Business Press Pays Attention To Blog Industry

prostoalex writes "Right after Business Week named WebLogs, Inc. one of the five Net companies to watch in 2005, the Associated Press has a feature on SixApart, the company behind Movable Type, Typepad and (after acquisition) LiveJournal. The article talks about the company starting to 'think big' after being approached by venture capitalists, and has some stats on the blog industry in general."

Comments

Reality Check

[Xpilot]

The internet is shit

Seriously, why is such a big deal being made of blogging?

let blogs replace mass media

[trufflemage]

From the article:

The potential of blogging itself elicits strongly divided opinions.

Denizens of the so-called blogosphere believe the practice is destined to revolutionize the way people distribute and get information, increasingly marginalizing traditional mass media outlets. ...

Critics, though, view all the fuss about blogs as the latest bout of Internet hyperbole, one that will eventually fade away ones readers realize they are rife with inaccuracies and mundane minutiae.

The critics are correct--reading blogs means reading a single writer's private quirks--but that works to the reader's advantage as well as disadvantage. Who wants to get all their information from a single, monopolistic, sensationalistic source? That's how I view the local television news--to be fair, they make an attempt, but to me it's obvious their bottom line is ratings. So today we have an alternative model for the dissemination of information (or rather, many models), and one of the sturdiest is the blog.

I'm reminded of analogies I've heard made between modern AI computing algorithms (ie, neural nets) and the human brain, in which there are so many tiny, self-contained fundamental units (connections, say) that a great many of them can fail without destroying the performance of the whole. Robust & degrades gracefully.

Blogs may forge that sort of network online. No longer will it be easy to mislead the masses, because the masses are not drinking from a single spring. Each person is reading a finite number of blogs and processing and making their own blog. Everyone is (gasp!) thinking for themselves.

I like the direction this is going....

Re:let blogs replace mass media

[Tethys_was_taken]

Each person is reading a finite number of blogs and processing and making their own blog. Everyone is (gasp!) thinking for themselves.

Do not think, even for a minute, that this will happen. We (the people) will just find a different way to be sheep. Some blogs will get more attention than most, and everyone will again be thinking the same things, controlled by similar people.

A medium may encourage free-thinking, but people don't seem to like it too much. Most people prefer to be told what to think while going about their lives.

Blog entrepreneurs

[mparaz]

More people are looking through cashing in on their blogs, like through Adsense, and other schemes like BlogKits BlogMatch which show that AdSense doesn't work for blogs. Then we have the commercially sponsored blogs from companies like Gawker Media - such as Lifehacker for Sony.

Here's some analysis on commercial blogging. (Yes, it's from a blog!)

gmail invites

[Anonymous Coward]

This is nothing new. The rebulican party has been paying bloggers big bucks for some time now. "Grassroots" propaganda. Dig deep into the "Jeff Gannon" story for more details.

On another note, I have gmail invites for the first 50 who ask at safety.account@gmail.com

Re:gmail invites

[strelitsa]

A poster at conservative website FreeRepublic.com is credited as first discovering evidence of CBS News' and Dan Rather's clumsy attempt to rig a US Presidential election by exposing the incredibly bad Bush Killian memoranda forgeries that CBS had "authenticated". Here is the historic "Post 47" that exposed Rather's perfidy:

Post # 47 To: Howlin

Howlin, every single one of these memos to file is in a proportionally spaced font, probably Palatino or Times New Roman.

In 1972 people used typewriters for this sort of thing, and typewriters used monospaced fonts.

The use of proportionally spaced fonts did not come into common use for office memos until the introduction of laser printers, word processing software, and personal computers. They were not widespread until the mid to late 90's. Before then, you needed typesetting equipment, and that wasn't used for personal memos to file. Even the Wang systems that were dominant in the mid 80's used monospaced fonts.

I am saying these documents are forgeries, run through a copier for 15 generations to make them look old.

This should be pursued aggressively.

47 posted on 09/08/2004 8:59:43 PM PDT by Buckhead

CBS executives Betsy West, Josh Howard and Howard's deputy Mary Murphy as well as producer Mary Mapes acted as human shields for Rather with their jobs. Memogate was only the most recent attempt by supposedly unbiased "journalists" at CBS to subvert the will of the American voter. And bloggers were the first ones on the scene to expose CBS' treachery.

Of course, Dan Rather has a documented history of bias against Republicans. Rather's refusal to cover Juanita Broderick's rape charges against former President Bill Clinton during Penisgate was another black eye for CBS and its bell cow. Rather's incredible claim that the story was "an intrusion into Clinton's private sex life" was both disgusting and horrific. Rape is a crime even when committed by a sitting President, not a political football. Further, Rather's Jan. 25, 1988 interrogation of then-candidate George Bush trying to link him to Iran-Contra was a harangue so vitriolic that even Mike Wallace said his co-worker had gone too far, and CBS affiliates called the Bush campaign to apologize for Rather.

Along with Michael Moore's nazi-esque propaganda film Fahrenheit 9/11 and the stunning testimony of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth documenting John Kerry's cowardice and misdeeds during the Vietnam War, Dan Rather and Mary Mapes' evil machinations will be remembered by history as one of the primary reasons that George W. Bush won the 2004 election. The American people can smell a skunk in the woodpile, and Rather's shameful curtain call in March when he retires as anchor and managing editor of the CBS Evening News means that they finally, thankfully, have started to pay attention to the rampant liberal bias that infests the American "old media" television networks.

Re:Hoo boy...

[trufflemage]

the main product is something that is already available for free.

This has interesting ramifications. It's free, anyone can do it (and does) and it's spreading. The problem for the reader is sifting the interesting bits out of the sea of inanities. However, a couple of facts prevent this from being too big a problem:
1. what's of interest to me is not necessarily of interest to someone else
2. even after culling the 90%, the remainder is still a huge number. There exist enough relevant, interesting blogs to give me, the reader, choice.
3. "free" is contingent on size. A popular blog consumes bandwidth and at some point that bandwidth must be paid for. I believe that's a built-in check that will promote many small blogs over a few giant blogs. It's naturally resistant to monopolization.

The problem of too much to choose from and low quality is not really a problem but an asset(especially considering Google the Glorious to help me pick my way through): a plethora of choices is a good problem to have.

Blogs

[CastrTroy]

I have to say that blogs are a good way to generate traffic. I read about 4 blogs a day, most just from friends. However, most of my friends, like myself, have their own domain name, and pay some kind of hosting service. Geocities was one of the first free web page services. But nobody knew HTML and everybody's page looked really bad. It also took a lot of work to get what you wanted to say onto the web in a nice organized fashion. But still, Geocities was immensely popular, and is still around, although bought out by Yahoo. People want to express themselves on the web. And even if each blog only generates 5 hits a day, if you can get 5% of web users to have a blog, you're still going to generate a lot of hits, while only paying for bandwidth and servers.

Re:Am I the only non-blogger out there

[sploo22]

...it's just not deserving of "Next Big Thing" status.

I beg to differ. Technorati currently has over 7 million blogs tracked. 3 million of those have popped up just since last October -- that's one every 3 minutes. no matter what the quality is (and I do tend to agree with you there) blogging is big.

I guess the real appeal is that it's finally an "idiot-friendly" way of publishing content. People are starting to get the desire to make the Web a two-way communication system.

Re:Am I the only non-blogger out there

[BenjyD]

7 Million! - that's a lot of stories about people's pets. I wonder what fraction are regularly updated and read. In order for there to be two-way communication, someone has to be reading those blogs ;).

Blogging is important, of course - just look at how many Slashdot/OSnews etc. stories link to a blog post these days. But extrapolating from 7 million people moving their journals online to a revolution in journalism is too big a leap for me to believe.

Re:Dot.Com Bubble again

[SallyMac]

I'm not so sure you're dead on with the money part - I know that LiveJournal has a large portion of their accounts (large for me, anyways) that are paying accounts, and with blog platforms like Moveable Type you have to pay to get any of the good features. Perhaps if more companies starte delivering easy to use blogging interfaces for the average user they won't be able to charge, but for now they're making a decent bit of change.

Re:Hoo boy...

[disserto]

Cringley talked about this last week. The VCs are running out of time to use the money they have, so instead of giving it back (as well as refunding the fees they charged to manage it), they're going to start putting it into everything they can.

This is both good and bad. Obviously, money is going to go into things that aren't really going to go anywhere. Money will also go into things that sorely need it and will produce something good.

The question is whether or not we remember the lessons learned just a short time ago. Will we all follow those investors and jack up the market on pie-in-the-sky dreams of hitting it big the easy way? Or will we hold back, actually research these things, and maybe play it a bit more conservatively?

Judging from the spam I get, I think more people will be into putting their life savings into the hot stocks again. Maybe the rest of us can use that to our advantage.

Re:Dot.Com Bubble again

[PerlDudeXL]

companies like Six Apart have an actual product and a weblog platform for people that can't setup their own.

selling the weblog/cms software, sponsored links or banner-advertisements on weblogging platforms seems to be a decent concept. compared to the dot.com bubble with companies without an actual product to sell.

Re:Dot.Com Bubble again

[Znork]

If your buisness plan can be implemented by a pimplefaced teenager in his parents basement, you should be prepared for the competition of several hundred thousand pimplefaced teenagers doing just that.

The value in such a simple buisness is just too small to support a public company as anything other than a short-term investor aberration.