"Eight percent of internet users, or about 12 million American adults, keep a blog. Thirty-nine percent of internet users, or about 57 million American adults, read blogs," according to a study (pdf) conducted by Pew Internet & American Life Project.
The astounding number of blogs, nearly all of which have been created in the past couple of years, can be attributed to the fact that blogging technology has finally delivered the promise of Internet - it has given an average user on the Internet the ability to self-publish. The self-publishing revolution has not been limited to blogs. It extends to places like Myspace, Flickr and Youtube – who have lowered the bar to "publish" content to the world.
From Blogs to Better Content
Popularity of blogs has led to creation of an enormous amount of content. This in turn has spawned a home industry devoted to finding ways to sift through the content that has led to the evolution of things like tagging, "digging," RSS, blog aggregators, and edited multiple contributor driven sites like Huffingtonpost and Blogcritics. Among all the innovations, it is the last innovation I am particularly excited about for it has the capability of creating robust, well written, independent online magazines. For these sites to be able to compete with the 'establishment magazines' like Newsweek, they need to rethink their business and creative plan. Most importantly, they need to focus on the following issues:
1. Redesign and repackage: For sites like Blogcritics to move to the next level, they need to pay more attention to web design and packaging of their stories. To accomplish this, they may want to assign producers for the home page and beyond. Producers would be in charge of creating a layout for the home page and choosing the news stories and the multimedia elements displayed there. By assigning more resources on design and slotting multimedia elements, the sites can add to the user experience.
There are twin problems with implementing this feature: labor and coming up with graphics. Blogcritics portrays itself as a destination for top writers and hence fails to attract talent in other areas critical to developing an online news business including web and multimedia design and development.
Blogcritics and other sites similar to it should try to reach out to other segments of professionals (like graphic designers, photo editors) needed to produce a quality magazine. They may also want to invest programming resources in creating templates to display photo galleries and other multimedia features. In addition, these sites may want to tap into the user base of sites like Flickr and Youtube so as to expand the magazine to newer vistas like news delivered via audio or video.
Article comments
1 - larry
i like your new format! once i figured out how to navigate it was fun. i am glad to see some of the worn out blogs dissappear