Luis de la Rosa

Why blogs succeeded where homepages didn't

I was in the doctor's office the other day and a cover caught my eye: Fortune magazine had a "Brady Bunch"-reminiscent picture square of famous bloggers. Don Box almost got prediction #10 of his come true, but Fortune decided not to put Scoble on the cover.

Fortune covers the blogosphere in its #1 "Tech Trend": Why There's No Escaping the Blog. It's a pretty good read to get a feel for the state of the blogosphere. Basically, Fortune is confirming what the Cluetrain Manifesto predicted a few years back that markets are conversations is now coming true. Those conversations are getting louder and faster via blogs that are becoming easier to set up (thanks Mena, Ben, and all the TypePad folks!) and keep current. All of this is forcing companies to change how they do business.

The most interesting part of the article:

"Unlike earlier promises of self-publishing revolutions, the blog movement seems to be the real thing. A big reason for that is a tiny innovation called the permalink: a unique web address for each posting on every blog."

I don't think that the reason why blogs succeeded vs home pages mostly because of the permalink. The big difference is that blogging software like Movable Type/TypePad, Blogger, and others function as a simple, 80%-what-you-need content management system. So people don't have to know how to write HTML or how to structure things so your web server can understand your pages. They don't have to change all the links via a find/replace whenever they move a page.

Also, the ubiquitous BlogRoll replaces Web Rings, which help people to find related content, which helps those sites support each other.

Most importantly, blogs encourage more content, more focused content, and more up-to-date content. What I mean is that as blogging gets easier, there's less hurdles to jump to write more content, especially closer to when you think of it, making it current. This brings me to another interesting quote, by Bill Gates:

"As blogging software gets easier to use, the boundaries between, say, writing e-mail and writing a blog will start to blur. This will fundamentally change how we document our lives."
For me, this boundary is already very blurry, thanks to a one-two punch of MarsEdit and TypePad.

And because there are ways of finding good content via Google, Technorati, PubSub, etc, you can focus on a small narrow niche like Eclipse on Mac OS X and have a chance that people will read your stuff.