Blogging, plogging or clogging?
p2pnet news view P2P | Advertising:- “After five years of writing on tech industry topics as well as personal ones and building an audience of 10,000 to 20,000 daily visitors, Calacanis said he got tired of all the nasty commenters and opportunistic ‘link-baiters,’ people who post just to promote their own blogs.”
That’s Jason Calacanis who, says the Washington Post, “got into blogging early and big” and who’s quit.
Yeh. I can see how he might have done that.
I got into blogging before it was blogging, but p2pnet isn’t big. According to Awstats, this month the hightest number of unique visitors in a day was 27,433 (lowest, 12,643), and the average number off UVs for the month was, at 9:54 am, 274,014.
Every morning, the first thing I do is cull the obvious hand-delivered spam comments and ‘link-baiters’. (I didn’t know that’s what they’re called. 
I edit out the links and leave the posts, if they look genuine.
“Calacanis blogged to start conversations and be a part of a virtual community,” says the story, “but corporate bloggers are in it for other reasons: talking directly to customers or giving a personal touch to a big business.”
Personal touch to Big Business? heh.
“It’s a phenomenal promotion vehicle for a company, or a great crisis tool or a great customer service tool,” The Washington Post has Geoff Livingston, a “public relations strategist” and “social media expert” saying.
But what’s really happening is: having penetrated and befouled the net, the suits are now bent on doing the same to blogs.
It can’t work, though.
Sure, blogs can be subverted and sure, some of them are set up purely as online PR vehicles, but bottom line, for the most part, they’re run by ordinary people most of whom are simply trying to communicate openly and honestly, and without spin, to other people around the world.
“Kathleen Matthews, who heads global communications at Marriott International, came up with the idea for chief executive Bill Marriott’s blog,” says the Washington Post.
“He saw it as a good way to communicate. ‘That’s the importance of public relations, of advertising, of everything we do, Marriott said. And this is just another channel.’
But, “He’s not your typical blogger,” says the story, because, “he doesn’t use computers”.
Oh.
Instead, “he dictates entries into a recorder and a staff member transcribes and posts them. The audio is also on the site, which averages about 6,000 visitors per week and has had more than 600,000 total visitors since its inception in January 2007.”
That’s not blogging. That’s plogging. Or is it clogging?
Calacanis, meanwhile, runs Mahalo, “a search engine guided by editors rather than algorithms,” says the Washignton Post, adding he now focuses on a personal e-mail list, not directly affiliated with Mahalo, with about 4,000 subscribers.”
Wiht it, “I have a much tighter relationship with people.” He said it’s more intimate and generates more substantive feedback than his blog did.
“It’s basically become a mudpit and it’s very loud,” he said of the blogosphere.
But “the limitation of the medium is the strength of the medium,” he said. “It’s open to everybody.”
In other words, the medium, not PR, is the message. And it’s coming across loud and clear.
Washington Post -Marketing Moves to the Blogosphere, August 25, 2008
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August 25th, 2008 at 5:30 pm
Another incomprehensibe P2PNet ‘Opinion’