I’m back from BloggerCon after a quite warm day in Harvard Law School. There really were a great deal of interesting people and comments passed around throughout the conference.

As usual, the echoes of blog conversations ran long and loud as topics discussed in many different contexts converged in the real world. There’s nothing that can ever replace that face-to-face interaction, though.

By far, the most interesting session was the one run by Jeff Jarvis on the Business of Blogging. I’ve spent the last week exploring several different aspects of blogging. Some of the key topics that came from the discussion related to the models for generating revenue, the need for metrics in the industry, and the questions relating to the ethics of blogging and business combining.

One of the main action items that resulted was the notion of a Trade Association of sorts that would assist in the establishment of the blogging industry and increase the appeal of it to marketers. I’m looking forward to see what the outcome is.

I’ll be attending BloggerCon and related events for the next 2 days. There should hopefully be some reports from the conference over the next few days.

Next week, I plan to expand the Blog Entry Archetypes to include the following new categories:

• Media Entry
• Event Entry
• Instructional Entry

Many 2 Many mentions some new statistics on the use of the terms blog and weblog. As they note:

“Blog” outpaces “weblog” in 2003, 687 to 389; that’s a big change—in scale as well as preferred term—from 2002, where the respective numbers were 270 and 274.

Source: Out of the Crooked Timber, “Blog coverage” via Many 2 Many

I’ve found most often that if I use the shortcut term blog, I generally have to backpedal a little bit going to weblog as the next step. Assuming that point of explanation fails, then “online diary” seems to get it clear. What are you using?

Last night I had the pleasure of meeting both Stowe Boyd (A Working Model, GetReal) and Judith Meskill (Social Software Weblog, Knowledge Notes) in real life, that is away from the keyboard and face to face. Interestingly enough, despite never having met in person before, the conversations were detailed and familiar.

As it turns out, a great deal of internalization occurs as one subscribes and imbibes the daily thoughts of another person. Conversations begin to happen not as spoken dialog but instead as written screenplays. As I explained last night what a blog was to one of the other folks there, the best description I could provide was it was a personal journal with discussion — a flattened forum if you will. This definition seemed to work enough to convey the general point. However, when pressed who wrote things, I noted that there is usually only one author, however, there are often times when multiple authors create. I did mention, though, that comments were usually open, which, is another form of authorship. The last form mentioned was this screenplay effect where one author used their own blog as a pulpit for responding to others — a virtual game of tag as it is.

Indeed, our conversations last night continued where the blogs had ended. There was no discussion about the source of the subject matter as everyone already “knew” what we were talking about. There was never a need, though we might have out of habit, mentioned that the information was in the blog. Perhaps we mentioned it more so for those around us that weren’t part of the online conversation and, now, somewhat bewildered.

One of the last comments on the “blogging thing” was that it seemed to disjointed. I had to disagree, however. My main assertion is that blogs have their own DNA, derived from the wills and motives of their authors. Although topics range, categories provide roadmaps to the thought process. This also serves as one of the biggest challenges for new readers. Understanding the though process (a.k.a. why it’s not disjointed) requires, at a minimum, more context. Unfortunately, blogging today generally lacks the visual and informational pointers to generate context, instead reporting only on the “timely”.

Fernanda Viegas, a PhD candidate at MIT’s Media Lab (Sociable Media Group) has completed a survey on the demographics of the “typical” blogger. As his findings conclude:

Formerly viewed as a marginal activity restricted to the technically savvy, blogging is slowly becoming more of a mainstream phenomenon on the Internet. Thanks to much media hype and some high profile blog sites, these online journals have captured the public’s imagination. As novice authors plunge into the thrilling world of blog publishing, they soon realize that publicly writing about one’s life and interests is not as simple as it might seem at first. As they become prolific writers, more bloggers find themselves having to deal with issues of privacy and liability. Accounts of bloggers either hurting friends’ feelings or losing jobs because of materials published on their sites are becoming more frequent.

Source: Fernanda Viegas, “Blog Survey: Expectations of Privacy and Accountability” via GetReal

I had a conversation on this topic a few nights ago as I explained some of the motivations for the blogging system I was designing. One of my main assumptions in the development of the blogging application was that a tidal wave of activity was on the horizon. The force behind that movement - entrepreneurs. While the inital wave of bloggers were tech-savvy individuals, followed by a smaller burst from individuals and increasingly teens and young adults, the next rising will see business people reaching out to these technologies for a number of reasons, least of which being a creative mix of editorial and sales content.

In the business world, it is often the smallest of companies that unleash innovative ideas and methodologies to the masses (however small they may be). In general, the smaller player has the advantage because of their nimble infrastructure and their ability to adapt to emerging trends and other fads. In contrast, the larger, established corporations have longer, deeper roots which often requires more strenuous effort to “sprint” towards new concepts. However, the ability to truly spread information is usually hindered by other forces — the largest node has the upper hand in this regard.

In the blogging world, “power laws” rule the topology and the same effect can be seen. There are thousands and thousands of innovative thinkers scattered across the blogosphere. Unfortunately, spreading a message to the community at large is often hindered as a result of size and distribution. The solution — amplifiers. To bootstrap their positions and roles, bloggers seeking the position on the Thought Leadership Totem Pole require the assistance and acknowledgement of those more entrenched. The ability to feed information to the top only helps to levitate the individual’s standing.

There’s a catch, though — elevation requires attribution. If the message is co-opted by others without proper credit, the influence of the author is nullified. One might think that in a “socially responsible” network such as the blogosphere that this would not happen often, but new research at HP seems to indicate otherwise.

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Whitney Pastorek seems to believe that blogging is ruining her social universe little by little. In her recent Village Voice piece, she comments:

It takes a lot to make me rethink my place in this city, and even more to make me question my very existence. But lately, irrational social fears are keeping me up at night. Something is going horribly wrong, and I have finally traced the problem to its source: blogs.

[…]

I don’t know all of this because I am a blogger. I know it because my friends are, and now everything is bad. And while a lot has been made of the cultural implications of the Blogosphere, I am not convinced that anyone has taken the time to talk openly and honestly about the effects it is having on the day-to-day existence of the world’s adult non-bloggers, or what I like to call The Way Blogs Are Ruining My Life.

Source: Village Voice, “Blogging Off”

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I checking in at the ViralMarketingBlog and found a link to an old article written by John Hiler of MicroContentNews titled “The Tipping Blog - How Weblogs Can Turn an Idea into an Epidemic”. Anyone who actually knows me can tell you how important Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference” has been to me and how interested I am in the subject matter In addition to dealing with issues from “The Tipping Point”, the article also talks a good deal about another favorite of mine, Seth Godin’s “Unleashing the Ideavirus”. Indeed, this was a treasure to find.

The article tries to dissect the explosive circulation of an article written by the author. By using server logs and a little bit of common sense, the author traces through the event and locates the different characters that were critical to the boost. There’s too many good tidbits to try and quote here, so I can only recommend that you go read it yourself!

The subject matter is particularly interesting to some ideas I have been mulling over. Since I started this blog, it’s been growing steadily over the past couple of months and certainly has posed and imposed a new challenge for me. In this same time, I have come to recommend and evangelize the use of the medium to an ever-increasing group of self-starters and entrepreneurs. Despite the initial excitement, however, things never seem to progress. I think this is largely a matter of motivation and confusion. Starting a blog with purpose, as opposed to as a personal journal, can be daunting as blogging is changing at all times and there is a great deal of work perceived from the outside. I am curious how much of a market their is for assisting people in using web logs and other related technology to accomplish a variety of goals.

Could this be a new service? What would a service like this look like? I’ve been thinking about a model like this:

• Introduction - the ins and outs of the blogging world
• Research - getting “into” the space and understanding your potential contribution
• Implementation - selection of the right tool for your needs
• Strategy - advice on how to “work” the system
• Managing and Measuring Expectations - understand what you can expect, coping with growth (or lack thereof) and measuring it effectively

I’m certainly not an expert on the space, but I’m very interested in digging in a bit more. If anyone is interested, I’m willing to try something like this as an experiment. For anyone looking for immediate how-to type material from a marketer, you might want to check out Debbie Weil’s blog as I think she offers a seminar on the subject.

USA Today:
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/webguide/internetlife/2004-02-27-web-feeds_x.htm

E-mail is crippled, concussed by an irrepressible spam stream. Web surfing can be equally confounding, a wobbly wade through bursts of pop-ups and loudmouthed video ads.

And that may explain the excitement these days over a somewhat crude but nifty software tool that automatically delivers updated information to your computer directly from your favorite Web sites.

Enthusiasts see these Web feeds as sketching the outline of the next Net revolution.

[…]

RSS has been called the TiVo of the Web, the first “killer app” of the anticipated automation of social and commercial transactions online using the Web’s second-generation XML (extensible markup language) standard.

Forbes.com
http://www.forbes.com/personaltech/2004/02/23/cx_ah_0223tentech.html

But the potential goes much further than simply making life easier for obsessive Web surfers. It turns out that RSS feeds are searchable and that many bloggers like publishing their own RSS feeds because it can help boost readership numbers. That’s exactly what Feedster.com is all about. The company recently demonstrated its ability to search through the content of RSS feeds at the Demo 2004 conference in Arizona.

Some new statistics have been released regarding the use of blogging by the American masses by the ,a href=”http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/toc.asp?Report=113″>Pew Internet Project. According to this Associated Press article:

The Pew Internet and American Life Project, in a study released Sunday, found that somewhere between 2% and 7% of adult Internet users in the United States keep their own blogs.

Of those, only about 10% update them daily, the majority doing so only once a week or less often.

Some bloggers indeed update their journals often, in some cases several times a day. But it’s clearly a minority who are taking advantage of the blog and its potential to steer the online discourse with personal musings about news events and daily life.

[…]

Among other findings: 21% of Internet users have posted photos on Web sites, and 20% say they have allowed others to download video or music files from their computers. Seven percent have webcams that let others see live pictures of them over the Net.

Source: USA Today, “Between 2 and 7 percent of American adults blogging” via Nick Bradbury

I find three things very interesting here:

1. The number rised sharply from the end of last year to the beginning of this year (most are wondering, however, how many of the young adults and teens are contributing to this space)
2. The article seems to indicate, to a very wide audience, that influencing a group of people is “easy” as seen by the comment on “influencing discourse”. Of course, the underlying power laws (as elegantly described by Clay Shirky and recently lamented by Seth Finkelstein) may stem user’s success, real or perceived
3. Close to one fifth of users have both uploaded and exchanged digital assets (be it photos or videos) and web cams are on the rise. The age of the digital image is certainly encroaching on us (if we’re not already embedded)