Technology moves fast. But you know that. It is your
job, after all. Even so, sometimes it catches us all by surprise.
Web logs, orblogsas they have become known, are
barely a decade old as a publishing medium, but they are part of
the mainstream media. And they should be part of your daily
routine, as an author, a reader or a commenter.
You may think that blogging is just a silly hobby, where people
post pictures of their cats or blog about what they had for
breakfast. Sure, such blogs exist, but the blogosphere is a far
richer place than that.
According to research conducted by
Universal McCann, 73%
of regular internet users have or read a blog. Dig down a little
deeper and you find that just a smidgin under 50% are weekly blog
readers. Twenty five per cent of people read blogs about products,
and a similar number read about computers.
What is the betting that, if you segmented the IT industry folks
out of those numbers, the percentages would be far higher?
Blogging is a key communication tool that cannot be ignored.
Take the case of Jeff Jarvis, a well-known
journalism blogger, who
poured out his frustrations with Dell in a post called
Dell
Hell. A couple of years after the firestorm, Dell is widely
praised for its own blogging.
Some companies remain refuseniks, but most IT companies are
blogging at the very least in an unofficial way, although most do
it in a sanctioned manner.
And that is important, because users are out there, talking
about their products every day. Some are sharing their complaints
about the tools they use. Some are expressing their enthusiasm and
passion.
The age when the marketing people could control the message, and
access to developers and product managers was jealously guarded,
has passed into memory. Now developers can talk directly to their
user base, and the users can feed right back.
In other industries, companies still have an excuse for not
joining in. Their users are not tech-savvy, perhaps, or work
outdoors and are away from their computers for long stretches of
time. Even there, though, we are seeing rapid advances in
blogging.
The readers of
Farmers
Weekly, a sister title to ComputerWeekly, are rapidly taking to
blogging as a way of sharing information in difficult times for
their industry.
The excuses have long since disappeared for anyone in
technology. If you are a supplier, you should be out there, joining
in the conversation around the product.
If you are a user, you should be helping shape the discussion
about how the product might look in future releases. And if you are
good, if you really know your stuff, you might just become one of
the new wave of authoritative voices on technology that are taking
over the blogosphere.
l Adam Tinworth is head of blog development at Reed Business
Information