Marketing to the Social Web: How Digital Customer Communities Build Your Business

Chapter 13. The Blog Strategy (Everybody's Talking at Me)

By the time you read this, the blogosphere will have expanded well beyond 112 million blogs. That's right, 112 million blogs—some personal, some professional, all adding their voices to the social web.

A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic. The vast majority are primarily text, although some focus on photographs (photoblog), audio (podcasting—more about this later in the chapter), or video (vlog or vodcasting, more later) and are part of a wider network of social media. Microblogs such as Twitter, also discussed later in this chapter, are increasingly popular.

Blogs are hardly new. Online diaries and journals began appearing in 1994, and the term weblog was coined by Jorn Barger in December 1997. The short form, blog, showed up in 1999 and quickly became both a noun and a verb, what the thing is as well as what you do when you're doing it.^[61]

Now there are so many blogs that special search tools like Technorati and Google Blog Search have sprung up. In fact, since Technorati was founded in 2003 by David Sifry, it has tracked the growth of blogs. According to Technorati, the number of blogs has doubled about every six months. Every day, more than 100,000 new blogs are created and 1.3 million new posts are added to existing blogs. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of blogs sit frozen in time, with no new entries, and thousands more are simply abandoned as people ...