fall in two camps: you get it or you don’t.  The group that gets it sees how blogs can be used effectively for a multitude of things, including neighborhood groups using them to build a community, businesses using them to promote goods and services, non-profits using them to further their advocacy goals, and, of course, for individuals to disseminate their personal musings.

The group that doesn’t get it, however, tends to fall back to the circa 1998 question, “Why would someone care about what time I woke up and what I ate for dinner?”

The truth is that blogging and blogging software have grown up significantly since the days when LiveJournal was king.  While there is still plenty of room for personal blogs, there are a growing number of ways that blogging is being used to do things that are new and innovative.  And, in my opinion, this has a lot to do with the software that the blogs run on.

Blogging software like Wordpress and Movable Type allow people to create sites, customize them, and deliver content more quickly and easily than in the past.  This allows sites to “come to life” in a way that pages updated through raw HTML coding and FTP never could accomplish.  Gone are (or should be) the days when businesses rely on static and seldomly updated pages to communicate their products and services.  People want to know what you’re doing now, and blogging is the perfect platform for doing that.

So, in this series of posts, I’d like to highlight some of the blogs that are using this medium in new and innovative ways.  Be on the lookout later this week for the first site, and in the meantime, let me know about some of your favorites in the comments!