Here I am, sitting in a hospital room in Shawnee Mission, Kansas, watching my grandmother sleep and catching up on my Internet community of blogs. The hospital has wireless and for that I am grateful. I can check my mail and get caught up and somewhat pretend to have my normal existence. Normal existence means being with my computer and jacked into the community datasphere. (Ah that's the Hyperion series coming out.)
Which give me time to compose my thoughts on blogging. Blogs are no different than a web page. I don't really understand why the media and companies are buzzing about blogs. Blogs and the interface I use to blog is nothing more than a good UI slapped on a lot of standard web functionality. The face is the same, it's the mask that has changed. Blogs are just web pages. Communities of web pages. Like the dream of Geocities communities, except have a much better user interface - both in terms of viewing outputted content (template functionality has gotten easier and consistent) as well as inputting the content. It's the web applification of Dreamweaver. An old school network instead of all content lives ones place. (Although the server power is not diversified in a peer-to-peer way.Blogging is the web application interface to web creation.
So I'm not really blown away by blogging. And yet, it is a core activity. "Blogging" facilitates what I do - live, work, communicate, interact, meet and maintain relationships with myself and others. It's a medium. And we all know, the medium is the massage. Blogging for blogging sake doesn't really interest me that much. It's limiting Like being a user interface advocate. Yes, it's important to advocate for the user, but the real work is in the doing. The creation. It's the content, baby. And the medium facilitates the content. It's what you're trying to get across. Why do you blog? To disseminate information? To feel important? To journal? To keep a record of the road? To garner buzz for your product? To create a feedback loop? To create a community? To meet people? These are all good and valid reasons.
Blogging makes it easy to put your conversation from lunch online. To jump online instantly and record something, like the first Netflicks only mailbox. Something you might read in email or hear directly from your friend. Blogging records conversations without limiting to a particular medium. (Email, IM, images, phone, audio). But blogging is another baby step along the way. Don't get caught by it's shine. It's the next tech fad - which is not bad in of itself, however, it will move along and get integrated and built upon.
Blogging in an of itself is not a marketing or business strategy. It's how you run your business and what you are trying to accomplish, sell, buy, do that will determine how blogging is threaded into your business. It's way to do PR, it's a way to gather customer feedback, to create a user group, test ideas and concepts, grow buzz through a cult of personality or productality.
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