Blog It, Baybee!

When web logging first began, nobody is quite sure. There were people maintaining web logs or journals online long before there were web logging applications built for this purpose. In the earliest days, webmasters would update and upload static pages to their sites, but as these pages got longer and longer, and the difficulty with maintaining archives became more and more complex and time-consuming, people who were adept at programming began to build applications for just this purpose. Web logs, at first, appealed mainly to the geekier types online, but we’ve come a long way since then, and even the non-geeks are web logging today.

About 7 percent of the 126 million Americans with access to the Internet have created blogs, according to data collected in 2002 by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. That translates to almost 9 million people across the country. A research group in Massachusetts, Perseus, recently predicted that more than 10 million hosted blogs would exist by the end of 2004, and that’s not counting the number of blogs people maintain on their own servers. According to research by Perseus, more women blog than men - 56 percent of blogs surveyed by the group in a recent study were written by women. The group also found that women were less likely than men to start a blog and then abandon it. Those who abandoned blogs tended to write posts that were only 58 percent as long as the posts of those who still maintained blogs, which simply indicates that those who enjoy writing stick with blogs longer.

Major changes in technologies of access, the maturation of Internet users, and the development of new applications and content are three likely factors that have contributed to the growth of online pursuits. Spurred by an increase in content and the momentum of important news events in recent years, the online news population has grown by 50 percent since 2000. Those who have searched for political news and information online grew by 57 percent between 2000 and 2002, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Americans’ everyday applications of the Internet continue to expand over time, and by extension, this is also true of the rest of the world.

When blogging came along, it made it easier for personal publishing to become a reality for millions of users online, changing publishing from a traditional one-to-many model into a technology-enhanced many-to-many model of communications. Traditional media, at first, didn’t take the advent of web logs seriously, but as bloggers began combing through the same news sources as traditional media uses, and breaking the news stories before traditional publishing could, those who previously did not take blogging seriously have slowly begun seeing something of value in the blogosphere. This became especially poignant as the United States began bombing Iraq in the Spring of 2003, when a young Iraqi in Baghdad began posting his daily missives of what was happening around him in Where is Raed?. And unlike e-mail, often touted as the Internet’s “killer app,” blogs, potentially, are read by thousands of people, not just one set of eyes.

Presidential candidate, Howard Dean is aggressively using Internet technology to reach voters. He was the first - but no longer the only - candidate to use a web log to do it. Voters can also post their comments or questions 24/7. More than any other candidate this year, Dean has mastered the Internet. He’s raised more money with it than his top Democratic challengers and, just as important, the doctor has his finger on the pulse of his core constituency. Dean began blogging a year ago with 3,000 daily readers. By November, 2003, that number was 30,000. If a Presidential candidate can take blogging seriously, perhaps there’s more to it than many people think.

Joshua Micah Marshall’s plea for funds to cover the formal debut of the 2004 presidential election got him so much money he ended up giving a lot of it back. But such a display of respect and loyalty for his Talking Points Memo - which gets 300,000 unique visitors a month - shows that blogging may yet become a viable way for journalists to earn a living. — via OJR

Marshall isn’t the only one who’s found dollars in blogging, however. Andrew Sullivan has a $20/yr. subscription service for his column and appears to be quite successful with that. And then there’s ad dollars to be considered. Some of the more high-profile bloggers’ ad revenue can top $2,000 a month, according to some figures I’ve seen online. But what about blogging as a part of a regular job?

Perhaps the most blog-friendly company in America is Macromedia Inc., a multimedia software producer based in San Francisco. Blogging is at the core of Macromedia’s customer marketing strategy. In 2002, as the company released a number of new products, it asked several employees to launch blogs where they could field questions from customers.

”We needed a mechanism to communicate incredibly quickly,” said Tom Hale, Macromedia’s senior vice president of business strategy. ”We hit upon the blog strategy as a mechanism to do that.”

Hale said the experiment succeeded beyond expectation. — via Seattle Post Intelligencer

If more companies would recognize that blogging can offer something to their customer service and marketing departments, and allow them to communicate directly to their customers, bloggers could begin to find offline employment opportunities springing up all over. Part of the allure of blogs for corporate publishing is the immediacy of the communications. Certainly some of the bigger corporations that have a stake in online technology, such as Microsoft, AOL, and even Lycos/Tripod, are now swiftly adopting blogging into their service offerings. They recognize, now, that blogging has gone from a novelty to a necessity. And there are no signs yet that it won’t continue to grow. So, what’s next?

The next wave could be dubbed blogging-on-steroids - as blogging technology is merged with wikis and integrated into social networks (the Friendsters of the world) to create a truly-connected world of online journals, Web collaboration and personals networking.

Researchers at Microsoft are already testing a networking tool called Wallop to explore how people share media and build conversations in the context of social networks. The word around the industry is that Google will hook its Blogger software to a Friendster-type network (via an acquisition?) to tap into the ever-more-connected, open-standard-driven computing world.

In 2004, the evolution of the weblog/wiki/personal network will make a huge impact in the way information is shared on the Internet. Doubters need just look at the way the heavyweight politicians have embraced blogging to take advantage of the conversational nature of the technology. — via InternetNews.com

Look for the next “killer app” to embrace that idea. I think we have a lot to look forward to, don’t you?