Why blogging matters

This is the transcription of some words I spoke to introduce a workshop about starting a blog at Yahoo (September 20, 2006). I saw an opportunity to speak something I believe to be true, and this sermonette was the result:

I believe blogging is important. I believed it in 1999, when I grew intrigued by the 'genre,' and wrote about it for a syndicated column that none of the Hearst newspapers chose to publish. 

I believe that the rise of blogging on the Web in the last decade is part of the same phenomenon as the open source movement, open content projects like wikipedia, citizen journalism, hacking (the good kind), the long tail, the abundance of niches, the rise of the 'prosumer.'

Because connectivity is pervasive, it's become frictionless to do person-to-person transactions across barriers of time and space. Because bandwidth, storage, search are practically commodities, anyone anywhere can exchange not just physical goods, but also information, knowledge, insights, virtual ideas, opinions. Anyone with an Internet connection (a mobile phone)  can have a conversation with anyone else. Individuals can talk to the world and be discoverable by means of links, strategic content and contextual advertising -- with minimal intermediation.

I believe this emergent, distributed, bottom-up world (pick your favorite futurist cliche)  demands a new openness and agility from all businesses,  but especially from big companies and complex organizations where it's easy to miss a market disruption. It's easy (and dangerous) to become siloed, monolithic, complacent, distranced from active users, and ignorant of what early adopters and digital natives are doing online, and what they're passionate about, and what they're not doing at all. This is especially true when these passionate early adopters are no longer active users and are doing things they love elsewhere on the internets.

At first I'd planned on opening this talk with a curious ramble through the history of blogging, beginning in the early nineties, when the first online annotated link diaries appeared, through the birth of Blogger and the adoption of the word "blog"  on to the dotcom crash, the rise of social software on the web, and Yahoo's entry into the public conversation of the blogosphere, with the launch of Yahoo Search blog in the summer of 2004 and the launch of Yodel Anecdotal two years later.

I believe we're currently in the midst of the next revolution in personal publishing online -- in which we slowly transition from text to video storytelling, from weblogging to moblogging -- overlaying our reliance  on words with tools of even finer immediacy. Costs are coming down, tools are more widely available, and attention spans are getting shorter.

Much as I love to read and write, I think what's more important than format is authenticity; voice; respect for the reader or viewer's time, intelligence, and attention. The business blogger's imperative is: a willingness to listen, especially when users tell us what's broken or missing; the ability to watch closely, especially when they show us what they love.

Comments

[-g]

wow, one of the best pieces you have ever writen, i have read it several times now, inspiring and dead on right.

well done!

-g