AOL to give all its members blog ability

is this really a good idea? blog noise indeed

[amznVibe]

I'm not sure if anyone has noticed this from last weekend, but AOL has been giving private demos [mena.typepad.com] of its "AOL Journals". They are going to offer free weblogs to all their "30+ million" members.
[washingtonpost.com...]

I can't wait to see how the search engines deal with this. Hopefully all their silly chatter won't wash out better quality information on the web. With any luck, it won't be web accessable at all so we can ignore it, but I think that's unlikely.

[edit_g]

I can think of very few things I'd like to see less than emptyheaded "auto blogs" from a myriad of AOL memebers. At least now there is some token effort involved if you want to blog...

[edit_g]

AOL has dubbed its service "AOL Journals" because its surveys showed that members found the word "blogs" confusing

A telling statement... ;)

[TGecho]

maybe you could search for >> topic -"aol journal" << or something like that :)

[Marketing Guy]

Would be interesting to know if AOL will list these journals in a directory on their members site.

"Hmmm....we have a lot of information about our users, and we keep getting stick for spamming them with junk mail - how can we target them more effectively - what do they want?"

"If only they would write about it and tell us...."

Yeh, I'm cynical! Leave me alone! *covers ears*

Scott ;)

[jeffb]

Whatever AOL is doing with it, they're not making a big deal about it. I checked on AOL (yeah, I'm one of the saps who got sucked into it years ago and never has stayed mad at it long enough to go through all the hassle of switching all my e-mail and subscriptions and all) and they list nothing about these journals under their keyword search and make no mention of it in their promos for AOL 9.0. Have they given up on the idea or was someone pulling the Washington Post's leg?

[chiyo]

Come on now.. we are being a bit high and mighty yes?

Many isp's offer sibscribers webspace, and many other websites can be made simply with frontpage, dreamweaver or templates or blog software and CMS's already available.

We all know that it takes some effort over and beyong writing away, to have some exposure on the web and in indexes. I dont really think AOL "journals" are going to cause any increase in the amount of junk already available on the web - a lot of it including abandoned commercial sites, a mass of throw-away affiliate sites and doorway sites/pages, and most of it not good enough to appear in main SERPS anyway..

Me and andy think alike. Everybody will get their 15 megabytes of fame eventually.

Whether it appears in the first page SERPs for chosen keywords or they pay PPC is another matter!

[amznVibe]

The reason its so easy to be down on AOL is that it has always been bloated, slow and completely proprietary. Now they are looking for any way possible to keep members, and I guess this is one way they are trying - making post's by instant messages only available if you are a real member, not with free AIM

Well at least there will now be a new market for programers to write code to convert "Aol Journals" into Moveabletype etc. :)

And yes, if a million AOL members decide to blog some month about "pain pills" (madeup example) or anything your keywords might target, it WILL affect your keyword ranking, in theory, no?

[mat_bastian]

is the 1ntr0w3b running out of space? Last I heard they were still building servers.

Yeah, I most likely won't read them, but who do I think I am to tell people stories about their cat, and the trip to the cabin, and the story about the boy who liked them in grade school aren't important... or that my amazon affiliate site is more important?

Let them blog and when 90% of them get sick of talking to themselves and realize, blogging is alot like school work, I think then we'll see the ranks thin a bit.

and if you consider aol bloggers with no interest in your keywords to be competition, you may need to work on honing your craft.

[AAnnAArchy]

...or you can *be* one of those AOL bloggers with an interest in your keywords. ;)

[dragonlady7]

Pff, most of them that want to already have a blog of sorts on livejournal (or one of the copies of it floating around, of which there are about a million). There are over 100,000 people on there. I know I was on there from way before I had a clue what a "blog" was. And most of my comrades on it haven't a clue what a "spellchecker" is, much less a "blog". No fear.
One neat thing about livejournal is that it lets you block your journal from spiders, so that it doesn't show up in Google. A good idea for many newbies who don't want to show up (like I initially did) in random searches and end up with strange people leaving comments-- I got more inappropriate propositions there than I ever had in a bar, and I blocked spiders right quick once I figured out what was up. Hopefully AOL will do the same, and so will its users!
:)

[amznVibe]

I take it that livejournal blocks via robots.txt or "noarchive" and not via IP blocking? I guess that can give some tiny bit of comfort though it's a false security, lots of smaller engines just ignore those requests. I mean if you don't want it read, obviously don't put it on the web - there are private journal programs out there.

I don't mean to be a hypocrite as I have found many an interesting topic, discussions, and bug fixes via blogs. I have my own, and I read a few others daily. But I just can't imagine how all that AOL chatter is NOT going to hurt the quality of my searches, etc. I mean just remember what AOL chat rooms are like, or their forums. Now envision their blogs.