About blogs

Blogs gained popularity as personal online journals. Many people use them to keep in touch with family and friends. Nowadays, they have vastly widened their scope. You will find blogs on every subject, from tips on web-design, to religion, sex, politics, science…. The blog search engine, Technorati, tracks 22 million blogs.

Blogs are hard to define. They are rather like websites, but they are updated frequently, perhaps several times a day. Usually the most recent post will appear at the top. Most blogs allow users to leave comments. In fact, on the popular blogs, the comment section is where much of the action takes place. Here’s a few lines penned by Jeff Jarvis on his Buzzmachine blog about his new car, a Mini, and the price of fuel. He sparked, as he often does, a long discussion with over 50 comments.

The ease of publishing a blog has unleashed a huge outpouring of words all around the world in many languages. Of course most blogs only have a few readers. But there are some that have a massive following and enormous influence. At the time of writing, the Technorati Top 100 blogs , page shows that “Boing Boing, a Directory of Wonderful Things” is the most popular blog based on other sites that link to it. In fact, it has 69,000 in-coming links. This means that all over the net, you will find links and references to “Boing Boing”, and they generate huge amounts of traffic for the blog. The number Four Blog, “The Daily Kos”, where a former US soldier gives his (liberal) political views, has around 60,000 unique visitors a day (according to “Blog!” published in Autumn 2005).

What’s the secret of Blogs’ enormous popularity? Many reasons have been given, but one major driving force seems to be a growing disenchantment with the traditional media. This seems to be particularly accentuated in the United States. Elections have proved turning points, where blogs have broken big stories. A well known example is the felling of the veteran TV presenter, Dan Rather.

But it also seems that the tone of blogs - personal and informal - is very much in keeping with the spirit of the modern age. It’s an age in which people are on first name terms as soon as they meet. It’s an age in which people trust personal recommendations rather than advertising messages. It’s an age in which people like to express their views on equal terms with the self-appointed arbiters of morality and fashion. Blogs fit the bill.

Another reason is that the internet was rather devoid of worthwhile content until blogs came along. There were noble exceptions, such as sites by the BBC and CNN, but most of the pages put up by institutions where either self-serving puffery, or dull directories. There was a great online void, and blogs came along and filled it.

Businesses in general started to become really interested in blogging around the start of 2005. General Motors and Boeing both leapt into blogging. In May 2005, Businessweek published a front page article “Blogging will change your business” that caught many people’s eye. The magazine put its money where its mouth is by adding a number of blogs with reader feedback sections to its website.

But business blogging has been around for quite a while, and the most successful blogs have been rather subtle. They have realised that blogging is about developing an individual voice - something that is highly illusive for a corporation. Microsoft has done this brilliantly. It has often been seen as giant and monopolistic. It has taken flack from the technical community. To soften its image, it appointed an established blogger, Robert Scoble, as an evangelist for the company. Scoble is credited with taking the sting out of much of the criticism, and giving Microsoft a human face. He is quite open about his connection with Microsoft, but he writes under his own name and gives his own, unfiltered opinions which you can read at Scobleizer. By the way, he’s now the top Robert on the internet - way ahead of say Robert Redford in a Google search - which only goes to show the power blogging. All Business Bloggers should read his Business Blog Manifesto.

Sun Microsystems has also lept right into blogging. Its boss, Jonathan Swartz writes a closely followed blog- but it also encourages all its employees to write blogs that are publicly available. This enables its key partners and clients to read the message on the coal face, so to speak. Its real and authentic, and has saved an enormous about of money that would have otherwise gone into public relations.

Blogs are also idea for professionals. They are a way to establish credentials as “leader” in a field, and they are also incredibly powerful as a networking tool, because bloggers are quickly drawn into conversations with each other. They become online pals, and before you know it, they are seeking each other out at professional get-togethers - even though they may live thousands of miles apart. There are many examples, but just one is the web designer Molly E. Holzschlag who now spends her life travelling the world, partly because of the popularity of her blog.

Small businesses can get a big profile out of blogs. Thomas Mahon, a Taylor, has reached a new generation of clients through his blog English Cut which demystifies London’s Saville Row. If he’s travelling abroad, he just has to announce his trip on his blog, and he’s inundated with advice about where to stay, and with messages from potential clients.

Recommended Reading: Blog! by David klien and Dan Burstein