People still don’t get blogging

Jul 10, 2007

Blogging is a conversation. Also it helps you establish yourself as an expert — if you want to, that is — but otherwise, blogging mostly helps you articulate your thoughts without the corporate balderdash. Blogging in no way makes you less of an expert as claimed by Jacob Nielson. He says this on his web page (I won’t call it a blog post) that blogs are just for cheap products:

Weblogs have their role in business, particularly as project blogs, as exemplified on several award-winning intranets. Blogs are also fine for websites that sell cheap products. On these sites, visitors can often be easily converted and the main challenge is to raise awareness. For example, a site that sells pistachio nuts should post as much content about pistachios as possible in the hope of attracting quick hits by people searching for that information. Some percentage of these visitors will buy the nuts while visiting the site.

I think he gets this impression because he hasn’t visited some quality blogs. Even Google has an official blog and Google is in no way a cheap product. Anyway, that’s not the point.

He says you should write in-depth articles instead of writing blog posts because articles are well-researched hence are more credible. This is a silly assumption. Just because it is a blog post doesn’t mean it is not serious stuff. Many people spend hours researching for their blog posts. The basic point is, blogs are highly interactive, and people who fear interaction, fear blogging. Conventional journalists snigger at blogging because it allows readers to ask questions. Through a blog you can question the authority of the “expert” and you can also offer an alternative point of view. The old-school writers don’t like being questioned because they are not confident about their own facts and theories. The lack of communication tools used to shield them against direction questioning. Blogging demolishes that shield. Only a very confident person uses blogging to express his or her expertise.

Technorati Tags: blogging, blog publishing, blog writing

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4 Responses to “People still don’t get blogging”

james Breeze
July 18th, 2007 at 2:52 am
I totally agree here… If it weren’t for blogging I wouldn’t have come up with some of my new innovations. It took a while to get over the ‘what will people think’ hurdle; but once I started to get some conversations going the reinforcement from that was enough to make me look forward to my next post.
I have written two theses and you could say I’m an expert at writing crap that no-one reads. If I wrote a researched paper every time I wanted to do a blog post then half the ideas in my head would be forgotten and I’d become stuck in the past, like Jacob, and not onto the next new thing.
Amrit
July 18th, 2007 at 6:24 am
Hi James.
Nice blog. You are right. You don’t need to be cautious every time you write/publish something. Let people see the real you and let the judge what your writings represent. That’s why blogs are so different from online magazines and newspapers.
Presell
July 24th, 2007 at 2:11 pm
He he he … people are bloging … in Poland for example they seting up blogs and let readers writing their own articles with links in the content to make their websites more popular … good one - isn’t it ?
Kian Ann
August 2nd, 2007 at 7:25 pm
Amrit, Jacob might be right actually, if you look at the higher class society - brands that sell on the concept of exclusivity won’t blog.