About Blogging...

What Is A Blog?
What Is The Goal Of A Media Blog?
Basic Tips For Blogging

How Has Blogging Evolved In The Past Few Years?
Which Blogs Are Working Now?
More Industry Buzz About Blogging

WHAT IS A BLOG?

A blog, originally (and often still) known as a weblog, is a web-based publication consisting primarily of periodic articles (normally, but not always, in reverse chronological order). Although most early blogs were manually updated, tools to automate the maintenance of such sites made them accessible to a much larger population, and the use of some sort of browser-based software is now a typical aspect of "blogging."

WHAT IS THE GOAL OF A MEDIA BLOG?

A dozen bloggers will give more than a dozen reasons for blogging, but from the business perspective of a media company, blogs serve the same straightforward aims as anything else printed or broadcast:

Inform and entertain your audience.
Reach ever-more audience.
Reach your audience ever-more frequently.
Connect with your audience ever-more deeply.

Audience in this case means users, in the same sense as readers or viewers. Advertisers and company owners are audiences too, but they have different needs from your media product.

BASIC TIPS FOR BLOGGING

Be frequent. Update at least daily, if not throughout the day.
Be brief. Less is more for busy users scanning content.
Be focused. Leave essays and complex analysis in your column, then tease to it from your blog.
Share the Web. Use your authority on a topic to become a guide for users.

The "Don't Link To Other Web Sites" Myth: Inexperienced media managers might worry that linking to other Web sites just "drives traffic to the other guy." True - for one page view - but here's some points to consider toward gaining credibility for your blog:

Your audience spends 99% of their time on other blogs and Web sites anyway. Don't ignore their world or sell short their exposure. Earn their trust by acknowledging and helping expand what they know.
Seach engine optimization - the process which determines what ranks first in Google results - typically values external links when indexing your Web site or blog. Hypertext linking the right keywords on your blog earns points.
Respond to users both through your blog and their blogs. People like recognition, both good and bad. Acknowledge their comments or post a "counter-point" comment on their blogs, exposing yourself and your blog to their users.

HOW HAS BLOGGING EVOLVED IN THE PAST FEW YEARS?

Phase I (1996-2000): Blogging Gets Easy
Phase II (2000-2004): Blogging Gets Popular
Phase III (2004-2007): Blogging Gets Connected
Phase IV (2007-2011): Blogging Gets Necessary

PHASE I: BLOGGING GETS EASY

Term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger in December 1997.
Focus of trend is on tools: Xanga (1996), Open Diary (1998), LiveJournal (1999), Blogger (1999), etc.
Google buys Pyra Labs' Blogger (2003).
People can publish their text and photos quickly and easily, without the heavy overhead of a full content management system or having to learn WYSIWYG HTML editors, FTPing files to servers, and other techy ways to get stuff on the Web.

PHASE II: BLOGGING GETS POPULAR

Focus of buzz is on most-trafficed and most-linked blogs, comments, trackbacks. Niche evanglists thrive.
Speed of publishing increases.
Several professional blogs rise to rival the readership of national news magazines: Gawker, Anne Cox-era Wonkette; more...
Uniting the technologies of XML/RSS feeds with MP3 audio creates podcasting, making Wisconsin farm couple Dawn and Drew into stars with ten of thousands of listeners.
Social sites such as MySpace amd Facebook tie blogging with the social network model made popular by Friendster.
Phase II is where most newspaper organziations got on board, outfitting their columnists with blogs based on their existing beats or columns already being published in print and on Web sites. For example, sports writers and entertainment columnists now became sports bloggers and night life blogger.
Many newspaper Web sites now highlight breaking stories in a "news now" blog, contrasting to their other content sections which mostly reflected once-a-day updates pushed from their print edition content.

PHASE III: BLOGGING GETS CONNECTED

Trend now is driving toward trusted recommendations, user ratings, and more social networking.
Both algorithm-driven systems like Google News and user-driven systems such as Digg.com help qualify blogging and other online media. See Technorati.
Keywords and tagging become commonplace as users build organic content networks. See YouTube, del.icio.us.
Blog content is very tipping-point driven, viral.
As an organic way of "blogging" opinions in a commerical use, Amazon.com offers suggessions based on other shoppers' comments, ratings, lists and purchases.

At this point, blogging is a critical way in which people define themselves. A critical mass of easy, interconnected blogs on the Web reflect less how people really are, but more a broadcast of how they see themselves: their opinions, their avatars, their music, their friends, their likes.

PHASE IV: BLOGGING GETS NECESSARY

A further convergence of technologies begins to replace user-written blogs with user-reflective blogs.
Media speculators predict this convergence will deconstructs and personalizes all online data:

The Googlzon EPIC of 2015 by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson.
Geocoding and GPS wireless devices - BlackBerry handhelds, cell phones - will trigger automatic blogging by tracking users in real-time, in the real world, and updating their user profiles automatically.
Blog opinions and behaviors will become indexed, audited, and syndicated to like users and local receivers.

How will mainstream media fit in this new model?

WHICH BLOGS ARE WORKING NOW?

Several Web sites track popularity in such a way as to measure which blogs are most popular at any given moment. Here are some places to look:

Some of the usual suspects...

The Drudge Report: The 500-pound gorilla of news reference sites; Alexa rank 362.

Engadget, Alexa rank 483, and Gizmodo, The Gadget Guide, Alexa rank 847: Reviews and previews consumer electronics, can make or break a new product.

Drew Curtis' FARK.com: User-submitted links and discussion on news sites and various goofy stuff. Serves 11 million page views a day. Boasts 275,000 free registered users, with an estimated 10,000 premium members ($60/year). Alexa rank 746.

Boing Boing: A Directory Of Wonderful Things: A cooperative blog posting links to an eclectic range of sites around the Web. Alexa rank 1,136.

Daily Kos: State of the Nation: Bastion of liberal left political envangelism, founded by Markos Alberto Moulitsas Zœniga of Berkeley, Calif. Alexa rank 1,850.

Podcasting - essentially, audio blogging - has its own sites to track popularity, including charts right in iTunes:

MORE INDUSTRY BUZZ ABOUT BLOGGING

Blog censorship handbook released [BBCNews.com]

All the news that’s fit to annotate [Doc Searls]

Jim Romenesko: More Companies Will Start Hiring Bloggers [This Is Not a Blog/NYU]

Jeff Jarvis: Half-baked vs. Fully Baked Blogs [BuzzMachine]

Public Relations Will Be Changed by Blogs [This Is Not a Blog/NYU]

IBM, blogging and the rise of the world’s biggest media company [Hypergene]

Seven big ideas (and one pet peeve) from BlogNashville [OJR]

What Makes a Good Blog? [This Is Not a Blog/NYU]

Secrets of the A-List Bloggers: Lots of short entries [TNL.net]

Six reasons why I prefer good blogs to most traditional journalism [The Long Tail]

How News Travels on the Internet [hammeroftruth.com]

Small Business Blogging [DanBricklin.com]

Business blogs increase customer interactions [Wisconsin Technology Network]

And for dead-on fun:

The Lifecycle of Bloggers [MinJungKim.com]

Want your own blog?

If you are interested in starting up your own blog, these Web sites offer free hosting for basic blogs, with priced options to upgrade for more features.