Jul 24, 08Last updated: Jun 24, 2008
The Elevator Pitch for the Future of Blogs
1. There are a dozen reasons celebrate the explosion of blogging, but the main one is straightforward: there has never before been a broadband media outlet for so many voices previously left unheard.
2. Blogs represent an enormous range of disparate ideas, commentary and sources, in most case those which the traditional media has historically failed to incorporate.
3. Since 9/11 we've seen that blogs often capture important stories (and details of those stories) long before the traditional media. As a result they have a growing impact on traditional news media - some of it decidedly for the worse. eBizMBA reported in June 2008 that four of the 10 Most Popular Political Websites are blogs.
4. The top blogs are starting to draw heavy traffic. While Hitwise's May 2008 report shows that none of the 20 most-visited websites are blogs. However, according to eBizMBA, top blogs like www.huffington.com and www.PerezHilton.com are pulling in between 1.5 and nearly 2 million monthly visitors. Few blogs can pull these numbers, but clearly the biggest blogs are now commercially viable and outdrawing most newspaper and magazine websites.
5. On the other hand, the number of blogs, estimated by Technorati at over 112.8 million (not including the 72.82 million Chinese blogs as counted by The China Internet Network Information Center), gives us leave to ponder the future of this form of publishing.
With these numbers, there's no doubt that blogging as an activity has a bright future. The increasing traffic to the top blogs and their increasing influence on traditional media are also very encouraging signs. However with the enormous number of blogs already in existence, and with thousands of new blogs launching every day (in an increasing number of languages), the average blogger has about as much chance of being noticed as a car alarm going off in the middle of Manhattan at 5 in the afternoon.
2. Blogs represent an enormous range of disparate ideas, commentary and sources, in most case those which the traditional media has historically failed to incorporate.
3. Since 9/11 we've seen that blogs often capture important stories (and details of those stories) long before the traditional media. As a result they have a growing impact on traditional news media - some of it decidedly for the worse. eBizMBA reported in June 2008 that four of the 10 Most Popular Political Websites are blogs.
4. The top blogs are starting to draw heavy traffic. While Hitwise's May 2008 report shows that none of the 20 most-visited websites are blogs. However, according to eBizMBA, top blogs like www.huffington.com and www.PerezHilton.com are pulling in between 1.5 and nearly 2 million monthly visitors. Few blogs can pull these numbers, but clearly the biggest blogs are now commercially viable and outdrawing most newspaper and magazine websites.
5. On the other hand, the number of blogs, estimated by Technorati at over 112.8 million (not including the 72.82 million Chinese blogs as counted by The China Internet Network Information Center), gives us leave to ponder the future of this form of publishing.
With these numbers, there's no doubt that blogging as an activity has a bright future. The increasing traffic to the top blogs and their increasing influence on traditional media are also very encouraging signs. However with the enormous number of blogs already in existence, and with thousands of new blogs launching every day (in an increasing number of languages), the average blogger has about as much chance of being noticed as a car alarm going off in the middle of Manhattan at 5 in the afternoon.
Page Index
Overview of the Future of Blogs
There's a father of the Weblog (a.k.a. blog) and his name is Dave Winer. Anyone who tells you otherwise is just wrong. (OK, I'll admit that the historians trace blogging BD - "Before Dave"). Winer has been an Internet innovator for lot longer than most of us have worked in this business. His ideas have changed the industry -- more than once. (Potential conflict of interest notice: I've worked with Dave in the past while with Seybold Seminars, and consider him a colleague and a friend.)Think of RSS, think of SOAP -- think of any number of simple yet profound innovations that have changed the way we compute. The road often leads back to the brilliant and challenging Dave Winer.
Technorati is a top site to turn to first if you're interested in blogs. Quoting from Technorati:
"Technorati is the recognized authority on what's happening on the World Live Web, right now. The Live Web is the dynamic and always-updating portion of the Web. We search, surface, and organize blogs and the other forms of independent, user-generated content (photos, videos, voting, etc.) increasingly referred to as ‘citizen media.'
"But it all started with blogs. A blog, or weblog, is a regularly updated journal published on the web. Some blogs are intended for a small audience; others vie for readership with national newspapers. Blogs are influential, personal, or both, and they reflect as many topics and opinions as there are people writing them.
"Blogs are powerful because they allow millions of people to easily publish and share their ideas, and millions more to read and respond. They engage the writer and reader in an open conversation, and are shifting the Internet paradigm as we know it.
"On the World Live Web, bloggers frequently link to and comment on other blogs, creating the type of immediate connection one would have in a conversation. Technorati tracks these links, and thus the relative relevance of blogs, photos, videos etc. We rapidly index tens of thousands of updates every hour, and so we monitor these live communities and the conversations they foster.
"The World Live Web is incredibly active, and according to Technorati data, there are over 175,000 new blogs (that's just blogs) every day. Bloggers update their blogs regularly to the tune of over 1.6 million posts per day, or over 18 updates a second."
As noted above, the company points out also that it is currently tracking (and making searchable) 112.8 million blogs! Google also maintains a blog search, as do other search engines.
http://blog.com/ is an example of a site where you can easily launch a free blog (and, as you become more comfortable with your blog, or ambitious for its prospects, have lots of chances to give them money for upgraded features). http://www.typepad.com/ is reputably the original and the best of these services (and therefore doesn't offer a freebie; the basic service is $50/year).
In early March 2007 I took part in a session at the Xplor Document University in Miami where Scott Kelly and I examined numerous technologies that we felt could impact document publishers in the months and years ahead.
When it came to blogs I made the deliberately provocative declaration: "The first new form of publishing since the novel."
Well let's first of all ignore, for example, comic books, which certainly post-date the novel. My statement, distilled, is intended to proclaim that blogs are a new and very important form of publishing, and often underrated.
They suffer from a couple of perceived weaknesses. First of all they're very short and casual, often personal and apparently trivial. As if that weren't bad enough, they're not published by the New York Times.
I was amazed by the faith expressed by the audience in the reliability of conventional media. There was widespread acceptance that:
1. Editors ensure accuracy.
2. Editors ensure quality.
3. "Big media" can be relied on because it knows what it's doing and has a lot at stake
4. Big media HAS to do its job; otherwise people will vote with their pocketbooks and cancel their subscriptions.
It's hard to know where to begin. Talk about a bias! Just because some (mainly white middle class) folks have spent a few years at a college or university, studying a course called "journalism" (or something similar), often run by someone who can no longer make a living in the field, why do people feel so confident of mainstream press qualifications? Just because The New York Times has been publishing since long before they were born, and published some noteworthy journalism here and there, why do they believe that it is a purveyor of truth?
People are suckers for big media, plain and simple.
So what makes a blog a blog?
Dave gets a bit complicated in his article on the subject.
Much of his piece verges on the breathlessly jejune:
1. "...as long as the voice of a person comes through, it's a Weblog..."
2. "A Weblog post has three basic attributes: title, link and description. All are optional."
3. "The home page of the Weblog displays the current items, as configured by the editor. The posts scroll through the home page. Some weblogs show you the last 15 posts or the last 7 days; no matter what, eventually the item will scroll off the home page, but it will be permanently stored on an archive page."
I'd have to say that this describes a great deal of other journalism as well.
But then Dave gets to some aspects of the blog that are essentially unique. For example:
Trackback. When a post links to a post on another Weblog that supports Trackback it can ping the other Weblog to notify it that it has been referred to. In this way each post can serve as a collection point for posts on a given topic.
and
Notification via email or IM. Some Weblog software can automatically notify editors or community members if new posts, pictures, media objects, articles, or comments have been posted. To date no software can do this over instant messaging, although it would be relatively easy to implement.
Now we start to see the true nature of blogs: the social nature of blogs. Unlike other forms of journalism, they are inherently intended to be interactive: author to author and reader to reader. And unlike most newspaper Web sites, the software structure of the blog not only affords this interaction but encourages it.
On the Other Hand
Joel Spolsky, in his blog on July 20, 2007 quotes from Dave Winer and notes, "The important thing to notice here is that Dave does not see blog comments as productive to the free exchange of ideas. They are a part of the problem, not the solution. You don't have a right to post your thoughts at the bottom of someone else's thoughts. That's not freedom of expression, that's an infringement on their freedom of expression. Get your own space, write compelling things, and if your ideas are smart, they'll be linked to, and Google will notice, and you'll move up in PageRank, and you'll have influence and your ideas will have power." (see Dave's original thoughts on this subject.)They make an important point...well worth considering in your blogosphere.
The Next Stage in Blogging: Twitter
Created in late 2006, but only now becoming the new rage, Twitter describes itself as "...a service for friends, family, and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?"The technorati are rapidly adding Twitter to their blogs, with gushing enthusiasm. Wired calls it "incredibly useful." Noted blogger Jason Kottke writes "Twitter is the first thing on the web that I've been excited about in ages."
Because you can Twitter faster than you can blog, Jeff Jarvis describes it as "becoming the canary in the news coalmine," while noting that Twitters alerted the world to the recent earthquake in China before any other medium. But of course most Twitters are not able to offer news of such import. Instead they write about what they just had for dinner.
It all falls into the Web 2.0 phenomena of social networking. Check it out. I, for one, don't want to know what everyone I know is currently doing. They can phone me if they want to bring me up to date. I've got call blocking.
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