Dec 15

Written by: Don Worthley
12/15/2007 1:11 AM

Why Blog

Here's a conversation I had recently with a friend.

Me - "...Yeah, I blogged about that just the other day..." (as I said this I'm realizing that I don't know if the concept of blogging about something has the same meaning for me as it does my friend).

Friend - "You have a blog? Isn't blogging like an online diary? I've thought about blogging too, but I'm not sure what I would put on my blog."

Why do people blog? I've spent the greater part of this past year studying the Web 2.0 phenomenon in preparation for writing meaningful community software and I realized as I prepared to write this post that you might as well ask, "Why do people want to express themselves?" There are so many reasons and so many forms of expression. Or maybe you might ask, "Why do people publish content to the web?" Or maybe you might go back a little further and ask, "Why do people publish anything?"

Although the very first blogs were more of an online diary, the medium of blogging has been adopted by people for a wide array of different purposes. As a technologist, this makes perfect sense. For the past 10 years, during the 1.0 phase of the web, publishing content to the web required the use of tools that created a special class of people called web masters, or web developers. If you wanted to place content on the web, you had to use special tools and in many organizations you were required to go through an approval process before content was placed into the very sacred medium of the organizational web site. All too often, this approval process involved pointy headed managers right out of a Dilbert cartoon.

Enter the blog

An interesting thing has happened over the past 3 years, and I believe it is driven by the deep and innate desire of every person for self expression. It's interesting, but this desire seems to be much stronger in some than others. I've tried to depict this on a graph I've called the publishing curve.

It's this first group that's of interest when it comes to blogging. These are the people who love to express themselves verbally and want the entire world to see their expressions and recognize it for the beautiful work of art that it is. For some, these expressions are received by vast audiences as masterpieces. Sadly, most of us publish content that is appreciated by only a small fraction of the reading population. Until now, because of the barriers in place and the lack of an infrastructure supportive of emergent and connected publishing patterns, the long tail of publishers, those of us with unique content of interest only to the small group of people on this planet who think just like we do, find ourselves frustrated by both the inability to express our thoughts and the lack of response we receive when we do.

Of course, many of us are in the middle group and we have a very important part in the blogosphere too! In fact, as you're probably already thinking, almost all publishers are readers and it is the readers who provide valuable feedback to the the publishers, sometimes through comments and also at a very basic level by what we choose to read.

Why Doesn't Anyone Understand Me?

The absolute bliss that many bloggers express related to their newfound passion of blogging seems to be related in most cases to the fact that they have found a medium, which, when augmented with some of the technological features that have become a standard part of the blogosphere, such as pingbacks and trackbacks (more about these to come), allows them to connect and hold a virtual conversation with a large pool of like minded people that until recently were virtually impossible to find. Out of the entire world, there may only be 2 people who are both publishers and who have an absolute passion for the medicinal properties of birch bark, but when these 2 people publish a blog related to this content, it's so unique that when the 16 readers throughout the world who are also interested in the same topic type in the keywords medicinal and "birch bark", what should float to the top but the blogs for our two homeopaths.

Blogging has helped reduce many of the barriers that prohibited people from connecting and sharing, and while there are still language barriers, even these barriers have been mitigated by the wide-spread adoption of English and the use of tools like Babel Fish.

Blogging is just Web Publishing Made Easier?

Do you agree with that? I don't, at least not completely. From one perspective, it's helpful to think of blogging as just a really easy way to publish content on the web. It started with geeks, who often refer to themselves as incredibly lazy, trying to streamline the process of making posts to a web log. However, I believe it's the simplicity of this solution that caught the attention of the hidden 10% of the population who long to publish and probably an even greater percentage of the business world who may or may not want to publish, but recognize the need and either lack the technical skills or are frustrated by the overly burdensome and political obstacles that stood in the way between their content and the web. So yes, blogging is basically just web publishing made very easy.

But at the same time, no. It's more than just web publishing, and this really gets at the heart of why blogging as a medium is so powerful as a standard tool in the Web 2.0 toolbox. As blogging has matured over the past 3 or 4 years, and the process of publishing has become easier, this new medium could be used by bloggers as a way of entering into a conversation. "But forums have provided that for 10 years!", you say. Yes, but aside from avatars, forums, and lets throw listservs in there too, lacked an important ingredient: identity. For the 10% of the population interested in publishing, or anyone interested in self expression for that matter, there is a strong desire to create an identity or a name associated with your forms of expression. Unfortunately, most forums and especially listsers made it difficult to amass ones expressions in one place where they could collectively sit and grow as an evolving work of self expression.

Nate Whitehill is a great example of this since he explains this very point on his blog and since his blog itself has become an elegant expression of his own personality and interests.

The fact that web publishing has become much easier has made it possible for people to come up with unique and interesting ways to express, either as individuals or as groups, whatever it is that they want to express, and to express it in a way that can be:

• easily branded for the purpose of establishing some form of online identity and
• designed to encourage others to engage in conversation.

To sum up what we've said so far regarding why people blog, we can say:

• A certain percentage of the population has a strong desire to publish
• A corresponding percentage of the population want to read published content that relate to their interests
• Technological and bureaucratic barriers have, until the advent of blogging, made it difficult for people to publish
• The barriers to publishing were alleviated through advances in technology, but this alone doesn't describe the what and why of blogging.
• Blogging technologies emerged which facilitate:
  • Branding and identity
  • Community through comments, trackbacks and other blog specific technologies.

Types of Blogs

Whether you have your own blog or not, it's interesting to take a look at the landscape of the blogosphere to see how this new technology has been used. As you can imagine, it has taken on many flavors as people have used blogging for a variety of purposes. Since there are so many different types of blogs, I found it difficult to come up with a way to present this information from an outside-in perspective. Here's what I think might help. Broadly speaking, blogs have some of the following characteristics where each is either boolean (yes, no) or a continuum.

• Closed -> Open to the World
• Fee Based -> Completely Free
• Commercial -> Non-Commercial
• Narrow in focus -> Broad
• Instructional -> Conversational
• Personal -> Relating to a Profession
• Individual -> Group (Can related to author or to participants)
• Low Knowledge Sharing -> Hi Focus on Knowledge Sharing

Of these different ways to classify the types of blogs, I think it is helpful to create a matrix with 2 axis:

• The X axis will have knowledge sharing on one end and social on the other.
• The Y axis will have commercial on one end and non-commercial on the other.

Using this matrix, our view of the blogosphere might look something like this:

Of course, this isn't even remotely quantitative, but it does highlight the idea that there is an extremely varied landscape related to the use of blogs to publish data. Some blogs are published by groups, while others by single individuals. Most blogs are written by the author, but some are ghost written. Some blogs get intensely personal and some are nothing more than a series of scholarly articles published using blogging as the medium. And speaking of medium, blog posts come in a variety of flavors even related to the technology used to convey a person's or a group's expression. Most blogs are a combination of static text and images, but a growing number of blogs are incorporating other highly engaging forms of media such as podcasting, slidecasting, it's related cousin screencasting and vlogging.

Types of Blog Posts

Once you've settled on the type of blog you would like to create, you then have to go about the fun task of feeding it on a regular basis with content. I've personally found it interesting as I've read other blogs over this past year to see that there are a variety of common types of blog posts within each blog. Here's what I've identified so far:

• Personal reminders - Little technical tidbits of information that get posted in the blogosphere like little post-it notes often with information regarding a problem and the solution finally found for that problem. The hope is that others will find it useful. Some of my posts are like this and I've already had the experience where I'm searching Google regarding a problem only to find that the solution you find was one you wrote 5 months ago.
• Did You See This? - An interesting quote or a news story that you think your friends or readers may have missed.
• I Don't Think So! - I disagree with what you just posted and my response is too long for a comment (plus, I may just want to build my own identity a little). These are the really interesting posts that get to the heart of what blogging is all about. They foster community dialog and are often very interesting to follow, especially when the sparks start flying!
• Gotchas - A cousin to the personal reminder, but this is an issue you know you'll never forget...ever. You wasted 3 days trying to solve this problem and you know hundreds or thousands of other poor souls will be pounding their poor little heads against the wall for days if you don't put the solution out there for the search engines to spider.
• The Aside - no matter how professional or focused on knowledge sharing the blog is, it's great to know the author or authors of a blog are people just like you and me. This is the post where the author shares something a little off-topic for the blog, but which is of significant interest to either the author or the readers. I got to go sledding today! Yipee! Honestly, this is why Twitter and other forms of micro-blogging have taken off.
• The Epiphany - You're sitting there in your office and all of a sudden you realize that the periodic table of the elements exhibits symmetrical qualities that can be described by group theory! It's so fascinating, you just have to record your thoughts.
• I Went Here, and Here and Here... - People love to see pictures, so you probably lace your entry with digital photos of your trip to the Grand Canyon with your local computer science motorcycle gang, or whatever it is that makes you extremely unique...and interesting.
• Here are My Notes, Sorry So Sloppy - You were able to attend the session on new advances in radiometric tuning while your buddies were told to attend the session on hypersonic digitization measurement analysis. Don't Google, completely made up.
• The List - You're reading one right now.
• Statistics and Graphs - These posts can be very useful for the audience. It usually takes an inordinate amount of time and energy to crunch numbers looking for patterns or relationships. At times, these patterns and relationships can lead to an epiphany.
• I'm so Disappointed - I would recommend you stay away from this genre of post and any of it's negative siblings or any post that's even remotely related. There's no problem with comparisons, these combined with statistics and tabular representations of raw data to support your position are fine, but ranting about your phone company's unbelievably low level of customer service misses the productive tone that your readers will find useful. Life is hard for everyone, what people want to hear about are solutions and how-to's and pick-me-ups and fun stories.
• The Story - More useful in closed blogs, such as family blogs or personal blogs, and very similar to the aside, but listed separately because of the power of a story. Aside from humor, it's one of the best ways to make a point.
• The Shill - There is a growing trend, especially among professional bloggers to write posts related to a particular product or service that they are paid to promote. It's important to know that this is going on and to ask yourself, "Are they telling me that the new Dell XPS laptops are absolutely incredible because they paid hard earned money for one and really like it or because someone paid them to say it?"
• I'm Sitting Here With ____ - The interview makes for a great way for the blog writer to tie into the expertise of others around them. If you interview the right people, this can really help to drive traffic to your site. Video interviews and podcasts are the best, but even good old text interviews make for a good read.
• The Article - I may be getting close to one here. It's not uncommon for bloggers to separate articles from blog posts. Another similar term is white paper. On some blogs, the regular blog posts are free and the articles are available for a fee.
• Case Study - Like a story, these are interesting and they're usually sprinkled with statistics and graphs related to the measurements made as a part of the case study.
• The Review - Could be of a book, a magazine, a product, a service. Whatever it is, make sure to marshal good solid evidence for your perspective or viewpoint.
• How To - Related to the gotcha, it turns out that you're an expert in something and over the years you've created a recipe for reproducing some set of desired results by following a simple set of
• The Apology - There are a couple of flavors of this post. In some cases they result from saying a little more than you intended or maybe saying it wrong or insensitively. In some cases the blog isn't the best forum for this. If you decide to leave the offending post or if the offense you may want to include the apology in the comments. Also, if the offense was committed in a comment that someone refuses to remove from their site, your apology should be in the comments. Another form of apology is the I'm-sorry-I-haven't-posted-in-x-number-of-weeks post. I think a slightly better way to handle this is the more positive tone of, "I sure have missed interacting with you all, and I'm looking forward to more active participation after ..."
• It's Hear! - The announcement post is a staple of the organizational or company blogs. On many company sites, the company blog has taken over the news release section in an effort to convey the image to clients that the company is open, interactive and responsive to customer feedback which is usually permitted in a moderated form on the blog.
• Help! - As you can imagine, this post comes in a variety of flavors, but the basic idea is that the tables are turned. I'm not providing information, I'm asking for it. For example, I'm thinking of buying a microphone for podcasting, anyone suggestions are welcome.
• The Add-On - This kind of post is at the heart of the conversational aspect of blogging. In this post, you've read other posts and now it's your turn in the conversation. Here's what you have to say on the topic.

The funny thing is, when you get started with these lists, you lose all track of time and you find yourself searching for something you've missed. There are probably a lot of things which leads me to one last piece that you'll find in most posts and that this the link in to the conversation. It's the "I would love to hear what you think" line that reminds people that a blog post, no matter how long winded or detail may be is an invitation to interact and to disagree and to add to the beginning of the conversation.

Finally, if you're new to blogging, as some of you may be, I would encourage you to focus on the conversational aspect of blogging. As I tell friends when I have this talk in person, writing a blog entry is like starting a conversation. I might say, "Hey, I created a new widget in my spare time to solve the boondoggle problem. Here's how it works. Any thoughts?"

The absolute best thing to do is to get started today. You can create free accounts at WordPress or Blogger just to name a few and some of the accounts (I believe this is the case with both Blogger and WordPress) will even let you post entries that only you can see. After you've configured your account, find some topic you would find fascinating to write about on a regular basis and just start writing away. Your next step should be to configure an RSS feed, either in your browser (IE 7 and Firefox both support this) or through a free service, such as Google Reader and begin finding and ready as many blogs in your particular area of interest. But don't just read the blogs, leave comments and enter into the conversation. As you work hard to contribute new and unique content to the conversation, you'll find that over time you will develop a great network of new friends and hopefully some enemies (the good kind) too.

One final note, the graphic above which shows the 80% readers in the middle is misleading. It captures something I wanted to communicate, but it makes it seem as though there is a clear line of delineation between the publishers and the readers. Of course, there isn't. In actuality, there is a spectrum of publishers and readers. We all have some combination of publisher and reader in us, so go out there and find a few posts that sparked a thought and then leave a comment. If there's a mental hurdle there for you, start with a comment that just says, "Thanks for posting this, I found it interesting." A bigger hurdle for some may be the first post. My recommendation is to break the ice with a short post that simply says, "Hello World! I'm looking forward to a life-long, fascinating conversation. More soon."

Glossary of Terms (for those just entering the blogosphere)

• Blog - An online presence usually comprising a series of blog posts of varied types (more on this below) along with optional secondary pages or side bars which provide information about things such as basic contact and biographical information about the author or authors, other blogs the author or authors read, links to resources related to the blog and links to social networking sites the author or authors use on a regular basis. In addition, the sidebar of a blog routinely contains a tag cloud containing common terms related to blog entries as well as links to previous posts. While most bloggers use special tools such as WordPress, TypePad or Blogger, these tools simply create HTML which is placed on the web. So, blogs are a subset of the World Wide Web.
• Blogosphere - The blogosphere is the collection of all content published through blogs. It is a subset of the World Wide Web, and yet as a subset it has specific qualities that are unique to the use of blogs as a medium for publishing information.

It should be noted that while blogs are just a subset of the web, they are usually hosted with providers that offer blog specific features, such as trackbacks, pingbacks or keywords (tags).

• Trackback - Trackbacks occur when a) Your using blogging software that supports this technology and b) when you are submitting a post to your blog. The software you use will read through the post and compile a list of all the links you've included in the posting. It will then attempt to contact each of the links to see if the link is to someone else's blog which is managed with technology that can understand and listen for TrackBacks. To use an example, If John and Ursula both use blog software which supports Trackbacks and John creates a post which contains a link to an earlier post by Ursula, then John's blogging software will contact Ursula's blogging software to let it know that John has linked to one of Ursula's specific blog posts. Ursula's blog software can then use this information to show a list of Trackbacks or to automatically create a comment under her blog post which basically says that John linked to this post. As you can imagine, this is a very powerful way to encourage the conversation which is a central aspect of the blogosphere.
• Pingback - Similar to the trackback, the pingback takes another step and checks to make sure that the Trackback it received is from a page which actually contains a link to the post. In our previous example, Ursula's blog software would then make a request to John's blog for the post which it claimed had a link to one of her blog posts. It would open that post and electronically read through the post checking to make sure the link actually existed. As you can imagine, this is a great way to ensure that people aren't abusing the comment section of a blog by either automating the process of creating comments or by automating the process of creating trackbacks which contain a return URL which advertises xyz dating service.

Tags: