This is a snippet from a recent email thread I had with a UK journalist. I cut her part out as she never did give me permission to print her part:
First EMail reply by me:
Popularity by whom? On readers :
No I don't and I wouldn't trust the (blog) stats anyway. I believe that the majority of people do not know that they are reading a blog. And with some of the new designs that I am seeing the lines of a blog and traditional website and social website are becoming fuzzier and fuzzier.
I think most people would call a blog a website. It is us enthusiasts that get enamored by labels and technologies and forget that the general public is not interested in these endeavors. They are interested in text to read.
For example I call the NY Times website or the LA Times website the newspaper. And obviously it is not a newspaper.
Additionally on the popularity, I think it is popular with publishers for its ease of use and blessed mythology that it is easier to get into the search engines. It truely is the the cheap start up.
Cheers,
Tim O'Keefe
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That's a great article (she referenced me to a web 2.0 article). And I agree. I think 2.0 is more marketing hype whereby the marketers and companies want to believe. Because I think there is an attraction to user generated content instead of having to produce it and then sell yourself. Somehow it is implied these visitors will just buy because of all your cool shit.
Everything is the latest widget which is funny as that was always the fictional product used in B school for case examples. It seems most of the widgets and widgetary we see online might as well be fictional and have about as much thought behind them as most B school homework assignments.(maybe not they are getting VC money so maybe they are smarter than I give them credit).
Its like this massive conspiracy that everyone has agreed to , all except the public who are supposed to pay for all this stuff. Smoke and mirrors comes to mind. It seems to me the net world is operating on the premise of just get eye balls still and they are trying to prove out this failed model from the first dot bombs.
To make matters worse you have notions of free all over the web that feeds somehow into the idealism of the 2.0 philosophy. You see the Chris Anderson article at Wired this month that is all about free. Although there is a ton of truth in the article it also can really deceive a marketer from fundamentals.
Its like the hippies and technologists have bred and we have these wide eyed idealists that think the real world thinks like they do. I have watched pitches for these ideals and they all are built on a premise of build it and they will come. But they skip past that into the sexy stuff called 2.0 and wow the money guys with widgets and concepts like user generated content, and collaboration. Me, I just see this stuff as another , ever changing opportunity for traffic!
But let me tell you how I really feel ;-)
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