The
Effect Of Blogs
Blogging Grows
In the past month or two,
I’ve felt like what I like to do (blogging and reading blogs)
has become a mainstream discussion.
I read about blogging in nearly every newspaper and
magazine. I hear about it on radio and TV.
I’m sure that someone is pitching a TV sitcom or a movie
with blogging as part of the plot.
With 6 million plus
bloggers and an additional 35,000 every day, something interesting
is happening here. Blogging
has become a new way to set down one’s thoughts, to seek an
audience, to build a community around an interest or topic.
It’s as if anyone can start his own daily (actually
continuous, since you can update all the time) newspaper, with an
unlimited circulation, at almost no cost.
In fact, the more readers
you can attract, the better your opportunity to make money.
Some of the big-time political bloggers who have really
large readerships were making $500,000 a month in ad revenue
during the presidential campaign (we suspect they’re making less
now).
Where will all this go?
No one knows. Some think it may be like CB Radio (remember that?) – just
a fad that will reach a peak and then quickly fade away. Others are sure that it’s already too big and too
interesting to disappear.
I think of it as Web Sites
for ordinary citizens – no skills required, little or no cash to
get started. Anyone
with access to a PC and minimal writing skills can look for an
audience. We started writing about narrowcasting for magazines and
cable TV stations at least ten years ago.
Maybe this is the ultimate narrowcasting, with the search
engines to help us find our audience and the vast worldwide web to
insure that an audience is out there for any topic, no matter how
obscure.
Deepblog
Deepblog is a new service that wants to help
connect readers to established blogging sites by areas of
interest. The idea is
to make it easy, listing the best bloggers and making their sites
easy to find. If you
go to www.deepblog.com
you will find lists, by category (such as political, religious,
and technology blogs, but also contemporary cultural blogs, best
blogs, and so forth.
The idea is to keep the
lists short and well pruned so that users, especially newbies,
won’t be frustrated.
We’ve suggested some new
categories in business areas (you’ll guess what if you read the
rest of this article) and we’re also hoping that Deepblog (or
someone) will develop an easy-to-use reader rating system so that
bloggers’ reputations can be shown as a guide for new readers.
Check it out and tell us
what you think. Better
yet, tell Deepblog how to make it better.
Who Uses Blogs For What?
As we’ve noted above,
with over 6 million blogs, even if most of them are about teenage
girls and their five best friends, and the best-known blogs are
clearly about politics and social issues, some of them are about
business. We’d like to note that even here the uses of blogs fall
into clear and different categories.
In many companies, blogs
occur spontaneously (or with minor encouragement, but not as
part of anyone’s job). Here
we have bloggers in any kind of job, but especially bloggers who
work for technology companies, and especially those with
technical jobs, writing passionately about their work.
The very best of them have some writing skills (reading a
blog is pretty boring if you’re constantly trying to figure
out what the author meant to say) and they often give us a
glimpse into their personal lives, telling us about their
families, their personal interests, what makes them unique
individuals.
Other blogs are clearly
being built specifically as a new form of marketing
communication – a new kind of 21st century
newsletter, if you will. That’s not wrong, it’s just totally transparent.
If you want to send me marketing information, I don’t
care if it’s in the form of a daily or weekly newsletter or an
RSS feed for a weblog, I just want us both to agree it’s
marketing information. Blogs
themselves aren’t marketing (although they can be used to
transmit anything), but rather a way to share information, with
the information for a community of interest to comment on it.
I doubt that this is marketing.
A kind of in-the-middle
usage is what some small businesses (particularly those where
the blogger is the entrepreneur him or herself) are doing.
Here they are using the blog to tell you about the
progress of their business and its products and often telling
you about how customers are figuring out new things to do with
the products. If
the blogger is clever enough to let the Perils-of-Pauline world
of the small company show through from time to time, these can
be quite engaging, and often the readers become a kind of
cheerleading section. I
guess it’s marketing, but it’s a very new kind of let me put
you into the middle of the action marketing – not the old kind
of let me sell you something marketing.
Meanwhile, at Sun
So with that as
background, let me tell you that we have watched with fascination
(and not, I think, with pleasure) as Sun’s COO Jonathan
Schwartz, a very prominent blogger, has from time to time used his
well-read platform to do a kind of marketing by blogmail.
The latest is an Open
Letter to IBM CEO Sam Palmisano in which he implies that IBM has
refused to support Sun’s Solaris 10 (by porting its
infrastructure software (DB2, WebSphere and so forth) to the
platform) because it wishes to use its monopolistic powers against
Sun and other competitors. My
first reaction was, “I must have misread this,” so I read it
again – twice. Then
I checked with IBM to be sure that they do, in fact, support
Solaris 10 on the SPARC platform.
They do.
Never mind that (a) IBM is
not a monopoly, last I looked and (b) Solaris 10 is a new product
(it was launched in November), so it’s very early for it to have
a visible marketplace, beyond upgrades for existing customers.
The real story (as a
number of publications have noted) is that IBM chooses not to port
their software to Sun’s Solaris 10 –x86 platform because
they’re waiting to see if there is sufficient customer demand.
Since even Sun (so far) has been selling most of its –x86
Opteron systems with Linux, not Solaris, we suspect that the jury
is still out on how big the –x86 market for Solaris 10 might be.
Sun’s blog manages, unfortunately, to give the distinct
impression that IBM is shunning ALL of Sun’s Solaris 10
platform, not just the –x86 portion.
My problem with this is
not that Jonathan Schwartz and Sun shouldn’t have a marketing
blog. Blogs are
technology not a religion.
But many bloggers are
hoping to establish their credibility as an alternative source for
trustworthy information in their areas of expertise.
Many old media journalists have not been at ease with this
notion, sometimes being pleased to have bloggers as sources for
information, but at other times quick to point out that bloggers
do not enjoy the resources or the editorial process of a large
newspaper or a monthly print publication.
Bloggers who are serious about providing careful,
thoughtful writing on subjects in which they are well versed want
to give their readers (and the traditional media) every
opportunity to learn to trust the Blogosphere.
Using blogs to write marketing material, written from a
particular viewpoint, and without the transparency that bloggers
and their readers are famous for demanding, doesn’t help.
Of course, blogs may be
used for any purpose – they just need to make that purpose
clear. That’s why
my newsletter is called “Opinions.”
I want to make it very clear that while I am writing about
events and product, I am expressing my opinions, however expert.
Comments are welcomed; agreement is not required!
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