The Value of Dialog (On Blogging)

I read an interesting article over at Knowledge@wharton today on blogging. In all, the article was fairly well balanced with both supporters and detractors. However, the detractor’s comments were the most interesting (in that elbow-patched academic sort of way). One detractor basically said he didn’t really read blogs because there is no way to validate the credibility of the writer in the same way that you can with established sources such as newspapers, magazines, etc. I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding of what the blogsphere is about. IMO, a blog is a conversation about a topic of interest — the same as you might have over a beer or by a water cooler. As such, it is and should be supplemental to other sources. Surely, he is not going to reference a water-cooler conversation in his next peer-reviewed journal article, but he may talk about his research topic with his peers. Have a look at techdirt; this business model is built around aggregating and commenting on topics of interest (for the general public on the blog and for private clients as a revenue generating business). This blog dosen’t replace the orginal sources, but it does analyze and comment on them. Also have a look at Chris Anderson’s Blog about writing his book The Long Tail. The blog didn’t replace the book, it was supplemental.

I may not have had enough coffee this morning, but I think confusing opinion with fact misses the point, and discounting discussion and opinion altogether is just plain silly. Sure, as the Wharton article points out, there are more blogs out there that have “zero subscriptions” than those with have any readers at all. However, with filtering, feeds and other aggregation technology, it is relatively easy to seperate the wheat from the chaff. The challenge for businesses and marketers is to figure out how to use the technology and the medium in the most appropriate way (ironically, on his Oct 15 post, Bizmaster suggested that I may be violating that principle). In the “reputation economy” (I’ll explain that a bit later), it is important to build a report and credibility with customers through a genuine dialog. A blog is just one tool to do that. However, it is supplemental to other marketing efforts.