TheWayoftheWeb

I’ve been trying to manually import the remaining content from my old Blogger blog, but it’s been slow going. So there may be a little less posting while I finally finish the job.

Plus I also need to upgrade my blogs to the new Wordpress 2.6. I hesitated a little due the problems outlined hear, but if you’re having problems logging in, apparently clearing your cookies will solve it.

I’m willing to take the risk to be able to post from anywhere and hopefully increase my output once more…

And neither of them are mine sadly! Stowe Boyd has posted two posts on /Message about two aspects of blogging, and I have to say I pretty much agree with both of them:

The A-list is dead: Long live the A-list. Covering the idea that the possible falling star of Robert Scoble and the retirement of Jason Calcanis from blogging does not mean there is an end to an A-list, or the short head of the long tail.

David Appell is Andrew Keen Jr: Covering the idea that blogs are worthless because they’re not written by specialist experts after months of research.

And I totally agree. I keep coming back to the idea that Chris Anderson made explicit in The Long Tail. It’s an AND change, not an OR change. The retirement of one prominent blogger, or the fall in buzz around blogging, does not mean that there will not continue to be some individuals or groups who will dominate the space. Either the names will change on the A-list, or the location of the fame may change e.g. Twitter or Seesmic, for example. After all, tech and social media bloggers always refer to traditional brands needing to evolve and stop relying on the reputation they built up by broadcast mechanisms before the internet – and yet we expect the popularity of prominent bloggers – and blogging, to be set in stone?

And the A-list will continue to change. Emarketer recently measured over half of U.S. internet users reading blogs – if it’s true, it’s a big number. But it’s going to keep growing by huge amounts – especially if you imagine the global growth possible from 50% upwards.

There will always be value found in blogs, and many of them will get that value by linking to an A-list. What is going to change is the names on the list – and if they’re located on a blog, microblog, video or alternative platform.

Hello Google,

There are many things you’ve done which I’ve appreciated. Search, Google maps, Gmail etc have all been great, and I know you’re very busy with lots of new projects and trying to figure out how on earth they’ll make money out of Youtube. And Adsense means I can cling to the dream that my blog will make me millions and allow me to retire to a small island I’ve bought.

But would you mind sorting out my Page Rank please? My old blog had a PR of about 4, and I’ve made sure it’s no longer being indexed in case of duplicate content. It’s been 10 weeks now, and I’ve been shown how important it is to have a reasonable Page Rank. You are indeed all powerful.

And I know Matt Cutts once said that the Google Toolbar Page Rank is republished every 3 months, but I can’t wait two more weeks to become a millionaire!

So how about it? And can you keep at eye on 140char as well please?

Cheers

Dan

Aside from an exponential increase in my involvement on Twitter, and setting up FriendFeed on an experimental basis, probably my most interesting discussion at the moment is with Brendan Cooper, the creator of the PR Friendly Index.

Having submitted this blog, I was curious whether it’s non-appearance was down to performance, or definition (I promise I was curious, rather than complaining!). Which led onto an interesting and good natured discussion about the definition of blogs, bloggers, PR and influence. I doubt there will ever be an exact definition for any of those terms which won’t cause disagreement in one quarter or another, but I thought Brendan’s views were pretty interesting, and wanted to post my latest response here, to hopefully get some other feedback on my own attempts to define the indefinable.

So, here’s my own humble take on blogs, bloggers, influence and PR. Which does raise the question for me of whether marketing and PR co-exist any more, or whether it’s an artificial split in the business of building relationships and conversations around a specific brand/topic/product:

“Influence: Interestingly, I’m very deep in researching the usage of Net Promoter scores, Buzz Monitoring etc, to look at how to track influence and engagement as far as is currently possible (Nothing will ever be close to 100%!). I do know from discussions with some firms that they’ll be providing some limited free tools in the future, which may help track influence above and beyond popularity and linking. I’m influenced by a lot of things that I don’t end up linking from my blog due to time, effort etc.

Blogs: For me, it’s any site which is updated chronologically in one ‘flow’. Any news site is chronological, but articles etc will be spread across sections. A blog can cover numerous areas of interest, but everything is covered in one main stream of information which can then be split out. Rather than a homepage aggregating from the various sections. If that makes sense!

Bloggers: Anyone publishing a blog, whether paid/unpaid, corporate or not. And certainly a journalist can also be a blogger and vice versa. For me, the definition seems to come from what, where and how their content is displayed. Again, going back to my definition of a blog (which is very much a work in progress). I’d hesitate to define it by technical functionality, such as RSS, and certainly look to define it more by form (Any definition of over 100 million examples is going to be fuzzy in some way…)

PR: Definitely the trickiest one. Should it be classed with Marketing/Customer Retention? Is there even a place for it now? I’d argue that to define a discipline by the fact it doesn’t analyse as deeply as another is probably doing it a disservice, but it’s difficult not to. Certainly journalism, PR, marketing, advertising etc are all increasingly about relationships and conversations rather than purely broadcasting. I’m still stunned by at least one PR company I deal with banning employees from using Facebook for example, rather than encouraging the use of every tool to target press releases as accurately and individually as possible. But where the line comes between targetting press releases to journalists and bloggers, and marketing something to bloggers and consumers, for example, is very, very fuzzy. Maybe the terms for PR and Marketing should be merged and then discarded. Engagement and communication? Enunication? Communigagement?“

I’m expecting some Entrecarders (I know you’re out there) to weigh in on Blogs and Blogging! And I hope Communigagement and the like don’t take off…but if they do, I want credit! Engagication?

Any comments I do get, I’ll aggregate and combine with the conversation with Brendan.