Business Press Pays Attention To Blog Industry 139
prostoalex writes "Right after Business Week named WebLogs, Inc. one of the five Net companies to watch in 2005, the Associated Press has a feature on SixApart, the company behind Movable Type, Typepad and (after acquisition) LiveJournal. The article talks about the company starting to 'think big' after being approached by venture capitalists, and has some stats on the blog industry in general."
As a blogger, (Score:1)
Dot.Com Bubble again (Score:5, Insightful)
So if I were to invest in on of these companies, where would my stock dividends be coming from?
Or is it another case of a dot.com investor not really understanding what they're buying into?
Re:Dot.Com Bubble again (Score:3, Funny)
What's the proper nomenclature...
iBubble?
dot-bam?
dot-pop?
dot-pup?
gumball rally?
Re:Dot.Com Bubble again (Score:2)
Re:Dot.Com Bubble again (Score:5, Funny)
It makes me cry whenever I hear people say this. I dry the tears with my Webvan stock certificates.
Re:Dot.Com Bubble again (Score:4, Insightful)
Much has happen since... like, amazon, ebay, paypal. Wanna tell them that "online advertising is flawed"?.
Re:Dot.Com Bubble again (Score:4, Insightful)
All those companies have real services and don't just survive off of advertisements. That said, if your blog pages are generating enough hits you can survive on just adds. What do you think keeps Google alive?
Re:Dot.Com Bubble again (Score:2)
For me that cap is at about 1,2m pageviews / month. And no, I'm not even having a own "real" blog. I could probably do it with much much less pageviews but I've chosen to not whore out that much.
Re:Dot.Com Bubble again (Score:2)
And why is that? Because they show relevant ads. Compared to the old-school ads that were just "ads" these ads are targeted to us as a "geek"-group.
Now if they'd only do geographic targetting too
Re:Dot.Com Bubble again (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Dot.Com Bubble again (Score:4, Interesting)
The value in such a simple buisness is just too small to support a public company as anything other than a short-term investor aberration.
Re:Dot.Com Bubble again (Score:2)
"If your buisness plan can be implemented by a pimplefaced teenager in his parents basement, you should be prepared for the competition of several hundred thousand pimplefaced teenagers doing just that."
Very astute. Being prepared, in this case, is doing a better job than those pimplefaced teenagers.
"The value in such a simple buisness is just too small to support a public company as anything other than a short-term investor aberration."
Not in this case. Those pimplefaced teenagers have been lau
Re:Dot.Com Bubble again (Score:4, Insightful)
"People aren't actually very willing to pay for somewhere to write their blog"
That's an extremely general statement; can you clarify? What people? Your friends? You're correct, in the tautalogical sense, that people who don't want to pay don't want to pay, but the important thing is that there are people who do.
The fact that your post was modded "insightful" shows that there are many who agree with you, but this may be similar to the "lots of people pirate music, thus people aren't willing to pay for it, thus the value of music is zero" fallacy. As the volume of piracy grows, so has Apple's business in paid downloads. And despite more and more free blogging services popping up, more people are paying. I'm able to measure this not in the abstract, let's-post-hunches-on-Slashdot sense, but by the amount of money that's put into my bank account each day.
To your credit, the "there's no business in blogging" sentiment is a popular one, but I'm just not seeing the evidence to support that.
Re:Dot.Com Bubble again (Score:2, Interesting)
selling the weblog/cms software, sponsored links or banner-advertisements on weblogging platforms seems to be a decent concept. compared to the dot.com bubble with companies without an actual product to sell.
Re:Dot.Com Bubble again (Score:2)
Am I the only non-blogger out there (Score:4, Insightful)
Blogging, IMHO, is overrated.
Re:Am I the only non-blogger out there (Score:1)
I ask strictly because I want to read the content, of course
Re:Am I the only non-blogger out there (Score:2)
Re:Am I the only non-blogger out there (Score:2, Insightful)
Would you not consider slashdot to be a blog? Sure the frontpage is controled by an select few and is considered to be a good source of news for geeks, but let's face it. This is a blog.
Re:Am I the only non-blogger out there (Score:2)
A great many blogs have more than one author. So that's not it.
No, if anything separates Slashdot from blogs, it's that blogs usually have original content on them. Slashdot just reprints anything that anybody submits, basically without discrimination.
Of course, that doesn't mean that Slashdot isn't a blog. It just means that, if you judge Slashdot by the standards of blogs, Slashdot is a really bad blog.
Re:Am I the only non-blogger out there (Score:2)
You don't read many blogs, do you? Blogs haven't been about posting lists of links for a couple of years now. There are still list-of-link sites out there like Fark and MetaFilter and Memepool, but these sites are not blogs. Blogs have evolved.
Re:Am I the only non-blogger out there (Score:3, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weblog
Re:Am I the only non-blogger out there (Score:2)
planet.gnome.org is a good example - kind of a microcosm of the blog sphere. You get people like Miguel and Havoc posting interesting stuff about GTK/GNOME which provides an insight into the dev process you wouldn't get otherwise. You also have people who post
Re:Am I the only non-blogger out there (Score:5, Interesting)
I beg to differ. Technorati currently has over 7 million blogs tracked. 3 million of those have popped up just since last October -- that's one every 3 minutes. no matter what the quality is (and I do tend to agree with you there) blogging is big.
I guess the real appeal is that it's finally an "idiot-friendly" way of publishing content. People are starting to get the desire to make the Web a two-way communication system.
Re:Am I the only non-blogger out there (Score:3, Interesting)
Blogging is important, of course - just look at how many Slashdot/OSnews etc. stories link to a blog post these days. But extrapolating from 7 million people moving their journals online to a revolution in journalism is too big a leap for me to believe.
Re:Am I the only non-blogger out there (Score:2)
All of them. Technorati has a system whereby blogs that aren't updated regularly are dropped from their index. I don't know how regular you have to be to meet the threshold; I think it's something like once a week, or once every four days, or something like that.
Re:Am I the only non-blogger out there (Score:3, Insightful)
No-one's asking you to believe that. However, "the blogosphere" becoming the source of an increasing number of stories, increasingly able to set the agenda (to an extent you may not even realize if you're not reading blogs; the evening news has been worthless for a while but for me it's now redundant for a lot of stories), and taking down various importent entities should
Re:Am I the only non-blogger out there (Score:2)
I watched News at Ten the other day where a journalist was doing a voiceover saying "As the British military plane touched down...", as a C-5 with a big star and the letters "US" on the side landed. If they're making that kind of mistake, it woul
Re:Am I the only non-blogger out there (Score:2)
I don't mean it the way you mean it; I mean that I saw the stories and more angles on it than the news will have, two or three days before the news has it.
Did you know that it is common practice to "release" news on Friday evening so it gets buried? I didn't, until blogs started to help that not work anymore.
I can't think of any stories where blogs have been the source, though.
Oh, yes, the mainstream news makes sure to credit the blogs,
Am I the only non-(insert X) out there (Score:2)
Hoo boy... (Score:5, Insightful)
Pardon the skepticism, but...
You know, it's crazy, but you'd think that after the dot.com bubble burst the venture capitalists would be a little more careful with their money when it came to tech, yet here they are, wanting to get in on an industry where the main product is something that is already available for free. Where will the revenue, and further, the return on the investment, come from? (Firing Berman out of a cannon?) What's worse is that if there's another burst like the last one, investors are going to go back to shying away from small tech companies that actually produce something.
I think this whole thing is a result of all the press that the mainstream media is giving blogs, and the only reason why I think they're getting all that press is because the media LOVES an opportunity to navel gaze.
Don't get me wrong, I think blogging is cool and all, and offers a chance for political/media/other watchdogs out there, and there are some blogs I find entertaining, but really, I can't help but think that all that money is just going to go right down the drain, and the only thing they'll have to show for it is a bunch of webpages of people and their cats.
Re:Hoo boy... (Score:2)
I don't know, let's ask him [primidi.com]. He seems to be doing okay [slashdot.org]...
Re:Hoo boy... (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, I, Cringely [pbs.org] predicted this a while ago. Apparently, any money the VCs collected in '99-'00 which they haven't invested has to be returned to the investors in five years, along with the VC's management fee. To avoid giving the fee back, the VCs have to invest in something - anything - and soon.
VCs love a bubble ... (Score:2, Insightful)
I *strongly* suspect that venture capitalists (and brokers) made a killing during the dot com era regardless of the collapse.
It's the bigger fool idea - each person buys at stupidly inflated prices assuming there is an even bigger fool who will buy after them - but the VCs get in first so there was very often much bigger fools begging to be ripped off.
I seriously d
Re:VCs love a bubble ... (Score:2)
Re:Hoo boy... (Score:2, Interesting)
This has interesting ramifications. It's free, anyone can do it (and does) and it's spreading. The problem for the reader is sifting the interesting bits out of the sea of inanities. However, a couple of facts prevent this from being too big a problem:
1. what's of interest to me is not necessarily of interest to someone else
2. even after culling the 90%, the remainder is still a huge number. There exist enough relevant, interesting blogs
Re:Hoo boy... (Score:2, Interesting)
This is both good and bad. Obviously, money is going to go into things that aren't really going to go anywhere. Money will also go into things that sorely need it and will produce something good.
The question is whether or not we remember the lessons learned
Re:Hoo boy... (Score:2)
"You know, it's crazy, but you'd think that after the dot.com bubble burst the venture capitalists would be a little more careful with their money when it came to tech, yet here they are, wanting to get in on an industry where the main product is something that is already available for free."
Yet the paid blogging industry is growing. Perhaps this seems counterintuitive, but it's true. I think many Slashdotters are basing assumptions on the fact of free blogging platforms (MSN Spaces being the latest o
Re:Hoo boy... (Score:2, Insightful)
I think investing in the moveable type company is a smart investment. You have millions of people willing to pay a monthly fee, and millions more likely to sign up in the coming months.
Re:Hoo boy... (Score:2)
It's not free. Yes, you can sign up for something like a Blogspot account for free, but your site is going to be hard to use and difficult to customize. The point here isn't that the services are available for free; the point is that they're cheap -- practically anybody can afford $5 a month. And for only a little more than that, you can have your own dedicated server at a data center like Hosting Matters. It's incredibly easy to make $5 a m
Re:Hoo boy... (Score:2)
All they need to do is pubblicize the companies until an IPO or a buyout and then they can walk away. Eventually people will realize that blogging software is not that hard to write and that these super high priced companies have very little advantage over any competent developer in their basement. But by that time the VCs will have walked
hmm (Score:1)
Reality Check (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously, why is such a big deal being made of blogging?
Re:Reality Check (Score:2)
The bar for posting something on the web has been lowered even further than it used to be. Of course this means (now more than ever) any dumbass is putting up crap to see on the internet.
The upside is that a handful of people that have something important to say can do so with ease.
Also, these "blogs" genera
Re:Reality Check (Score:3, Insightful)
That's not actually how it's turning out, though. See, out of the 7 million blogs out there, there might be only 10 that are even remotely interesting to you. Somebody else has his own 10. And somebody else has his 10. The net result is that every blog has an audience.
Ed Driscoll had an article on Tech Central Station about this a few weeks back. He talked about the fact that th
Re:Reality Check (Score:2)
I realise different content has different value to different people... but I have a hard time assigning real value to Jane Doe's, "I had such a crappy day cause Bobby doesn't like me" posts.
I know these aren't the sorts of blogs most people think about, but it seems like that represents the vast majority of content we get in blogs.
I'd call your coworker's blog one of the few that had real content on it. That makes it the one in a million that is worth anything.
And of course, the idea of having access to
Re:Reality Check (Score:2)
They are tremendously valuable to Jane's friends and family, and to anybody who enjoys the voyeuristic rush of reading somebody else's diary. Of course, Jane's online diary becomes massively important to the whole world as soon as she posts, "I had such a crappy day because Bobby doesn't like me, and holy cow look at that giant tsunami!"
The whole point of blogs is that they comprise a vast,
Re:Reality Check (Score:1)
The internet is way more than websites or usenet postings.
Re:Reality Check (Score:2)
That website is either the best on the net or it is the typical "I'm trying to speak out against the tide in my own ironic sort of way so I can distinguish myself and be noticed."
But it has a point either way.
Re:Reality Check (Score:2)
To decry it as "shit" is just a bit harsh. Yea, there are some internet dead-ends and cesspools, but overall, the world's knowledge is there for you. You just have to find it...
Perhaps you aren't looking in the right places?!?
And now... (Score:4, Funny)
By Blamo
let blogs replace mass media (Score:5, Interesting)
The critics are correct--reading blogs means reading a single writer's private quirks--but that works to the reader's advantage as well as disadvantage. Who wants to get all their information from a single, monopolistic, sensationalistic source? That's how I view the local television news--to be fair, they make an attempt, but to me it's obvious their bottom line is ratings. So today we have an alternative model for the dissemination of information (or rather, many models), and one of the sturdiest is the blog.
I'm reminded of analogies I've heard made between modern AI computing algorithms (ie, neural nets) and the human brain, in which there are so many tiny, self-contained fundamental units (connections, say) that a great many of them can fail without destroying the performance of the whole. Robust & degrades gracefully.
Blogs may forge that sort of network online. No longer will it be easy to mislead the masses, because the masses are not drinking from a single spring. Each person is reading a finite number of blogs and processing and making their own blog. Everyone is (gasp!) thinking for themselves.
I like the direction this is going....
Re:let blogs replace mass media (Score:2, Interesting)
Do not think, even for a minute, that this will happen. We (the people) will just find a different way to be sheep. Some blogs will get more attention than most, and everyone will again be thinking the same things, controlled by similar people.
A medium may encourage free-thinking, but people don't seem to like it too much. Most people prefer to be told what to think while
Re:let blogs replace mass media (Score:2)
Everybody has opinions. Having an opinion is one of the easiest things in the world to do. Go try and find one of these "sheep" you oh-so-smugly talk about. Go try and find somebody without an opinion. You can't. They don't exist. Everybody has opinions.
Are most people motivated enough to go to a lot of trouble to express their opinions? No, they've got better things to do with their time. But that's where outfits like Six Apart c
Re:let blogs replace mass media (Score:2)
Anyway, I have time and patience...
Who claimed that we don't have opinions? We (the sheep) do have opinions, which are shaped by the people we pay attention to. That was my original claim. You have not refute
Re:let blogs replace mass media (Score:2)
You, with all your yabber-yabber about how people don't think for themselves. Wanna back off that position, Sparky?
That was my original claim. You have not refuted it.
Oh, great. Yet another kid who thinks he's on his high-school debate team. Well, that goes with the smugness and the sense of superiority.
Re:let blogs replace mass media (Score:2)
You're an arrogant son of a bitch, and unfortunately, with all your "Oh, you missed my point" chatter, I see no sign that that's going to change.
Re:let blogs replace mass media (Score:3, Insightful)
No longer will it be easy to mislead the masses
The greatest fault, dear trufflemage, is not in our stars, but in ourselves....
Re:let blogs replace mass media (Score:2)
Indeed, in the political realm that is already happening, thanks to the fact blogs can outrun the so-called mainstream media when it comes to information dissemination and fact-checking quite easily. It was the blogosphere t
Re:let blogs replace mass media (Score:2)
Blog entrepreneurs (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's some analysis [paraz.com] on commercial blogging. (Yes, it's from a blog!)
businessweek is a day late (Score:4, Informative)
Not long after, Bill Gates did an interview with Gizmodo. Coincidence? (Gizmodo was not featured in the FORTUNE article - Engadget and Microsoft's own Bob Scoble were).
Re:businessweek is a day late (Score:2)
I got £45bn to advertise IBM on my blog (Score:5, Funny)
Woke up. couldn't find any clean underpants because the lighbulb is broken. Maybe the underpants gnomes stole the lightbulb to cover up the missing pants until they made their getaway.
19/2/2005
Posted in my blog today.
18/2/2005
Man I shouldn't have eaten those beans. I had to destroy all my underpants.
gmail invites (Score:1, Interesting)
On another note, I have gmail invites for the first 50 who ask at safety.account@gmail.com
Re:gmail invites (Score:3, Interesting)
Post # 47 To: Howlin
Howlin, every single one of these memos to file is in a proportionally spaced font, probably Palatino or Times New Roman.
In 1972 people used typewriters for th
Re:gmail invites (Score:2)
Re:gmail invites (Score:2)
I think everybody has 50 invites
even this initiative [isnoop.net] has 291,820 invites available to share.
Anybody who doesn't have a gmail account by now, hasn't figured out how to write gmail account invite [google.dk] in google
Re:gmail invites (Score:2)
Yes, please. Dig deep into the Gannon story. Because when you do, you'll find that it has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the Republican party, or with bloggers, or with anybody paying anybody for anything.
I wouldn't have bothered to reply but for the fact that some Slashdot moderator with more points than sense felt the need to call this compl
Re:gmail invites (Score:2)
Re:gmail invites (Score:2)
(Point of order: the events where the President stands up and takes questions are not briefings. They're press conferences. The President doesn't participate in the regular press briefings.)
Go read this [kingpublishing.com]. Unless, you know, you just don't give a damn
Re:gmail invites (Score:2)
And not any reporter can get into the whitehouse. There are hundreds of good reporters that do not get into the white house no matter how much they ask. And those are reporters who can show better journalistic experience than being gay whores (see http
Re:gmail invites (Score:2)
Um. I don't think you really have the foggiest idea what you're talking about here. He was identified on C-SPAN by his pen name because that's the professional name he uses. Just like how Mara Liasson uses her maiden name instead of her married name, because that's the name under which she works.
Gannon's day pass was under his legal name, not his pen
Re:gmail invites (Score:2)
And now I have two choices (i) shut up and thus indirectly admit that every thing I say is wrong, or (b) spend countless hours reasearching the white house press handling procedures on the internet in order to come back
Re:gmail invites (Score:2)
Except Gannon never held a press pass. Instead, he was given a series of day, or "A", passes, none of which have anybody's name on them. Your "at least one AP journalist" is either misremembering, or lying.
According to you, anybody from any kind of news website can get into the white house and once there, Bush will answer everyone's question. I REALLY doubt this is true.
Kay. Because you're uninformed about how the
Oh. My. God. (Score:5, Insightful)
Blogging is _exactly_ what happened at the start of the internet craze - it's _home pages_. Blogs are just home pages that are easier to update than they used to be back in the olden days, so people don't have to worry about HTML in order to create them.
Blogs: Just easy-to-use web pages, nothing more, nothing less.
Re:Oh. My. God. - citizen journalism is here. (Score:2)
Re:Oh. My. God. (Score:2)
Multiply.com is a bit different though; they've integrated blogging with social networking and basic communication (like e-mail), so the people in your life who might actually care to read your blog, get automatically notified. Between that and it's support for Photo Albums, it might have a leg up on basic blogging sites like blogger and LJ.
Check out my Multiply site [multiply.com] or start your own [multiply.com].
Disclaimer: I work for Multiply.
Re:Oh. My. God. (Score:2)
another step forward (Score:2)
I'll second that. Read about Rich Text Editing and Spell Check Come to TypePad [sixapart.com] and thats pretty much what the dog [sausage.com] was designed for when I was working for sausage [sausage.com] back in '95.
The key difference is that with a server based model you have a simplified platform (browser) compared to targeting an operating system (MS Windows) with a binary.
Re:another step forward (Score:2)
And mostly I post to my Livejournal using the Semagic client, which does lots of useful stuff for me (like shortcut keys for hyperlinks).
Re:another step forward (Score:2)
yeah I spotted this just today (and appreciated the significance). For example ecto [kung-foo.tv] (commercial blog client) which acts as a binary client supporting multiple blog api's [kung-foo.tv]. Thus theres a sort of binary revenge here because the web based systems have their minuses (until I tried out gmail [google.com]) .
I must say though users are voting with their dollars - enough even to move binary boys such as Joel [shorewalker.com] and Miguel [ximian.com] rethink.
Re:Oh. My. God. (Score:2, Insightful)
Excellent point. Just what I've been mumbling to myself for a while; I'm glad someone came out and said it.
To amplify: Personal web pages, a.k.a. "Blogs", are revolutionary. They are changing the world, and I imagine they will continue to do so. They started doing so around 1990. The techies got involved in big numbers around 1993. The man on the street started noticing around 1997. A while later someone came up
Re:Blogs: Just easy-to-use web pages, nothing more (Score:2)
[link fixed]Blogs: Just easy-to-use web pages, (Score:2)
Re:Oh. My. God. (Score:2)
Re:Oh. My. God. (Score:2)
Blogs (Score:3, Interesting)
History repeats (Score:3, Insightful)
Historically speaking this has happened numerous times. Each time a new media appears it changes the way all previous media performs, killing that which is no longer viable, gradually reshaping "old media" and creating a new means of information. Think about how the printing press, television, and computers have all changed the way major media reacts with the masses. As the price of producing in that media lowers more people will begin to produce in that media, creating a more diverse body of knowledge than "popular opinion" that big media tends to stick with. For instance as the prices of printing came down during the industrial revolution many would-be activists printed pamphlets of their beliefs. I actually own a pamphlet printed from that time insisting that we should move to a 12 digit numeric system, not exactly something that would be put forth by main stream media at the time, especially with the push for metric. And so it is to be expected that blogging will recreate media, providing a check and balance system for main stream media, just as has happened in the past.
That said, part of the point is that the price must be low in order to be used. Bloggers that are read daily by large masses: Instapundit and Lileks for example can easily manage to pay for their bandwith costs and to use purchased blogger software, but the average blogger doesn't have a ton of readers and unless he gets discovered, more than likely eats hiis bandwith costs each month and will prefer the free model for blogging apps. So, as far as investments go, I am not sure that that particular model will prove productive.
And some businesses are attacking... (Score:4, Informative)
A local news paper, The Tulsa World [tulsaworld.com], sent out a cease and desist letter saying to stop quoting their opinions/articles (in whole or in part) and to stop deep linking to their unprotected
Batesline.com [batesline.com], Chris Medlock's blog [blogspot.com] (a city councilor who is the subject of a recall), and TulsaNow.org [tulsanow.org] because some messages in the forum include links to articles.
The Tulsa World's webmaster apparently didn't know how to stop unauthorized linking until just recently. Wednesday he said it couldn't be done, today it is fixed. [tulsaworld.com]
Two other websites are involved in this story of so called copyright infringement, freedom of speech and deep linking. Tulsans for election integrity [tulsansfor...egrity.com] also received the letter, they are against the recall. The coalition for responsible government [coalitionf...rnment.org] are for the recall and has directly copied, in their entirety, articles from the Tulsa World and have received no such letter (the we know of) the Tulsa World has been informed, so either the coalition for responsible government is ignoring the demand or the Tulsa World has given them blanket permission to do such a thing.
This story has been covered locally [ktul.com] and nationally [cnn.com]
I hate the word "Blogging" (Score:2)
I avoided the weblog thing not really seeing the value. One day I realized I have a bunch of information I would like to post but it really did not "deserve" a full webpage dedicated to it... Duh!
Hell it may not deserve a "blog" but here is The iMovie FAQ News [danslagle.com] If nothing else it looks "clean and ne
Re:I hate the word "Blogging" (Score:2)
Re:I hate the word "Blogging" (Score:2)
Not a good thing (Score:2)
No long is it "An opinion and no media bullshit" it's just "media bulls
Re:Not a good thing (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't see blog corruption in your example, I see a Major News Organization who either didn't research the story enough to verify it, or convey the fact that they did that research well enough to convince you.
All stories start o
Big Media Newspapsers with RSS feeds (Score:2)
As an internet user that sucks (Score:2)
I hate blogs, always have, always will. Give me news, give me reviews, give me opinions, keep your blogs.
Weblogs inc is evil, sorry, not playing devil advocate or anything, I just do not like it.
In Korea, blogs are only for old people. future slashdot posting.
why evil (Score:2)
autoblog, engadget, pocketlintblog, ohmygodthinkofsomthingfunnyblog, somethingthatgwillhithighgooglerankblogs
each one posting and cross posting onto each other, and leaching favourable sounding verbiage linkage from sites such as well-meaning users of
They are poisoning google.
I wish google had a blacklist for its users.
Oh wait, I bet am
Re:Revenue (Score:2)
"I can't see much revenue for the blogging hosts, they still only really have banners/popups."
That's an interesting observation. I just bought a Lotus Elise with blog host revenue. TFA points out that Six Apart has seven million users -- larger than Slashdot's userbase by an order of magnitude. If their take rate to paid accounts is like mine, they're grossing about $1.5 million a month, and their company has fewer than five employees.
Reading the comments to this article shows that many other Slas
Re:There's Revenue in Them Thar Blogs (Score:2)