Many investigations benefit from a blog (website) post summarising what's been discovered so far (or the story behind the investigation). This not only helps new investigators find their feet quickly - but also attracts people searching for the same issue who might stumble across your blog post.

There are several ways to create a blog, but perhaps the easiest is a free service called Posterous.

All you have to do to create a blog with Posterous is to send your first blog post an email to post@posterous.com

A new blog will be created with your email as the first post (the subject will be used as the title). 

Posterous will then send you an email back with the address of the blog you've just created, so you can publish a link to it in your investigation. 

To publish further posts on your blog you just do the same again: send it in an email to Posterous.com. Posterous recognises your email address and will include your new post on the same blog as before.

If you send an image to Posterous it will be embedded in your blog post; likewise video, audio or Word and PDF documents. This makes it a very useful way of publishing documents and evidence.

If you want to publish more than one blog (website) you'll need to either use a different email or use a different blogging platform. 

Blogger and Wordpress are other free blogging platforms which are extremely flexible and useful, and allow you to create multiple blogs.  

Some tips on blogging investigations:

• Use the title of the investigation, or relevant keywords (e.g. Birmingham, clamping) - this makes it more likely to appear in search results when people are looking for that.
• Link to the investigation in your blog post and invite people to join it - the more people in there, the more likely it will produce results. They may need to request an invite, or you can offer to invite them yourself.
• Link to any other useful resources: this makes it a useful resource; and if you're linking to other blogs they will probably come to read what you've said. 

This post is tagged

• blogging
• posterous
• wordpress
• blogger