Weblogs: a Window on the Influential
This article appeared on Sam Whitmore's Media Survey site, and is reposted here with permission.
by David Strom
March 12, 2001
Dan Gillmor has the week off on a skiing vacation. Ric Ford has been doing
benchmark tests on a Power Mac G4/733. Dan Bricklin is losing a valuable
editor and work colleague. Doc Searls is moving from the Bay Area to Santa
Barbara. Dave Winer is reminiscing while he is walking around downtown Palo
Alto. Tara Calishain was busy watching Martha Stewart cavort with the Cookie
Monster on TV.
All of these things happened last week to the people involved. I know not
because I spoke to them or sent e-mail to any of them. I knew about these
things through reading the weblogs maintained by each person.
Weblogs are a cross between diaries and link lists. Dave Winer says, "A
weblog is kind of a continual tour, with a human guide who you get to know.
There are many guides to choose from, each develops an audience." Winer runs
the weblog.com site, which provides links to hundreds of blogs, as they are
also called. He claims the first weblog appeared close to the time of the
first web site, and prototypes included the "What's New" pages developed by
NCSA during the web's early days.
The best weblogs are usually updated several times daily, and contain all
sorts of information, including commentary along with their lists of links.
They can be as personal or as impersonal as the author wishes.
Weblogs have become popular during the past year, and now is the time for
public relations people to pay attention to them. They can be useful in
designing your next press tour or deciding who are the more influential
analysts and reporters. The technology-related weblogs should be just as
much a part of any PR professional's daily reading habits as looking at the
usual trade magazines and news sites, since they contain useful information
about technology trends, opinions, and industry people.
Perhaps the grandest effort to date has been the Open Systems Developer
Network and Slashdot.org series of web sites, which are often formatted to
look like weblogs in how they present their news and views. But many of the
more influential weblogs are single-person affairs, including the ones
mentioned in our lead paragraph.
Now, I am not saying that you should constantly prowl the web to keep up
with the more obscure doings of your favorite industry influencers. But by
reading their weblogs, you can gain additional insights into what these
influencers are up to, and how to craft your pitch appropriately. Indeed,
some of the weblog authors even have written the best ways to approach them
for a story pitch. (See sidebar in the orange box on the Media Shop Talk
anchor page.)
The bigger issue is that weblogs are the beginning of two-way communication
between journalists and their audiences. I recall back in 1990 when we began
Network Computing magazine that it was a radical notion to print each
author's e-mail address at the end of the article. Now e-mailing a writer is
common, and weblogs represent the next step.
Indeed, the notion of readers becoming the content authors isn't far off.
Katie Hafner of the NY Times calls this phenomenon self-organizing webs,
where like-minded groups of readers contribute to discussion forums and
become transformed into content authors. Winer calls this the two-way web.
At the O'Reilly Peer to Peer conference in February, Dan Gillmor of the San
Jose Mercury said this:
"Using the Web for a 'write' medium as well as a 'read' one - that's the
interesting technical part for me ... Journalism is turning into a
conversation. It's making my job easier."
PR pros: you've been warned.
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