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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."
These blogging sites are great for getting stats with big numbers that will impress the money men, like page impressions, and users, and gigs of bandwidth.. but what about the revenue? People aren't actually very willing to pay for somewhere to write their blog, you can't run a multi-million dollar business on the back of T-Shirt merchandising sales, and online advertising is a business model shown to be flawed in the late 90s..
So if I were to invest in on of these companies, where would my stock dividends be coming from?
Or is it another case of a dot.com investor not really understanding what they're buying into?
http://twitter.com/onion2k
Blogging, IMHO, is overrated.
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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.
Pardon the skepticism, but...
You know, it's crazy, but you'd think that after the dot.com bubble burst the venture capitalists would be a little more careful with their money when it came to tech, yet here they are, wanting to get in on an industry where the main product is something that is already available for free. Where will the revenue, and further, the return on the investment, come from? (Firing Berman out of a cannon?) What's worse is that if there's another burst like the last one, investors are going to go back to shying away from small tech companies that actually produce something.
I think this whole thing is a result of all the press that the mainstream media is giving blogs, and the only reason why I think they're getting all that press is because the media LOVES an opportunity to navel gaze.
Don't get me wrong, I think blogging is cool and all, and offers a chance for political/media/other watchdogs out there, and there are some blogs I find entertaining, but really, I can't help but think that all that money is just going to go right down the drain, and the only thing they'll have to show for it is a bunch of webpages of people and their cats.
The internet is shit
Seriously, why is such a big deal being made of blogging?
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
What rolls down stairs, Alone or in pairs, Rolls over your neighbor's dog? What's great for a snack, And fits on your back, It's Blog..blog..Blog!! ... It's Blo-og, Blo-og It's big, it's heavy it's wood! It's Blog, Blo-og It's better than bad It's good!!! Everyone wants a Blog, come on and read my blog!
By Blamo
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....
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!)
Not long after, Bill Gates did an interview with Gizmodo. Coincidence? (Gizmodo was not featured in the FORTUNE article - Engadget and Microsoft's own Bob Scoble were).
20/2/2005
Woke up. couldn't find any clean underpants because the lighbulb is broken. Maybe the underpants gnomes stole the lightbulb to cover up the missing pants until they made their getaway.
19/2/2005
Posted in my blog today.
18/2/2005
Man I shouldn't have eaten those beans. I had to destroy all my underpants.
Beep beep.
"you'd think that after the dot.com bubble burst the venture capitalists would be a little more careful with their money when it came to tech"
I *strongly* suspect that venture capitalists (and brokers) made a killing during the dot com era regardless of the collapse.
It's the bigger fool idea - each person buys at stupidly inflated prices assuming there is an even bigger fool who will buy after them - but the VCs get in first so there was very often much bigger fools begging to be ripped off.
I seriously doubt that another bubble is going to be seen as anything but an opportunity by VCs.
The whole fuss over people on both sides of the debate "Blogging will change the universe!" and "Blogging is just pointless!" misses the point.
Blogging is _exactly_ what happened at the start of the internet craze - it's _home pages_. Blogs are just home pages that are easier to update than they used to be back in the olden days, so people don't have to worry about HTML in order to create them.
Blogs: Just easy-to-use web pages, nothing more, nothing less.
My Journal
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.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
First, in reference to those who don't get blogging: It is finally a way for all of us would-be writers and journalists to express our humble opinions in a place where they might actually be read. It is a diverse community without the usualy limits and editing done when something is written within major media.
Historically speaking this has happened numerous times. Each time a new media appears it changes the way all previous media performs, killing that which is no longer viable, gradually reshaping "old media" and creating a new means of information. Think about how the printing press, television, and computers have all changed the way major media reacts with the masses. As the price of producing in that media lowers more people will begin to produce in that media, creating a more diverse body of knowledge than "popular opinion" that big media tends to stick with. For instance as the prices of printing came down during the industrial revolution many would-be activists printed pamphlets of their beliefs. I actually own a pamphlet printed from that time insisting that we should move to a 12 digit numeric system, not exactly something that would be put forth by main stream media at the time, especially with the push for metric. And so it is to be expected that blogging will recreate media, providing a check and balance system for main stream media, just as has happened in the past.
That said, part of the point is that the price must be low in order to be used. Bloggers that are read daily by large masses: Instapundit and Lileks for example can easily manage to pay for their bandwith costs and to use purchased blogger software, but the average blogger doesn't have a ton of readers and unless he gets discovered, more than likely eats hiis bandwith costs each month and will prefer the free model for blogging apps. So, as far as investments go, I am not sure that that particular model will prove productive.
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.
No mod points, no meta-moderating/Firehose/all the other free work Slashdot wants me to do.
I submitted this a couple of days ago, but it seems it wasn't important enough for its own story.
.pdfs to these websites:
A local news paper, The Tulsa World, sent out a cease and desist letter saying to stop quoting their opinions/articles (in whole or in part) and to stop deep linking to their unprotected
Batesline.com, Chris Medlock's blog (a city councilor who is the subject of a recall), and TulsaNow.org because some messages in the forum include links to articles.
The Tulsa World's webmaster apparently didn't know how to stop unauthorized linking until just recently. Wednesday he said it couldn't be done, today it is fixed.
Two other websites are involved in this story of so called copyright infringement, freedom of speech and deep linking. Tulsans for election integrity also received the letter, they are against the recall. The coalition for responsible government are for the recall and has directly copied, in their entirety, articles from the Tulsa World and have received no such letter (the we know of) the Tulsa World has been informed, so either the coalition for responsible government is ignoring the demand or the Tulsa World has given them blanket permission to do such a thing.
This story has been covered locally and nationally
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
So I'm watching this ABC broadcast I believe it was and they had some story about an Iraqi girl some army unit saving a little girl.. and the source quoted was "A blog". Now this is where I get problems, as soon as blogs become "well known media" we start to see them corrupting.
I don't see blog corruption in your example, I see a Major News Organization who either didn't research the story enough to verify it, or convey the fact that they did that research well enough to convince you.
All stories start out as uncorraborated rumors, unless the media has people and cameras directly on the site of the story. But ultimately, whether or not a story starts out as video footage or something I mumbled in my sleep last night is utterly irrelevant... the question is, is it true?
By the way, if you honestly think you've been getting "no media bullshit", you're nuts, absolutely nuts, and grossly misinformed. I had no idea that there were still so many people who still thought the media was some sort of mystically holy and unbiased source of news until I read the comments for this article. I mean, isn't the history of the term "yellow journalism" part of the standard history course in school still? An entire war largely manufactured by journalists? This isn't news, people...
Excellent point. Just what I've been mumbling to myself for a while; I'm glad someone came out and said it.
To amplify: Personal web pages, a.k.a. "Blogs", are revolutionary. They are changing the world, and I imagine they will continue to do so. They started doing so around 1990. The techies got involved in big numbers around 1993. The man on the street started noticing around 1997. A while later someone came up with some nice interface ideas and coined the word "Blog". Good for them, but that was just another step in a revolution that had begun a decade earlier.
Now some pundits wake up and say, "Hey! The internet isn't only about huge companies!" Well, it never was, and I'm glad they finally figured that out.