Why Blogging Matters, from Naked Conversations

Naked Conversations:
How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers
--a book by Shel Israel & Robert Scoble
http://redcouch.typepad.com/ excerpts from their post May 2005

Why Blogging Matters
“Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.”
—Malcolm Gladwell. The Tipping Point

Every few years, something comes along to change the way everything is. In the mid 90s, it was the Internet. Previously our lives were changed by email, computer networks, PCs, fax machines and photocopiers. The continuum of change extends all the way back through TVs, phones, cars, trains, the telegraph, electricity, the Gutenberg press, perhaps all the way back to when the wheel first rolled out.

Blogging has not yet proven itself to be on this same level of significance, but... give it time.

Conversation is the essence of the way people communicate, always have been. Conversations build trust.

Technically, a blog is very simple. It’s nothing more than a website with content displayed in reverse-chronological order. New items, or “posts” are at the top of the page. Except for team-written corporate and collaborative blogs, site visitors can identify the actual person or persons writing them. Blogs are loosely joined to each other by linking. Find one blog, and you can probably spend hours clicking links from blog to blog to blog or on mainstream media (MSM) sites like the New York Times or USA Today.

Watch enough blogs and you see a worldwide conversation happening. It's word-of-mouth on steroids. Blogs extend conversations beyond the limitations of the physical and includes anyone anywhere who wants to join. Many can communicate with many, on a global basis, in an orderly and constructive manner. Real people get to speak out, and blogs allow companies to listen.

That’s what is special about blogs -- they are the best technology, so far, for giving conversations global reach.

While one person, Dave Winer, is generally credited with starting blogs, on spontaneous impulse, blogs were not invented and planned as were the telephone, PC or the photocopier. They just happened and have grown over the last five years. Here are some of the reasons why:
(1) The Tainted Corporate World. (Enron. Need I say more?)
(2) Unemployed developers.
(3) Google.

Blogging turns out to be the best way to gain Google prominence and has to do with technology. Google spiders out onto the network in search of change. Blogs get updated all the time, while most websites do not. Every time you post, Google notices the update and that boosts your ratings. Google also pays attention to links—other sites that connect to you. Bloggers who find what you write interesting, will post on their own sites and link back to you. Nothing will boost your search engine standing better. Neither a press release nor a full page ad in the New York Times will boost your search engine rankings the way a blog that is updated regularly.



If you want a high Google ranking: blog and post often.

Blogs are:

(1) Publishable. Anyone can publish one. You can do it cheaply and often. Each posting is instantly available worldwide.

(2) Findable. Through search engines, people will find blogs by subject, author or both. The more you post the more findable you become.

(3) Social. The blogosphere has been called one big conversation. Through blogs, people with shared interests build friendships unrestricted by geographic borders.

(4) Viral. Information often spreads faster through blogs than via a news service. No form of viral marketing matches the speed and efficiency of a blog.

(5) Syndicatable. By clicking on an icon, you can get free “home delivery” of the RSS-enabled blogs you like into your email software.” RSS lets you see if a blog you subscribe to was updated saving you search time on information that interests you.

(6) Linkable. Because each blog can link to all others, every blogger has access to the tens of
millions of people who visit the blogosphere every day.

According to David L. Sifry, founder and CEO of Technorati (a Google-like service that tracks
blogging topics, links and trends), the number of blogs has been doubling about every five months since 2003. When Typepad launched, there were approximately 100,000 bloggers. Eighteen months later, the Pew Research Center estimated there were 8.5 million, bloggers, and that 40,000 new blogs start every day. Just a few months later, in May, 2005, Microsoft reported seeing 100,000 new blogs opened on its service alone – per day!

While as many as one-third may be abandoned within a year, the overall growth of blogging is among the fastest in history. According to Pew, 25% of all people who visit the Web read blogs, and that number is rising at the rate of 60% annually.

Today, blogging has become the most rapidly adopted technology in history. More than 10% of all Americans read blogs, an increase of 60% in 12 months, according to Pew Research. Technorati says growth is even faster in Asia and the Middle East than it is in North America. The full number of blogs worldwide today is more than 12 million, up from about 100,000 two years earlier in 2003. Half of these blogs are private, a majority of them being used for internal communications behind corporate firewalls.

Adoption is accelerating globally as well. In 2004, Sifry reported that Farsi language blogs showed the fastest growth, and in March 2005, Chinablogs reported more than a million Chinese blogs. There are bloggers in every country where internet technology is accessible.

A large number of blogs are password protected, used for invitation-only collaboration in everything from backroom corporate projects to family reunions. Private blogs are growing in popularity in corporations where they are used as a “clean intranet” for collaboration.



Finally, businesses should not dismiss the well-documented popularity of blogging among young people worldwide. They are the next generation of employees and entrepreneurs and they are likely to use the technology tools they know to conduct business as the move into the marketplace.

As far as blogging is concerned, the Genie is indeed out of the bottle, but history would indicate some companies will persist in ignoring technology.

So did the village blacksmith.