Alyce Lomax at the Motley Fool has some interesting data points in her Blogs Booming? piece today. The date is culled from the Pew Internet and Family Life Project. In a nutshell, Blog reading and authoring is a market on fire, with a lot of growth still to come.
- 62% of us don’t actually know what a blog is.
- Blog readership jumped 58% in November from February, with 27% of total Internet users saying they read blogs.
This article, (like so many others) still fails to “get” one of the main reasons the whole Blog thing is such a big deal. They don’t get (yet) it’s the architecture, not the content that has the greatest potential. True, blogs will become even more so “a serious source of information, concepts, or ideas.” Yes, they are “making discussions even more interesting.” and I have to agree that “there are plenty of silly blogs out there.”
Thats not the point. This is like articles in 1995 saying the Web is important because “it’s a great place to read physics papers”.
The fact is for a significant percentage of traditional Web sites (a majority?)—they should be served by a Blog engine instead. The entire site presenting this event looks like a traditional Web site to the untrained eye. It isn’t. The Blog Business Summit site is entirely a set of blogs, and after overseeing traditionally architected sites for many years, I will never go back to the old way. Visibility, collaboration, updating, and distribution are all light years ahead of the old method.
The article concludes:
“The blog phenomenon could remain a niche or stagnate at these levels. However, it seems to me that’s a slim chance. How this industry evolves will be of the utmost importance to traditional media — and Internet-based — companies, and the individuals who have invested in them.”
Will these newfangled Toyotas and the Interstate highway system remain a niche or stagnate compared to the tried-and-true Model T on gravel roads? Only time will tell…
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Travis Swicegood 01.04.05 at 6:27 am
I was just asked this question yesterday by a traditional marketing type:
My response was almost the same as yours - this phase/use, yes. But the easy method for updating sites and a constantly updated site, no.
-b- 01.04.05 at 7:24 am
That’s a good point - I had a similar conversation with a client this week. Responding to blogs, she said that her firm was too small and traditional. I think the untold story of blogs, is that they’re are a simple CMS and the evangelists, including myself, need to get that word out. It’s just another publishing medium, a website. The theme is the flury of press has been, “business transformation.” The good thing is that RSS hasn’t been in all of these articles as a wonder technology.
Steve Broback 01.04.05 at 10:32 am
I met with one of the most savvy internet marketers I know last week. He’s been in the space since 1995 and has made a fortune helping raise awareness and visibility for his clients. Even he said “blogs–isn’t that just the latest incarnation of geocities?”. Even he confused content with delivery…
Jon Husband 01.04.05 at 8:48 pm
My response was almost the same as yours - this phase/use, yes. But the easy method for updating sites and a constantly updated site,no
Absolutely spot on, imo. The last 20 or 30 years has been about building the technological infrastructure (and the 2-wayness of the Web trumps all of the rigidity still more-or-less embedded in large integrated systems in organizations).
Blog and wiki derivatives, probably called something else, will in all likelihood become the way(s) people interact and work.
Today I learned of a good common-sense approach to the unfamiliarity with blogs … call them whatever has the same meaning, more-or-less, for a given situation/application (such as a dynamic e-newsletter or an easily updated interactive site, or whatever else will reduce the skepticism, the pigeon-holing as just an online diary) … and then concentrate on what blogging can and might do for all involved.
Scott Rafer 01.06.05 at 11:59 pm
What I wondered about Pew numbers is: how many US Internet users read blogs withOUT knowing they are reading a blog? I suspect at least a couple million.
The Motley Fool position is ironic, given how that business was built on an almost identical phenomenon less than a decade ago.
-b- 01.07.05 at 7:58 am
Totally. And why should they know or care if it’s a blog? On our Clip-n-Seal site, we never called it a blog, cause we expect our customers wouldn’t know what that page was.