I came across a great article today over at c|net.com posted by Daniel Terdiman which discussed Sarah Lacy and her presentation last Saturday in Seattle at the Gnomedex conference. If you would like to read the entire article head you can check it out HERE.
Interestingly enough, the biggest display of ego driven narcissistic personality disorder at the conference was provided by uber-douche-monkey uber-blogger Robert Scoble after he jumped out of his chair and and slothed his fat ass to the back to throw a hissy fit towards Geoff Livingston.
Lacy began the session by posing the theory that in some ways, the PR industry has co-opted blogging–taking advantage of the fact that many bloggers trying to earn a living are so eager for page views that they will post just about anything they are spoon-fed.
I started this and my wife’s blog after I separated from the military. Our goal was to use the blogs as a creative outlet and, if possible, to earn a little extra income to offset the loss of my salary. The last few weeks I’ve been doing intense research on blogging, marketing, promoting, advertising, etc. etc. I’ve come across pages and pages of extremely useful information. However, I noticed that nearly all of the blogging advice I read never once mentioned anything about enjoying your blog or being yourself when you blog. It was all SEO this and Page Rank that. Am I trying to earn a living from blogging? Yes. Am I going to sell myself out to earn a living from blogging? No.
Others agreed, saying that the problem is that while the architecture of blogging is fairly standard, what people do with it can be quite different: Some may write a small personal blog and TechCrunch may be a large media company, but both use similar tools and are therefore lumped together to the detriment of the terminology.
Exactly. Look at the top 10 blog ist on Technorati. Those are NOT blogs. They are corporate websites/webzines. There needs to be a way to separate the corporate from the personal. I scan the corporate blogs for tips. I scan the personal blogs for content and meeting new people and developing the occasional blog crush..*cough* Jenny *cough*.
I will continue to press on with my blog without resorting to link baiting and forcing my family and friends to spam link me on every social network out there so I can move up from my 5.7 millionth ranking on Alexa. I enjoy blogging. I enjoy meeting new people. I enjoy staying home with my daughter full time. Finally, I hope everything works out for us.
[...] in that so many individuals and businesses are trying to create blogs for business purposes. Technically “blogging” is not the right term; it should be content creation. A blog is a publishing mechanism for a variety of content from the [...]
Okay, first of all, you are totally making me blush.
Secondly, I totally agree with you. If you’re bog is all about money and hits and you aren’t enjoying writing it then what’s the damn point? The day I stop having fun blogging is the day I quit for good.
Please tell you husband not to beat me up!
Also, having served 10 years in the Air Force doing intelligence work I am very familiar with the political aspect of social networking. However I was not prepared to encounter that very same political undertone throughout the blogging community.
You have a blog crush? WHAT?!!! I hope you know you’re sleeping on the couch tonight!
Speaking for myself, I don’t suppose I’d be blogging if I didn’t enjoy it, but blogging is really only a sideline for me and I don’t write because I enjoy it — my enjoyment is just an added bonus. I write because I’m a professional writer.
And I think that’s where the SEO/PR/Marketing community is missing the boat. They’re looking for a convenient, expedient means to sell products and services rather than quality venues in which to sell them. They only care about page rank and search engine traffic. They don’t have a clue who is actually reading those blogs or the overall reason why they read them. That’s assinine.
I think another problem is that the term “blog” has never been well-defined. For example, when the mainstream media refers to bloggers and the blogosphere, they are usually referring only to a specific group of blogs and bloggers (as if the majority of the blogosphere didn’t even exist). Another part of this is that the terms “blog” and “blogging platform” are often confused so that even though one might be using Wordpress or Typepad, he may well be using the platform for a purpose other than blogging — something Wordpress actively encourages as it seems to be evolving from a blogging platform into a full-blown content management system. A recent example of this is the Prime Minister of the U.K. using Wordpress to power the ministries homepage (give it time and WP will probably resemble Joomla — at least in terms of its many uses).
And while it is still true that “content is king,” content is not synonymous with quality information or quality writing. Any idiot can install a blog platform and post a bunch of content. Doesn’t mean it’s interesting or informative or even entertaining.
Right now, blogs are fashionable. Fashionable, but not a fad. I think what we’re going to see after the dust settles on Web 2.0 is that serious bloggers are going to have to become better writers (not psuedo-writers as so many are) and much more saavy about how they network, because all these fake-ass bloggers with their artificially inflated page ranks and questionable content will not thrive in the future. It’ll be sink or swim for those in it strictly for the money. The irony being that in order to make money, they will have to care about something other than making money.