PR guru buddy David Libby forwarded an email to me by a writer of an newspaper in the Northeast (I don't bother to say which to protect his local "scoop"), asking the eternal question: "I am working on a story about the growing number of bloggers, or Web loggers, on the Internet. I'm trying to get expert insight into why this is taking off."

Always a whore for publicity, I responded with an email that quickly got very long. So what the heck, I offer it here for your benefit, too. I do my best to stay on-topic here at ExecutiveSummary.com about Internet media and marketing and not become a self-obsessed ranter for who cool blogs are. But, darn it, blogs continue to be big in the up-and-coming importance department for Internet media, so a certain amount of this gushing is unavoidable. Anyway, the man asked the question, so here you go:

Scott,

A colleague of mine forwarded your query about blogging. I've been a blogger myself for more than six months and before that I've been an Internet media and marketing analyst and researcher for about 7+ years (and a career in journalism and newspaper publishing before that).

Please feel free to call me at 646 554-0963 if you think I could be of any help to put this in perspective.

I think a few factors are responsible for this blog phenomenon really getting big, almost going mainstream (the biggest evidence of which is Google's recent acquisition of Blogger.com), "crossing the chasm" or reaching its tipping point (or better yet, chose your own metaphor). Here are a few theories of my own:

The greatest power of weblogs is in their simplicity. They are self-publishing tools that truly let any Internet savvy person publish, index and archive their views on a wide range of topics. Sure, GeoCities, The Globe and others tried to do the same thing, but the Blogger.com folks, closely followed a fast-growing set of competitors were in the right place at the right time with a simple enough set of tools that the HTML-illiterate can publish pages in a format that has become widely standardized:

• reverse chronology postings on the main page


• every posting has a permanent link


• searchable archives

Beyond that, the common practices among webloggers to link to other material (both at other weblogs as well as major media sites and weirdo little sites) and to link to their favorite weblogs has created a community spirit to blogging (aka "the Blogosphere"), which serves as a powerful self-filtering mechanism for the quality of content weblogs provide. Informational Darwinism: by and large, only the better material gets linked to, so the probability of finding a few bloggers you like and getting referrals from them to crappy blogs is low. Tthe better, more interesting material bubbles up to the top.

In my mind, as a reader of blogs, that's what blogs are best at in the media ecosystem -- a network of independent media filters. It's easy to get addicted to services like Blogdex that tally a constant snapshot in time of the most popular links on blogs around the net, as it shows a truly democratic and organic information system at work, independent of the major media. There's a lot less cow-towing and trying to please readers as in mainstream media (who have to make a profit and please advertisers and suffer political pressures as well). The independent voices of bloggers pull no punches. As a journalist yourself, imagine not having an editor. It's quite liberating. It also improves the likelihood of finding stories being overlooked by the mainstream media via bloggers who have an investigative or alternative bent of their own.

Another point worth noting is how simple they are. As a blogger, you only need to identify an interesting article, link to it and perhaps provide a short meta-comment of your on top of it, and you've already created a tremendous amount of value to readers without your having had to do all the work of the journalist who wrote the story. That's what people mean by "thin media." It's why bloggers can go on making a living doing something else and publish popular weblogs in their spare time, as the effort involved is not much beyond writing a short email to a friend with a link of interest.

They are also powerful just in the flexibility of the tools. You don't have to be some Gen X political commentator wannabe or stalker/obsessive issue freak to benefit from blogging. The basic self-publishing construct of the tools -- Blogger.com and the more powerful and B2B oriented ones (see link above for details) -- also have tremendous business communications potential (think intranets, media relations, customer support, marketing and more), although disappointingly the mainstream of businesses have been slow to pick up on this, despite a few isolated examples already (Matel's Barbie Blog, Macromedia's customer support blogs, the whole computer game sector, and others).

Also, when you come right down to it, blogs are simply the coolest new buzz on the Net since Napster, which seems like ancient history already.

Reading Malcom Gladwell's book The Tipping Point is required for really understanding the big picture of blogs and their potential. It's all about how ideas spread, and blogs are going to have an increasingly large

It is likely that Google's acquisition of Blogger.com is going to have an even bigger impact on how blogs will inform that information soup and filtering process that both search and blogs represent. Already, blogs have had significant impact on Google's effectiveness, as many of its results are filtered through weblogs, a new phenomenon of the past year or so. If the two merged companies invest more in understanding the optimal balance for how Google can use the focus and power and quality of blogs as an information filter to return even better results, weblogs may become even more significant in the media soup that online represents in all our lives.

Anyway, I could obviously go on and on about this, but I do have other things to do. Hope you don't mind, but since I've put so much effort into writing this, I think I'll go ahead and post it to my blog!

Best,

Rick

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