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Why Blogs Matter
By Community | October 3, 2007
At first glance, a blog doesn’t seem that different from any other site you’ve probably visited. It has words, pictures and links. It may have video or audio. But dig a little deeper, and you’ll see that a blog is a very different animal from a regular web site. It’s because of what Robert Scoble and Shel Israel call the Six Pillars of Blogging:
- Blogs are Publishable–anyone can publish a blog, you can do it cheaply and post often. Each post can be instantly available world-wide.
- Blogs are Findable–Through search engines, people will find blogs by subject, by author or by both. The more you post, the more findable you become.
- Blogs are Social–The blogosphere is one big conversation. Interesting topical conversations move from site to site, linking to each other. Through blogs, people with shared interests build relationships, unrestricted by geographic borders.
- Blogs are Viral–Information often spreads faster through blogs than via a news service. No form of viral marketing matches the speed and efficiency of a blog.
- Blogs are Syndicatable–By clicking on an icon, you can get free “home delivery” of RSS-enabled blogs into your email or to a reader. RSS lets you know when a blog you subscribe to is updated, saving you search time. This process is consistently more efficient than the last generation method of visiting one page at a time.
- Blogs are Linkable–Because each blog can link to all others, every blogger has access to the tens of millions of people who visit the blogosphere every day.
These six pillars open up a whole host of possibilities that weren’t available to us in the “pre-blogging” era:
- An American woman can participate in a month-long, collaborative learning experiment with 20 people she’s never met from Australia, India, Canada and the UK.
- Another woman can raise enough money to send two young Cambodians to college for a year.
- A professional association can easily provide updates and information to its membership without having to go to the “webmaster.”
- A company can create a community with its customers by providing valuable free information and a forum for feedback, questions and ideas.
- A teacher can interact with colleagues from around the world, sharing what she’s learned at conferences and creating a sense of connection to fellow educators facing the same problems and issues.
Blogs are powerful because they give “regular people” a voice and a way to connect to other people like them. They put the networking power of the Internet to work for everyone, which means new ways to learn, work and play. And they make it easy to continually find updated information and to share new ideas with others, keeping interesting conversations flowing all the time.
Topics: Basics |
November 12th, 2007 at 4:09 pm
[…] from a regular web page. I’ve discussed some of these characteristics in a previous post on Why Blogs Matter, but let’s review a couple of key […]