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Blogging: A Modern Tool for an Age-Old Quest

Posted on: Saturday, 18 February 2006, 03:03 CST

By Conhaim, Wallys W

Perspectives

When a young newspaper executive was considering the promise of on-line databases such as Dialog, he told me that when he really wanted to know something, "I just call three or four of my friends. I'd rather get my information from people I trust who can give me their personal perspectives."

Our conversation took place 30 years ago. My colleague was just not impressed by what I considered near miraculous.

Fast-forward to today. The advent of blogs has added personal filtering and insights (which my friend had felt was important) to the vast quantity of information now on the Net. With blogging, the Web has become a huge platform for personal publishing, communications, and collaboration. We have moved not only our information, but our relationships as well onto the Net.

New Directions in the Blogosphere

Mainly the territory of geeks and information professionals just a few years ago, the blogosphere is now home to a diverse group writing on every imaginable subject.

Blogs are like magnetic fields with the attraction flowing in several ways. Readers are attracted to blogging communities in which they feel comfortable. Writers seek new readers and the cross- pollination their readers bring. Advertisers seek to intercept the multidirectional flow by placing messages in the paths of readers. Every individual who participates is in the cross hairs of all the other entities. Herein lies the power of blogs and the factor that differentiates them from traditional media.

People blog in journal-type entries about topics that interest them. They keep up with and discuss news of the world and their professions. Authors and activists engage with their readers around their viewpoints. Some blogs are composed mostly of links; others review literature or gadgets.

The advent of audio- and video-blogging and specialized hosting facilities, such as Audioblog.com, has brought in new voices that are comfortable with non-text modes of expression.

We are beginning to see Weblogs integrated with traditional media. We have moved not only our information, but our relationships, onto the Net. Professional journalists, such as the Star Tribune's James Lileks at http://www.startribune .com/ backfence and http://lileks.com are increasing their use of blogs to interact with their readers inside and outside the umbrella of their publishers.

Blogging Is Mainstream

Since my first column on blogging (May/June 2002 issue of Link- Up), blogging and reading blogs have become mainstream online activities. Here are just a few ways the trend may be measured:

* There were 60 million Weblogs worldwide by May 2005 (source: The Blog Herald).

* Technorati was tracking 19.5 million blogs by mid-October 2005, with the numbers doubling every 5 months. At that rate, 30 million blogs are expected to be working by March 2006. Fifty-five percent of blogs are active; 13 percent are updated at least weekly (source: Technorati).

* Fifty-one percent of journalists read blogs regularly; 28 percent rely on blogs for their reporting (source: Euro RSCG Magnet and Columbia University Survey of the Media).

* One-third of people (aged 13 to 21) have their own online content (source: The Guardian).

* Fifty million dollars to $100 million was spent in advertising on blogs in 2005 (source: Analyst Charlene Li of Forrester Research, as quoted in The New York Times).

Yet, Boing Boing (the top blog) with more than 300,000 daily unique visitors, is dwarfed by the 2.29 million average daily circulation of the top daily newspaper, USA Today. Many people, however, read many blogs but not several newspapers.

Survey figures, no matter how impressive, don't tell the most interesting part of the story: Blogs have had an enormous impact (disproportionate to their numbers and readership) not only on journalism and personal publishing, but on corporate conduct, government, and civic activism. And they are beginning to become a factor in marketing.

Infrastructure Grows

Many basic questions we had about blogs just a few years ago- such as how anyone can make any money writing or owning them-are being answered as a supporting infrastructure grows.

Perhaps the most important thing is advertising. While some blogs still rely on contributions from readers, revenue-shared advertising on blogs is now commonplace. Following Google AdSense's lead, Yahoo !'s Overture has now embraced small publishers, and a company called BlogAds places ads on blogs with specialized audiences such as progressives, conservatives, lawyers, gays, foodies, etc. Ad buying and placement are now highly automated.

Also accessible are many more hosting options, from Yahoo!360 and MSN-Spaces to AOLJournals and WordPress, with free, easy-to-use software and a wide selection of templates.

Portals such as Google, Yahoo!, Technorati, Blogdigger, and Blogwise allow us to search exclusively within blogs and discover hot current topics and sites.

The coveted Webby Awards, the Bloggies, the BOBs, and many others now recognize excellence in blogging.

Corporations Jump In

Corporations are using blogging not only for internal and external communications, but to enhance their product portfolios.

For companies, blogs are a double-edged sword, and learning how to manage them has become an important topic in business circles, according to Katherine Heires' article in the Harvard Management Communications Letter (http://hbswk.hbs.edu/ item.jhtml?id=5111&t=technology).

While blogs give the consumer a powerful voice, marketers see blogs as one more place where they can expose their products or brand names to self-selected groups of audiences. According to Brand Strategy magazine, Microsoft's 800 bloggers contribute to "giving the faceless technology company a human face" and allow it to engage with and listen to customers on a one-on-one basis. However, at a meeting of the Society of American Newspaper Editors and Writers in early May 2005, Bill Gates acknowledged that the numbers of Microsoft bloggers are interfering with his company's ability to get a uniform message out clearly to intended audiences.

This is not the only way blogs have sometimes backfired. Business literature is full of examples of firings of whistle-blowers, or simply malcontents, who thought their off-duty blogging was unrelated to their employment. To avert such problems, Robert Scoble, a Microsoft blogger, has compiled "The Corporate Weblog Manifesto" (http://radio.weblogs.com/000 1011/2003/02/26.html), a guide for corporate bloggers.

Media companies that once thought of blogs as marginal to their strategy are now rushing to position themselves in this growing market. Google was first, buying Pyra Labs, creator ofBlogger.com in 2003. During the last few months alone, AOL has bought Weblogs, Inc., Yahoo! bought Flickr and del.icio.us, InterActiveCorp bought Bloglines, and Time magazine has arranged to host Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish.

World-Changing Global Impacts

History shows us that the truth of any situation will eventually emerge, and blogs are among the newest tools, along with cell phones and digital cameras, for speeding that process. Blogging amplifies the voice of the individual, carrying it to ever-widening circles. Blogs have become important sources for firsthand information from the world's hot spots. Baghdad Burning (http://riverbendblog .blogspot.com), an anonymous woman's journal, is among the best- read and respected reportage blogs.

Especially in countries where free speech has not been encouraged, the power of blogging has a special allure. Communist China, for example, has more than 4 million blogs, and bloggers must apply for licenses and undergo automatic digital censorship, according to The New York Times.

Repressive regimes are so fearful of free expression that in Iran, for example, those who blog are often j ailed. Reporters Without Borders has published a new "Handbook for bloggers and cyber- dissidents" (http://www.rsf.org/rubrique.php3 ?id_rubrique=542), in part to help people worldwide learn the critically important skills of safe blogging.

International blog networks such as Reporters Without Borders, Global Voices Online, and Worldchanging are windows not only to concerns and voices of global citizens but also the ways access to new media can impact lives and economies.

On the domestic front, bloggers have played an often unwelcome watchdog role, nudging institutions toward greater transparency, accuracy, and accountability. A surprising development has been the willingness of newspapers, traditionally very wary of any outside input into their "product," to open up their Web sites and even some of their hard-copy pages to local bloggers in "citizen journalism" initiatives.

The Lingering Issues

No one argues that blogging is a beautiful manifestation of freedom of speech and the potential power of the individual in a democratic society and that easy publishing is a wonderful way for grassroots voices to be heard and heeded. Yet, the ultimate impact of blogging in our society and institutions is a subject of intense debate.

Here are some issues:

* Will blogs and other online news sources fatally erode major media of their audiences and advertising base, thus causing serious discontinuities in the journalistic ethics and standards that are the basis for First Amendment rights?

* How can online discussion lead to effective social change?

* How does an individual reap the benefits of so many new resources before inform\ation overload and the endless flow of new items render them inefficient and unusable?

We have added new gatekeepers with Hogging. Choosing which myriad filters to follow and how to process whatever they are sharing calls for a new kind of literacy.

We must accept that we have permanently moved beyond one-way media, and we must be prepared to write as well as read.

A Universal Imperative

The blogosphere seems very fragmented, but is it really? Are personal blogs, such as those on My Space and the older LiveJournal, somehow related to public affairs blogs such as the Daily Kos or Instapundit?

The answer is yes for futurist Cecily Sommers, founder and president of the Push Institute (http://www.pushthefuture .org) and convener of the annual, outside-the-envelope Push Conference. She sees the blogging phenomenon as just one of many current-day manifestations of the ancient and universal quest for truth.

"The power to create oneself and one's world," she wrote in a recent year-end newsletter, is "the real narrative that trumps all others" (http://www.pushthe future.org/pushpress_12.05.asp).

"What's new, and continuing to expand," in Sommers' view, "is our capacity to fabricate and project our worlds-an impulse fueled, paradoxically, by a yearning for something very real and authentic."

This proliferation of truth seeking and telling is leading us, she says, "toward an interesting future in which the age-old quest for truth is shared, discussed, published, and available to all in a way never seen before."

Through Sommers' lens, we see blogging as a truly "big" story, much bigger and more important than the huge amount of buzz commercial entities are making over it. Blogging tools can help seekers of hard facts fine-tune the kinds of truth they seek, but perhaps it is more significant that they facilitate the human quest for self-awareness as we arrange the puzzle pieces of today's confounding reality that make sense to us.

When deciding which of the vast number of blogs to read, the question is really the same as it was 30 years ago: Whom do you trust?

Blogs are like magnetic fields with the attraction flowing in several ways.

We must accept that we have permanently moved beyond one-way media.

Wallys W. Conhaim is a strategic planner, researcher, and analyst specializing in interactive services. Here-mail address is wconhaim@conhaim.com. Send your comments about this column to Metiers@ infotoday.com.

Copyright Information Today, Inc. Feb 2006

Source: Information Today

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