Amazing stuff happens when you blog

It is so easy to set up and write a blog these days that you forget about all the infrastructure that has to come together to get the message from your fingertips on the keyboard to your adoring audience.

This is from an article in Wired about The Life Cycle of a Blog Post:

You have a blog. You compose a new post. You click
Publish and lean back to admire your work. Imperceptibly and all but
instantaneously, your post slips into a vast and recursive network of
software agents, where it is crawled, indexed, mined, scraped,
republished, and propagated throughout the Web. Within minutes, if
you’ve written about a timely and noteworthy topic, a small army of
bots will get the word out to anyone remotely interested, from fellow
bloggers to corporate marketers. Let’s say it’s Super Bowl Sunday and
you’re blogging about beer. You see Budweiser’s blockbuster commercial
and have a reaction you’d like to share. Thanks to search engines and
aggregators that compile lists of interesting posts, you can reach a
lot of people — and Budweiser, its competitors, beer lovers, ad
critics, and your ex-boyfriend can listen in.

This is pretty incredible, when you stop to think about it.

There is a great interactive chart in the article which shows how the ping servers, ad servers and other pieces interact.  If you are into this stuff you will enjoy having a play.

Credit to JP for the pointer to Wired.