Six months ago I said I would write about blogging as a topic — to try to capture my thoughts about how profound and important blogging is. There has been so much written by so many thoughtful people that it would be hard to offer new ideas about it and frankly, I have been putting off the task. Yesterday I got an email from Irving Wladawsky-Berger, my friend and former boss at IBM, about Word Bursts. Irving’s note motivated me to get going and put my thoughts down — time to blog about blogging.
A website called Daypop is publishing a web page of Word Bursts — certain words from thousands of weblogs that have heightened usage within the last couple of days. In theory at least, the word bursts are indicators of what webloggers are currently writing about. The fact that anyone would be motivated to create such a site and that there is enough activity (blogging) going on to make such a site interesting, in and of itself, gives us an idea of how pervasive blogging has become. A site in New York City called "nyc bloggers" has a map of the city that shows where the bloggers are, organized by subway stop! Daypop and other sites also track what webloggers are linking to, offer subscription services to blogs (see bloglet.com), allow bloggers to setup "blogrolls" (see blogrolling.com) of the blogs that they read, and on and on and on. lisnews.com has an excellent compendium of the history and possible directions of blogging called "100+ Stories On Blogging".
One of the earliest stories about blogging was called "The Blogging Revolution" (Wired 10.05) by Andrew Sullivan. Andrew argues that weblogs are to words what Napster was to music. You can interpret this in different ways but to me it simply means that blogging is disruptive — in every respect. Publishing will change. More people will express themselves more often and more effectively. We have all heard the expression "I could write a book". Most of us have a book in is, but to actually get the thoughts from your head to the bookstore is really hard. In my case, it took six months to write Net Attitude and nine months to convert the bits into atoms. First you have to convince a literary agent that you have a point of view that is worthwhile. Then the agent has to convince a publisher. Then you interact with an editor. It all modesty, it takes a lot of perseverance.
Blogging create a new channel for those with a point of view. It isn’t a web page, it isn’t email. I think of a web log as an on-line diary. A successful blog is one written by a person with a pont of view, a desire to share it, a commitment to do it regularly, and the dedication to add a lot of links to leverage the value to the reader. Blogs that do this will get read. The syndication protocol of weblogs insures that the blog will get distributed to those who are interested. Compared to writing a book, it is infinitely easier. What about book royalties? I don’t have good data on this but I suspect that 99+% of authors don’t depend on book royalties to make a living. The top authors make a lot of money and the rest don’t make much. (This is also true of musicians). There will be some number of "would be" authors that will turn to blogging instead. If there point of view is of value they will find income in other ways. It may be by being asked to write a column for a formal publication of some kind. It may be consulting fees for going to spend time with a client that wants to engage directly.
The value produced by some bloggers will be in providing new channels of distribution for information. It isn’t just the point of view that they create but the pointers (links) that they create. Somewhere in the many stories about blogging I recall bloggers being referred to as "connectors". I may have a question about something and I don’t know who has the answer. However, I do know someone who will know someone who will know the answer. Blogs and blogrolls will point the way. David Singer at IBM told me that he "regularly use blogs to get points of view, and to get pointers to things I wouldn’t otherwise find". Blogs have become a major technical resource for him.
I think the biggest economic potential of blogging is inside the firewall. Intranets are now cluttered with millions of pages of “stuff” and most of it is poorly organized and the relevant things are often hard to find. To some extent the intranet has become an information dumpster. Portal software (like WebSphere) is making an impact but there is a long way to go for most organizations. Every company, government, university or non-profit has inside "experts" and people really care about what they think. They would find it much more productive to go to the expert’s blog than do a search with the intranet search engine. Knowledge Management is not an “in” term but to me that is what blogging is about – sharing knowledge.
