{"id":113,"date":"2018-06-14T19:04:31","date_gmt":"2018-06-14T19:04:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/bus3060\/chapter\/ch07-2\/"},"modified":"2026-02-03T15:40:37","modified_gmt":"2026-02-03T15:40:37","slug":"ch07-2","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/bus3060\/chapter\/ch07-2\/","title":{"raw":"7.2 Blogs","rendered":"7.2 Blogs"},"content":{"raw":"
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Learning Objectives<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n

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After studying this section you should be able to do the following:<\/p>\r\n\r\n

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  1. Know what blogs are and how corporations, executives, individuals, and the media use them.<\/li>\r\n \t
  2. Understand the benefits and risks of blogging.<\/li>\r\n \t
  3. Appreciate the growth in the number of blogs, their influence, and their capacity to generate revenue.<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

    Blogs<\/a><\/span> (short for Web logs) first emerged almost a decade ago as a medium for posting online diaries. (In a perhaps apocryphal story, Wired<\/em> magazine claimed the term \u201cWeb log\u201d was coined by Jorn Barger, a sometimes homeless, yet profoundly prolific, Internet poster). From humble beginnings, the blogging phenomenon has grown to a point where the number of public blogs tracked by Technorati (the popular blog index) has surpassed one hundred million (Takahashi, 2008). This number is clearly a long tail<\/a><\/span> phenomenon, loaded with niche content that remains \u201cdiscoverable\u201d through search engines and blog indexes. Trackbacks<\/a><\/span> (third-party links back to original blog post), and blog rolls<\/a><\/span> (a list of a blogger\u2019s favorite sites\u2014a sort of shout-out to blogging peers) also help distinguish and reinforce the reputation of widely read blogs.<\/p>\r\n

    The most popular blogs offer cutting-edge news and commentary, with postings running the gamut from professional publications to personal diaries. While this cacophony of content was once dismissed, blogging is now a respected and influential medium. Some might say that many of the most popular blogs have grown beyond the term, transforming into robust media enterprises. Consider that the political blog The Huffington Post is now more popular than all but eight newspaper sites and has a valuation higher than many publicly traded papers (Alterman, 2008; Learmonth, 2008). Keep in mind that this is a site without the sports, local news, weather, and other content offered by most papers. Ratings like this are hard to achieve\u2014most bloggers can\u2019t make a living off their musings. But among the elite ranks, killer subscriber numbers are a magnet for advertisers. Top blogs operating on shoestring budgets can snare several hundred thousand dollars a month in ad revenue (Zuckerman, 2007). Most start with ad networks like Google AdSense, but the most elite engage advertisers directly for high-value deals and extended sponsorships.<\/p>\r\n

    Top blogs have begun to attract well-known journalists away from print media. The Huffington Post hired a former Washington Post<\/em> editor Lawrence Roberts to head the site\u2019s investigative unit. The popular blog TechCrunch now features posts by Sarah Lacy (a BusinessWeek<\/em> cover-story writer) and has hired Erick Schonfeld away from Time Warner\u2019s business publishing empire. Schonfeld\u2019s colleague, Om Malik, has gone on to found another highly ranked tech industry blog, GigaOM.<\/p>\r\n

    Senior executives from many industries have also begun to weigh in with online ruminations, going directly to the people without a journalist filtering their comments. Hotel chief Bill Marriott, Paul Levy (CEO of health care quality leader Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center), Toyota\u2019s Akio Toyoda, and Zappos\u2019 CEO Tony Hsieh use their blogs for purposes that include a combination of marketing, sharing ideas, gathering feedback, press response, image shaping, and reaching consumers directly without press filtering. Blogs have the luxury of being more topically focused than traditional media, with no limits on page size, word count, or publication deadline. Some of the best examples engage new developments in topic domains much more quickly and deeply than traditional media. For example, it\u2019s not uncommon for blogs focused on the law or politics to provide a detailed dissection of a Supreme Court opinion within hours of its release\u2014offering analysis well ahead of, and with greater depth, than via what bloggers call the mainstream media (MSM)<\/a><\/span>. As such, it\u2019s not surprising that most mainstream news outlets have begun supplementing their content with blogs that can offer greater depth, more detail, and deadline-free timeliness.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

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    Blogs<\/h4>\r\n

    While the feature set of a particular blog depends on the underlying platform and the preferences of the blogger, several key features are common to most blogs:<\/p>\r\n\r\n