Thursday, 2nd June 2005
Power of blogging
Life as we know it, is being blogged by more people every day. Blogging is so simple that many successful people and firms have difficulty understanding why it is so effective. Some incredibly smart people blog, as do some rather un-imaginative people. Hopefully i fall some where in between them both. The power of a blog is immense.
Then there are a bunch of people who seem to blog like there was no tomorrow. When you have more time than money, blogging is a superb way to publicize yourself.
Blogging is an incredibly easy way to make new freinds. You can start conversations with almost anyone on the Internet and may be even build a rapport with them. Hell you may even find your soulmate this way instead of haunting dating websites, chat sites etc. There is an incredible thrill when we discover new friends amongst the billions of people who inhabit the blogosphere.
People often become fast friends because of certain ideas they share, even though many other viewpoints (political and personal) may be worlds apart.
A well known secret to a successful blog is "You blog, other blogs link to your blog, you link back, and Google loves that and the rest is history".
This is what blogging is all about. You conceive of something, write about it and people express their opinions about it. The only barriers are in your own mind. Once you break through them, the sky is the limit. Blogs experience surges of traffic which are partially under our control.
Blogging is like riding a wave of great power and almost infinite reach. It is incredibly interesting because you might find among friends who ride their own waves.
Today i try and describe two thoughts about the power of blogging and its capability. One related to techincal oriented blogs such as Joel Spolsky's blog, Eric Sink's weblog etc which contain a lot of technical matter. The other describes the possibility of how blogs might become a new powerful media.
Starting of with techincal blogs (if i were to refer to them as such), blogs such as those mentioned earlier are extremely popular. If you happen to subscribe to the RSS feed of Joel's site (as i do) or frequent his site often, you will see the enormous number of people who spend an awful amount of time debating about topics mostly concerned with software and occasionally offbeat topics as well. You then wonder why the site is so popular and what makes joel click. Certainly he is an excellent sofwtare developer but by his own admission is not the best ever and the products his company FogBugz develops is certainly not the most revolutionary pieces of bits and bytes of software to scratch the surface of processor chips. The truth is that he has mastered the art of marketing software and more importantly is an excellent writer and his ideas about software engineering and the software industry are so popular that idol worship is probably the only place left to go for joel. It is such instances where the value of being able to articulate ideas and thoughts, bear fruit. I'm certain joel wouldnt have been so successful if he wasnt such a good writer. Besides his understanding of user interfaces is incredible and this talent has brought him plenty of attention and his techincal talks about the importance of user interface design were well consumed by the techincal community.
In contrast to this are the blogs by tech gurus such as Eric Sink and Raymond Chen. Their ideas are well recieved by (if i may say so) geeky crowd and their sites are a software developer's paradise. But the differences from joel's site if quite obvious. They both lack the eye-candy to compete (not that that there is any supposed competition) with joel's site, but this again emphasizes joel's effectiveness when it comes to marketing himself, his site etc. The point i'm trying to make is blogging to express ideas isnt effective if it isnt marketed well. The difference in size, diversity of audience in joel's site opposed to other blogs is a fair testament to this. As long as they provide information that is of value to their readers, they will continue to enjoy readership but how they sell themselves matter too.
The other idea i had today was about blogs as a new form of (powerful) media. People everywhere capture events (good, bad, ugly) around them and document them in their blogs which are permanent and searchable. This new breed of citizen publishers have the power to possibly wreak havoc on the comfortable monopoly once enjoyed by traditional journalists.
Till recently the world consumed what they had to contrived and passed off as news. It even passed for 'the truth'.
Today, the voices of prime time news anchors are being punctuated by a growing horde of independent fact checkers who will not go away, verify facts and not shut up.
Poorly researched articles by "The New York Times" and "Newsweek" are refuted within hours by these independent citizen publishers who publish their findings on the Internet in their blogs for everyone to see.
Events that were once happily choreographed by mainstream media are now fact-checked daily by millions of interested people who have more expertise than the (think dumb bimbo) talking heads on TV or the columnists of the print media. This will probably lead to a new breed of media where blogger comments appear on editorial pages and on TV news channels.
The result is that more and more knowledgeable people are immediately cross-checking sensational news from the normal mainstream media against their favorite news blogs.
This leads to an interesting possibility. How long will it be until these people switch to weblog news entirely?. But this is unlikely to happen because ... How will these pajama-clad citizen publishers be any better? The answer is they wont, but the wonderful solution they have to offer is that when anyone can publish their thoughts, their findings, their research for all to see, it becomes more difficult for the Big Lie (that the mainstream media puts forth) to be maintained.
An example of 'The Big Lie' is the situation in Iraq. Information that would create the most devastating effects on American citizens was top of the agenda for the media. The media activities in Iraq became the subject of repeated exposes by bloggers. Once it became evident that these media correspondents were filing alarming reports about conditions in Iraq without ever leaving the safety of their well-protected hotels, their credibility vanished as quickly as the weapons of mass destruction.
Us bloggers have a responsibility to future generations to record history as it happens and not by what we are told by the media and thus affect what our world might become . It just might be a better world if we work it right.
Posted by Nikhil on Thursday, 2nd June 2005 in TechnoBabble | Life in General | Fun