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Saturday, July 05, 2003 |
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I found this link on Spirituality.com, and thought I'd do a little brag piece on "being quoted" in print, back in 1997. Phyliis Tickle had run across some of my Web stuff via my postings on Ecunet. She wrote me and asked about quoting some of my stuff, and I said "Sure". A short while later, a reporter from the Dallas Morning News wrote me (unfortunately at my Ecunet.org email address which I rarely checked) and asked if I was interested in answering a few questions of hers in an article she was writing on the release of the book God Talk in America. I was too late getting back to her for that article, but I went out and got the book, remembering how Phyllis had asked me for permission to quote me.
The Writer's Corner Page on Phyllis at spirituality.com that I found when I was checking out links from today's post on AOL Gets Blogging via RadioFreeBlogistan and Jeff Jarvis and BuzzMachine (they led me to Holy Weblog! which led me to Spirituality.com which led me to their Writer's Corner section where Phyllis was listed )
1:31:35 PM 
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Christian Crumlish has moved over to MT.
He lists one of my MT posts as one in a list of "migration issues"
12:35:56 PM
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From the BuzzMachine (by Jeff Jarvis) on AOL Blogging strategies:
Today, they are used in one or more of four ways:
- Community: LiveJournal et al let people communicate; my space talks to your space.
- Content: Weblogs like this one, Instapundit, Gawker, Lost Remote, IWantMedia, etc. are just nanopublishing ventures.
- Marketing: Consultants, venture capitalists, law firms, and others use them to show how smart they are. If I had a restaurant, I'd use weblog tools to put up my daily specials.
- Personal space: Very soon, weblogs will be used to organize your stuff and your life. AOL webloggers will certainly use them to publish photos for family and the world to see. I see a family weblog as a way to communicate and stay in sync.
Weblogs will get more and better tools -- publishing tools (for video, audio, photos, etc.) and also data tools (such as the amazing Technorati, which facilitates the conversations that weblogs really are).
In short: Soon, everyone will have a weblog because everyone will use weblogging tools of one sort or another to store or share their stuff -- whether that stuff is opinions or pictures or school assignments or shopping lists or church calendars (my son just rebuilt our church website around a weblog).
There's a much, much bigger strategy here. What AOL showed was only the first of many phases that should follow. The same is true for Movable Type and Blogger and About.com (which just converted itself to MT) and any wise ISP, not to mention content companies, commerce companies, and software companies.
More interesting point:
The real point: Ultimately, your content is more valuable than professional content.
Anil and I got excited lecturing these AOL-Time-Warner megolith folks that what they should do is give their bloggers back doors into the otherwise fenced-off content of People et al -- as the New York Times is doing with bloggers, allowing them to link directly even to archived stories. That might sound like heresy, treating the expensive People gossip as a commodity. But the truth is -- repeat: the truth is -- that by creating such a back door, AOL would cleverly be turning its audience into its marketing force: AOL bloggers would be the privileged ones who can show you People content (thus selling AOL subs) and if their readers want to see more, they have to buy the magazine (thus selling magazine subs). Now that is synergy.
You see, the magnet that creates that marketing power is the people's content. I've learned well in my online career that the audience's content is valuable and the audience is your best marketer if you allow the audience to be the star.
Starting weblogs allows the audience to create content and to market and to create value.
That's why it's a big deal that AOL is blogging. They've taken a good first step. But it's just a first step.
12:33:40 PM
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Christian Crumlish points to this article by Jeff Jarvis on AOL's AolJournal, their entry into the Blogosphere:
AOL gets blogging
Jeff Jarvis reports on a sneak preview of AOL's upcoming weblogging entrant, saying "They've done a good job."
He notes something that I just heard elsewhere, that About.com is relaunching itself with every columnist a blogger, using MT on the backend.
Finally, so you have a reason to click through to Jeff's site (beyond clarifying my oversimplification of a long detailed post), I'll mention that he and Anil offered AOL a killer "synergy" concept, somewhat similar to the deal Dave Winer brokered with the New York Times to enable webloggers to link to content behind the subscription wall.
The piece about About.com is interesting. I wonder if theire "religion" guy, Charles Henderson, is in on that. I know him from my Ecunet early days, when he had started a "First Church of Cyberspace" from a base of an actual FTF Church (in Pennsylvania somewhere, I think). I'll have to look up About.com and check it out. If I find something about this or examples of it, I 'll certainly be resporting on it here.
12:20:46 PM
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