Friday, August 19, 2005

Blogging moves to business

You are going to learn alot more about science and medicine as more blogs are started on these topics, but this story today is more on the business of blogging.

Today I noticed a interesting article on Corante’s Get Real blog - on the business of blogs! Stowe Boyd says about writing blogs (and notice he has a book coming out):

"As the number of blogs and bloggers continues to double every three months, some paradoxical realities are beginning to show up. Like here, at Business Blog Summit, where I was puzzled to see that there is less and less maturity in the attendees: I don't mean that they are young, but that they are newbies. I mean, these folks don't know very much. And I am not knocking the conference folks. It's just simple numbers.

When you a show with an absolute number of attendees -- 200 or 250 attending -- and an additional 5 million blogs went live last quarter, and 10 million this quarter -- guess what? A lot more rank beginners are going to show up.

That also means that the time is right for advanced seminars and symposia to start, and that's where Corante will be pushing in the upcoming months. In an environment where six or seven of the folks speaking at this conference have "Business Blogging" books in press or in process, it is time for more specialization and depth. For example, I could see a conference dedicated just to the technical issues of blogging on Movable Type, or a one day Master Class on Blog Writing for non-newbies who want to dramatically improve the quality of their writing."

I guess it is time journalism schools started up classes on writing blogs....

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Uh-oh, the end is near! It seems like every movement that starts simple and that welcomes "amateurs" has ended up eventually being captured by professionals. About a decade ago PageMaker started the desktop publishing revolution with a simple program anybody could use to make flyers, newsletters, reports, etc. Relentlessly the software became more and more complex as desktop publishing professionals took over. Now these programs are used almost exclusively by print professionals. I fear the same phenom in the blog-o-sphere. More and more people will specialize and spend more and more time honing their skills on ever more complicated systems, eventually driving out the ordinary guy and gal. Perhaps we'll come full-circle with a new generation of professional bloggers capturing the new media. Oh well, our kids need somebody to blame for how disenfranchised they feel and how nobody tells the truth.