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

Dot.Com Bubble again

[onion2k]

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?

Re:Dot.Com Bubble again

[natrius]

Or is it another case of a dot.com investor not really understanding what they're buying into?

It makes me cry whenever I hear people say this. I dry the tears with my Webvan stock certificates.

Am I the only non-blogger out there

[mattspammail]

I never have caught on to the blogging thing. The only times I ever look at a blog is when it's sent to me as a link (usually because a pic of a hot chick accompanies it).

Blogging, IMHO, is overrated.

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.

Hoo boy...

[aendeuryu]

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.

Reality Check

[Xpilot]

The internet is shit

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

And now...

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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....

I got £45bn to advertise IBM on my blog

[Realistic_Dragon]

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.

Oh. My. God.

[samael]

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.