Blogging 2.0: from surviving to thriving
I’ve noticed that much of the discussion of this new notion of Blogging 2.0 revolves around what users want. In fact, as I noted earlier this week, Duncan Riley declared that Blogging 2.0 is “all about the user.” Fair enough.
That said, my sense is that there’s a galaxy of well intentioned and ambitious bloggers out there who are and will be trying to figure out how to find their way in this new and strange era of distributed conversations (i.e. you spend the time, brain power, expertise, and hard work to create and share a new idea on your blog and it ends up being discussed in any number of other places).
It’s a question of finding the opportunity in the challenge, which I started to get into in a piece called Bridging the Blogging 1.0 and Blogging 2.0 divide. In my view, bloggers can be successful from a Blogging 1.0 vantage point (page views, RSS subscribers, comments, advertising revenue) by embracing the Blogging 2.0 environment.
That’s fantastic, you say, but what the hell does that mean?
It means that successful Bloggers 2.0 need to dive headlong into the places where eyeballs are and conversations are being held. The idea is to make friends, share ideas, and above all else promote one’s personal brand with the hope that people will eventually find their way back to your blog. It’s “old fashioned” online promotion – make friends, show that you’re smart and have something to share, and the people will hopefully follow.
This topic also led me to think about Blogging 2.0 tools from the blogger perspective. I mused on a WinExtra piece called Evangelizing is hard work (and it is, let there be no doubt!) that “I think that this need created by the complex environment that you’ve described will demand new means for publishers to promote themselves.”
That said, here’s a slate of some current popular means that bloggers can use to engage Blogging 2.0 with an eye toward driving the bottom line:
* Disqus - This is a good one to start with as it’s a comments plug-in system that exists right on your blog. So when people leave a comment on your site, those comments are also “cross-published” to the Disqus community. Further, all of your comments made around the Internet on other sites that use Disqus are stored for you in one place.
I installed Disqus here on Online Media Cultist a few weeks ago and like it for the most part, but one major qualm I have is that it’s difficult to tell which site commenters hail from (this should be one-click away). I’m also not convinced as yet that Disqus is an effective promotional tool overall beyond traditional commenting.
* Twitter - Beyond being the preeminent “smart people network,” Twitter is a wonderful place to see and be seen, or tweet and friend and follow in Twitter parlance. It’s a wonderful and flexible and powerful platform, built on a vibrant community of influential-types, bloggers, techies, geeks and, increasingly, everyone. Now if only it didn’t crash so often.
* Friendfeed - Friendfeed may be the perfect example of Blogging 2.0, a “lifestreaming” aggregator that facilitates conversation and provides social networking opportunities around a bevy of writing, link sharing, and media uploading that you’re doing around the Internet. It also works symbiotically for bloggers, in my view: the more you blog, the more you tweet, and the more you share, the more you show up on Friendfeed, the more likely you are to attract conversations around your ideas and, ideally, those click back visits that you’re hoping for.
* Facebook - I’m not a big Facebook user, but some bloggers utilize it as a promotional outpost for their sites. It has a Twitter-like “status” service, which in conjunction with typical comments and the horde of Facebook apps makes it a place for distributed conversations to take place and potentially take advantage of.
* Google Reader - Increasingly, what we can share is becoming important in addition to the new ideas and perspective we bring to the mix. Google Reader is significant in the RSS world as its shared stories feature ties into other services like the aforementioned Friendfeed as well as Readburner. So in essence we can add “sharing” as an important piece of participating in Blogging 2.0.
* MyBlogLog - I was extremely excited about MBL in 2007 as a blog promotion tool and blogger-centric social network, but that excitement was fleeting and transitioned to near-apathy over time as I didn’t find significant reasons to stick around the MBL community or ways to connect with other bloggers. Still, the MBL widget remains a nice way to get a visual (or at least an icon) on who is visiting your site. There’s also been a nice amount of chatter about recently added features, which I’ve been meaning to investigate for some time now. The bottom line is that there’s no better way to promote your blog than amongst an audience of likeminded bloggers, so MyBlogLog has an opportunity to be a place where people can do that.
As I mentioned briefly above, I do think there’s a growing need for tools that will help bloggers to harness the activity going on in all of these disparate places. Disqus and Friendfeed go a ways toward doing that, but I sense that we’ll see a lot more activity in this space over the next year or two.
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