Accidentally on Purpose Blog

Please read Paul Glazowki’s recent post on the future of blogging (”Blogs:  A History, A Future). What once was a mostly a “geeky” medium has become mainstream. 

For years, we have seen instances of blogs that have amassed steady readerships well past the million mark. Whether they be political in nature (DailyKos, The Huffington Post) or cover all things gadgetary (Engadget, Gizmodo), they’ve regularly shown, for many, many a season their ability to attract seriously large audiences.

But only recently have such online publications received considerable attention day to day in the realm of typical chatter. Whereas in 2004 and 2005 (in some cases 2006, even) one would tend to think twice before mentioning one’s interest in a particular blog at the lunch or dinner table, today it is more or less accepted that one mention such a reference in an average setting. You know, a setting involving one’s non-geek friends or family members.

What does this mean for the future of blogging?  Who knows, but we are well beyond the “early adopter” phase, at least when it comes to readership.  The big question is whether the masses will ever go beyond reading and participate more meaningfully. 

I think were going to see a second round of blogging growth.  Perhaps not the same “entrepreneurial” style that Paul’s post described but the corporate wave of blogging is still to come and that wave will favorably affect participation.  In the meantime, there are numerous other social-media platforms worth studying.  The rapid growth of social networks and video suggests that there is more than one way for people to participate.

Now, this is interesting.  The International Center for Journalists has awarded a Knight International Journalism Award to Egypt’s Wael Abbas, “recognizing his role in bringing controversial subjects to the attention of his country’s mainstream media and public.”  But the headline is that Abbas is a blogger, and he is the first blogger ever to receive this honor.  Here’s what usinfo.state.gov (a communications arm of the U.S. Department of State) had to say:

Created in 2004, Misr Digital [the blog] attracts an average 30,000 visitors per day and 1 million per month.  More significant, Barnathan said, the blog has forced the mainstream media to follow up on Abbas’ reports due to the large public reaction.

Abbas himself has faced arrest by Egyptian authorities, but the content he has posted on his blog is making a difference.  For example, a video he featured of two Egyptian policemen abusing a detainee led to a recent Egyptian court sentence against the officers, which Barnathan called a ?breakthrough? event for the country.

At the National Press Club, Abbas said the Knight Award is ?very prestigious ? and respected all over the world,? including Egypt, and he hoped the award will help raise awareness of his blog. ?It is not the best time for the media and the blogging community,? he said, since the regime is cracking down and trying to tarnish the bloggers’ reputations by accusing them of treason and acting on behalf of those outside Egypt.

What Abbas is doing is consistent with the role that journalism has always played.  But what’s noteworthy is the platform.  Now journalists and bloggers have the means to cover the big stories of our times.  And they are rewarded with the same honors, and exposed to the same dangers.

This is from a few weeks ago but hey, I’m just now getting caught up from the past 10 days of vacation! 

The BBC’s Peter Day contributed a byline in the Daily Mail about his experiences with podcasting, a medium that may not be getting the raw numbers still enjoyed by traditional broadcast, but which appears to be better serving its listeners (at least on the BBC).

Until now listeners have been remote: all we had was ratings to tell us who was listening, and a few appreciative or moaning letters. Now we have a new democracy of broadcasting: listening habits made manifest, ratings created by listeners making an active decision to download a particular programme.

Radio is music, chat and news but most of all it is ideas, and podcasting is going some way to redefine the ideas that interest our listeners. Podcasting is a new kind of listening, much more active and involved than merely sitting back to wait for what comes next.

Day concludes:  “It makes us broadcasters think much harder about who what and why we are talking to. It moves broadcasting much closer to conversation.”  That’s a big admission coming from a star member of the BBC, whose brand is almost synonymous with its broadcast “voice” — the distinct breeding and tone that have long characterized the smart men and women who have spoken on BBC radio.  I seriously doubt that brand will go away.  But the voice of the BBC may soon be the voice of its listeners.

In a very smart article about the advent of social media, AdWeek’s Brian Morrissey eulogizes the death of the campaign microsite.  More and more businesses are looking for ways to connect with consumers where ever they go. 

The growth of social media is causing marketers to realize they cannot expect consumers to always seek them out. Web widgets and video-sharing tools make it easy for any user to take content that formerly might have lived only on a brand site with them wherever they go. And social media sites help them share that content with friends.

“We really believe in fishing where the fish are,” said Carol Kruse, vp of global interactive marketing at Coca-Cola. “The old model is to build your own site, then spend media dollars to bring them there.”

Not so long ago, marketing was like the mantra in “Field of Dreams”:  “build it and they will come.”  Today, we know that we first need to understand what to build, and where to build it.  The first step, as always — listening!

Shel Holtz submitted a great piece on an emerging trend — the increasing number of businesses that are blocking employee access to 2.0 services.

According to surveys from Barracuda Networks, two-thirds of companies plan to restrict access to the Net over the next year, an increase of nearly 23% over this year. About half of the company’s customers already block access to social networking sites (25% block just MySpace, 6.3% block just Facebook, and 19.3% block both).

At the same time, notes Shel, many businesses are investing in social media platforms for collaboration “inside the firewall.”

What should we make of this “split-personality” disorder?  Says Shel:  “At some point, companies are going to have to come to terms with the fact that networks cross organizational boundaries and that open access?governed by clearly-communicated policies?will produce benefits that far outweigh the costs and risks.”  I agree. But there’s something else here.  While the business benefits of many internally facing tools are fairly well known — or better known — the benefits of all things 2.0 are not.  And in the meantime, the onus is on vendors that provide the externally-facing stuff. 

It’s a tough sell, when many of these services are not designed for work.  But it doesn’t mean they don’t have value.  In my opinion, those organizations that do block access do so at their own peril.  If you move toward using these tools now, you will become proficient at using them by the time most competing companies begin working with them.  You would be surprised how well this will teach people not only the ins-and-outs of the tools but more importantly, the values of listening and participation!

The Daily Telegraph — a leading U.K. tabloid — reports that blogging has gone “mainstream” in Great Britain.  More than 4 million U.K. citizens are now blogging, according to a recent report.  But a more interesting stat appears later in the article — the number of Telegraph readers who are using the newspaper’s blogging platform — MyTelegraph — to create their own blogs.

Since My Telegraph was launched six months ago, almost 4,000 Daily Telegraph readers have set up a blog to interact with other people from across the world.

Shane Richmond, who oversees the operation, said he was not surprised that so many people were getting involved.

Reminds me of the IBM case study — under Chris Barger’s leadership (he’s now at GM), more than 5,000 IBM-employees used an IBM blogging platform to set up external blogs, and more than 20,000 used the platform to set up internal blogs — I don’t know the current numbers but one would have to imagine that those numbers have grown.  We keep hearing about the power of platforms, and here’s a very simple example.  Make it easy for people to use social media, and you will get better returns.

Technorati Tags: My Telegraph, IBM, Chris Barger

Nat Torkington posted on a topic that I’m sure is going to get more and more attention in the coming year:  the human limits of social media.  There are many benefits for folks who know how to use blogs, wikis, social networks, Twitter (I’m still grappling with this one), etc.  But it all comes at a price.

… the more we use these things, the more overwhelming the pressure to maintain the network feels. I had blog burnout eighteen months ago, with an enormous subscription list that was consuming all my time. I just went twelve months without using an RSS reader, I simply used delicious network, TechMeme, and Digg to get what my friends were reading, what the tech bloggers were saying, and what the masses were thinking. I wish I could say that I used the extra time to develop a brilliant piece of software, but actually I spent it detoxing from Silicon Valley by fishing. Regardless of how you would spend the extra time, though, most people feel like they need more time even though they have all these high-scaling low-transaction-cost methods of communication.

In a conversation with Giovanni Rodriguez he was telling me that this strange predicament might have been foretold by Marshall McLuhan, the so-called father of post-modern media theory and author of the phrases “the global village” and “the medium is the message.”  McLuhan argued that all new technologies have the potential (1) to enhance, (2) to obsolesce, (3) to retrieve something that previously had been obsolesced, (4) and, if used to excess, to reverse the effect that was intended.  In the context of social media, the danger to those who overuse the tools is that they will get the opposite of what they intend.  Instead of efficiencies, they get inefficiency, inertia, burnout.  A warning to people who are “always on”:  you may soon turn off.

Eric Enge at Search Engine Watch adds a fresh breath of air to the conversation on community-based marketing.  More and more people are finding that bigger doesn’t mean better.

While much of the recent focus on social media marketing centers on the big social sites, such as Digg, StumbleUpon, and del.icio.us, search marketers would be smart to spend some time learning about micro communities.

Unlike the larger general-purpose sites, the traffic from a micro community will be vertically focused on your niche, which makes for a big bonus. While these communities get the label of “micro”, some of them are not really so small at all. You can get tons of useful traffic from them by matching the nature of your content to the right community.

I say, let’s just stop calling these communities “micro.”  These are the true communities that people need to think about.  As for sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, etc., it’s better to think of these as communities of communities.  It’s a lesson that’s being learned all around the business world, including eBay, which, as I recently posted, has decided to break out its own communities.

Technorati Tags: Search Engine Watch, Digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, eBay

The SF Chronicle — a newspaper that has long been rumored to be suffering from the myriad challenges facing the newspaper industry — weighs in with a close look at blogger economics.  Business reporter Sam Zuckerman zooms in most closely on TechCrunch, the Silicon Valley-based tech blog that most industry watchers regard as the bellwether for commercial blogs.

TechCrunch illustrates the new blogging math. It sells sponsorships that allow advertisers to display on the home page at $10,000 per month. It also uses Federated Media to sell display ads, keeping 60 percent of the revenue. And it charges $200 to list in its Cool Jobs section, getting about five or six want ads per day. Parties and conferences add another income source. Last month, TechCrunch organized a two-day event at the Palace Hotel that gave 40 startups a platform to tout their wares.

And, as far as spending goes, “our costs are only headcount,” Arrington said.

Let’s assume that newspapers need to study blogger economics in order to get ahead, or even keep up (btw, that’s a big assumption, because despite the success of TechCrunch, GigaOm, and other popular commercial blogs, the top line is not there for many others).  One lesson for newspapers has got to be depressing:  the overhead of running a commercial publishing enterprise has plummeted to a level where almost anyone can jump in.  But note that Michael Arrington and others are spending on “headcount.”  By that, of course, he means writers, and that’s not-so-bad news for journalists.  The new publishing world continues to drive the demand for good content.  Only question is, who’s hiring?