Subscribe to

For the last three years, it seems that every web marketer within earshot has been saying the word “blog” about 15 times a day. And yes, your crotchety system administrator (that’s me) is embarrassed when people use phrases like “technological innovation” to describe blogs, spouting other things like “this has never been done before.” How exciting!

But step back a bit, haven’t we been doing this for a while now? Really, we’ve had these tools on the World Wide Web in place for at least 12 years. There have been sites that are functionally equivalent to blog sites up since the beginning of the web. Before that we used Gopher, and before that, folks typed log entries into whatever flavor of BBS software was popular. Were there non-computerized, distributed, often-updated journals even before computers? Of course there have been, for hundreds of years.

Some people are turned off by the puffed-up, self-aggrandizing notion of publicly distributing one’s own journal. Even more folks just chuckle at bloggers as being a hopeless part of the population that still reads “Wired,” the lonely folks with MySpace pages who waited in line for iPhones. Many techies snicker when people say the word “blog”—it’s because they’re still thinking about the technology, and not the people using it.

Blogging isn’t really about the technology, it’s about a social movement. It’s about economics, and it’s about where people are willing to spend their spare time. It’s like drive-time in radio, and it’s like a commercial during the Super Bowl on television. I don’t want to sound too “woo-woo Web 2.0″ here, but suddenly there are a whole lot more people reading and writing logs. We should be paying attention.

As consumer educators, of course we should be blogging. We need to be there. We should be writing our little hearts out, duking it out in the blogosphere, protecting our customers’ reputations and bringing their solutions to light. Check out some of our cool blogs at the top of this page for some great examples of this. These blogs are non-invasive, entertaining and frequently informative ways to connect with customers and send highly qualified web visitors to our sites. All good.

We need to use this tool while we still can. Blogging as we currently know it won’t be around forever. The behavior we call “blogging” will keep mutating, so the time to get started is now.

And yes, I still think the word “blog” is silly.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 30th, 2007 at 5:12 pm and is filed under Blogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.