[Air-l] blogs and value

[Sashay]

The drive towards blogging is facilitated, IMO, by the perceived ease of 
use of blogging software. This isn't a new trend, of course, but it is 
becoming more obviously observable through the blogging world. Because 
the basic denominator of a blog is posts done in reverse chronological 
order, blogging lends itself to news and one-way communications such as 
editorial columns, corporate news, press releases, and the like. The 
speed with which one can quickly get a message out using blogging 
software is unparalleled at the moment. Say what you might about Wikis 
but they aren't as easy to use as most blogging software and solutions 
from Blogger and Typepad feel a lot like using Microsoft Word.

As for the concept of pushing your message to users through RSS rather 
than pulling them to your site to get your messages within a certain 
context, it would seem that once again, the pendulum has swung back to 
the push. Again, not a new phenomenon. I've seen it fluctuate back and 
forth over my years of working in corporate communications. Do we email 
them the information or just post it to the intranet? The tradeoffs in 
each are what usually start the pendulum swinging again.

What I'd like to see a study explore is the ego/vanity aspects of 
blogging. I blog, but I do it more to sort out my own thoughts and 
catalogue sites and interesting net phenomenon. I don t' care as much 
about whether I get readers or not. However, I suspect many do care and 
I have to wonder if the wholesale adoption of RSS feeds pushed out to 
people are an attempt to feel your blogging time is justified by 
ensuring that your message is getting out there.

Those are a few of my random thoughts on this phenomenon.

Tamara Paradis

jeremy hunsinger wrote:

> one of my daily reads  Jim Romensko's obscure store just moved from 
> being an independently designed newsite to a typepad blog.  this 
> struck me immediately as a devaluation of the site because it had 
> become 'just another blog', whereas before It was a uniquely designed 
> news-site that people had to visit to read.  In that they had to visit 
> it to read it, it was experienced as a whole, and its parts were 
> always in relation to one another as organized on the page, which gave 
> some added value.    designwise i think the argument is obvious and 
> has been made many times about the 'value-added' of good design and 
> layout, however, the thing with blogs is that we can read them via rss 
> and we never need to see the original design at all, or perhaps we 
> need to see it once in a while, but certainly not every day.  Also, 
> when blogs are read via rss, they parts need not be read in direction 
> relation to each other as a whole, but can be read mixed with 
> unlimited other blog-feeds, in the romenesko case, i think this lowers 
> the overall sense of irony and humor involved.
>
> I'm wondering if other people are exploring this aspect of perceived 
> value in blogging as compared to other online media, and if so, are 
> there any studies available, and if not, would someone be interested 
> in working on developing a project in this direction.  
>
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