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Might be a bit early, but pretty soon issues surrounding marketing and utilizing blogs for web related stuff (traffic generating, ecommerce, content, etc) will be very very important.
I think would have to impliment a tag to stop spamming ;-)
lol
yeh please add 1 I always have questions about blogs
[webmasterworld.com...]
Of course they're a fad, how could it possibly be denied?
Fads are transient and blogs are here to stay. (imo)
But regardless of the longevity of blogs, their link pop value could be transient. The search engines didn't just fall off the turnip truck; surely they know wassup. What then, eh?
[webmasterworld.com...]
And having thought about this some more, I stand corrected about my previous comments.
Sure, blogs are a "fad" now, and being heavily capitalized on to some extent, both well and poorly, but one that won't totally pass away any more than personal homepages have passed away. I've always loved personal homepages, and still do to this day, similarly to why I've loved online forum communities. Forums are a means of dynamic, interactive communication among people, while a well-done, legitimate blog can get into more depth on a personal level and give insight into a person's thoughts and beliefs, much as personal homepages do. There's a sense of connectedness with them, just on a different type of level.
There are actually people out there who have set up what amounts to being intended to be a "forum" site and called it a blog for the type of exposure, promotion and self-promotion that's possible with a blog but not with a forum, but I consider that to be a cowardly and fraudulent bait-and-switch tactic to avoid calling it a forum for various reasons that have no need of being spelled out. But that's a different story from the genuine thing done as a means of honest, personal self-expression.
Quite frankly and on a very personal level, what keeps me coming back and remaining attached to an online forum community is a sense of connectedness with members within the community. With a solid community there's always a steady, solid core group of members who somehow seem to set the tone and make it into a comfortable "neighborhood" much as our local shopkeepers and neighbors do where we live. There's a sense of relatedness and bonding that develops over time. It takes people - and communicating with people - to accomplish that, and in that respect it happens on an emotional and subjective level rather than an objective one.
A similar thing can happen with blogs we choose to continue to re-visit, identifying with the thoughts and writings of the owner/author - just on a different level. But it's still establishing some type of relatedness, so I see it as a type of communal relationship, though not nearly in the same way as with forums.
I'm not sure it would warrant a separate forum so I certainly have no opinion on that, but it's possible that there are aspects of blogs that haven't yet been examined to their fullest, particularly with regard to site stickiness and community-building issues.
