Horizon

"...But O the boredom of argument without action, politics without power." True enough. Suppose that means old Cyril would flip to have a blog named after his old mag.

A serious comment, since I do this professionally now: this winter a lot of people have founded business-oriented, narrow-topic weblogs whose competitors are probably private subscription newsletters, and whose primary purpose is to address narrow serious subjects rather than to entertain or persuade. I think that over time such blogs will compete down the prices of the private newsletters. I just don't know if the blogs themselves will make money for their authors.

A lot of business blogs seem very bandwagonish at the moment - where's our blog? We've got to have a blog being the equivalent of where's our website? of a few years ago. Not that business blogs are going to go away, necessarily - all those companies still have their websites. But I'm not sure if there's consensus yet on what these blogs are for. It took a while for the websites to do anything more functional than 'look at us!'

The vibe on blogs is confused among business people who don't personally spend much time on the Net. Some view them as marketing engines but I've also seen the claim that blogs can't generate their own traffic. Some folks seem to view a print publication's blog as a place to communicate with the print readers, but that doesn't seem to work because most blog visitors come in via search engines, i.e. their interest is in the topic, not the source.

It will take a lot of people a long time to realize that entertainment is not the only function of blogs and that writing for publication is writing for publication no matter what you call it. The genuinely new characteristics of blogs are the new characteristics of online writing in general: the ability to link directly to sources rather than ask someone to take your word for their existence, and the disappearance of text length limits -- or anyway, of limits imposed by the cost of paper as opposed to the reader's attention span.

I do think blogging will develop a more dignified reputation as a way to get fresh specialized information to a specialist audience. For example, a homeless service organization out here uses a blog to distribute subsidized housing listings. And quite a few real estate brokers, for example, use weblogs to advertise properties for sale.

I don't think people will keep seeing blogs as different from plain Web sites or for that matter conventional news tickers. What I do now as blogger for a magazine on subsidized housing is not very different from what I did as a news writer for the UPI wire in 1990.

As for whether blogging *by itself* will make money, and, if so, for how many people -- well, that's a different question again.

Actually, debunking others' claims about the wonderfulness of blogs seems to be the flavor of the week. See here and here.