11.11.06
Posted in Articles at 5:54 pm by jon yang
A lot of businesses — and people — think that by setting up a blog, they’ll be able to add value to their company. Well, as we already know, that’s simply not true. Blogging is no magical elixir. Just like in the late 90’s when every company thought that by simply owning internet real estate in their name, they could capture the attention of millions of potential customers. How’d that one turn out? Well, have you seen the web recently? Littered with the homepages of businesses that wanted to get in on the Internet craze but didn’t know how to do it.
It’s not their fault. Homepages, and the Internet, were marketed as a panacea to flagging sales and limited markets. The Internet was the contact point to (potentially) millions of customers. Whoops.
With that in mind, let’s look at blogging. Few companies really understand what a blog is, what it means to have one, why they have one, and how to leverage its power. In fact, even many of the companies with successful blogs don’t know how they did it. Maybe it was just one employee blogging away quietly that earned a company “blog-cred,” or it was a hit-and-miss collection of journals from employees that sparked enthusiasm, or maybe it was a company wide effort to execute, implement, and join the blogging revolution.
Either way, there are wrong and right ways to go about blogging your business. For an article about the wrong way to do it, here’s “Why Dell doesn’t understand blogging.” See what one company is doing wrong, and you might be able to figure out what you can do right.
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11.10.06
Posted in Articles at 5:41 pm by jon yang
Where is blogging going? Will it grow? Is the hype over? Has it established itself as a force in journalism? Which politician will use blogging the most effectively? These are the sorts of questions that blog pundits are asking every day. And when they have some spare time they’ll weigh in with predictions and stir the pot a little. What’s difficult about reading articles about blogging is that space has to be reserved to explain what a blog is in every article. Everything is essentially a “Blogging 101 — plus a few comments.”
Imagine having to re-explain what a computer is every time you wanted to comment on the state of computer hardware and software. That’s what it’s like to write about blogging. It makes for comprehensive recaps, but if you follow the “scene,” it can also seem as if you’re constantly treading water.
When will we have to stop explaining what blogging is? Oh wait, that’s my job!
Having said that, it’s always interesting to see what people were writing about blogging just one short year ago. So in that spirit, here’s a few articles from the spring of 2005, one of the doom and gloom variety, and one wondering about the future of blogging.
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11.07.06
Posted in Blogs / Sites at 2:53 pm by jon yang
What are blogs great for? They can give a voice to a niche that is rarely given any mainstream attention. If you love baord games like me, you’re gonna love “The Journal of Board Game Design” and “Gone Gaming.” Both are (super) in-depth examinations of board games and will bring to light exactly what you’re doing when you’re rolling that dice or drawing a card. Unless you’re in Vegas, in which case you’re probably only losing money.
And when I say “board game” I’m not referring to games like Monopoly or Chutes-n-Ladders. Just because a game requires a board to play does not mean that it’s a board game. There’s a huge world of difference between games played for fun, and games played for fun and strategy/tactics.
Get serious, get in the game.
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11.06.06
Posted in News at 3:03 pm by jon yang
A new “State of the Blogosphere” has been released by Dave Sifry of Technorati. Dave charts stats on how many blogs there are out in the world and feeds us tidbits like that tell us the growth of the blogosphere is slowing — we’re apparently only doubling every 236 days instead of every 150. Apparently, it’s getting hard to double the number of blogs every few months when there are 57 million blogs on the internet nowadays.
Out of those 57 million blogs, about 55% of them are active — with “active” being defined as being updated at least once in the last 3 months. Do your part people, update that blog! We can hit 75% active in the next quarter, I’m sure we can! Do I sound like an over-zealous investor? I’m not, really. I just get excited when people blog.
Check out the full report for some serious statistics and analysis of the blogosphere.
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