500 years of Newspapers – How many years of blogs?

While the blogging “industry” is still in it’s infancy, I wonder if the blogosphere will have the lifespan of a giant tortoise at close to 200 years in captivity or the less than a decade lifespan of the Betamax videocassette.  Will blogs continue to evolve or will they one day follow the newspapers into the world of cold and harsh oblivion>?

Let’s briefly consider the life spans of the newspaper and the blog to begin to look towards the future.

The Roots of Blogging

While there there is no official start date for the blogging revolution, the earliest form of blogging dates back to 1997.  On December 17th 1997, Jorn Barger coined the term “weblog” when he described the list of links on his Robot Wisdom website that “logged” all the Internet sites he visited.  Then in October of 1998, Open Diary launched with software to make reader commenting available to a wide audience.  The software continued to develop and in 2003, with the release of both TypePad and WordPress, blogging began to explode.

Check out the entire blog here at Blogging Tips.

Bedside Blogging – CarePages

Some people blog looking for fame.  Other bloggers are searching for their fortune.  This week I was introduced to a new universe of bloggers – those who blog for support and help as they struggle with a more basic need – the need to be healthy.  CarePages is an online community of millions of people coming together to share the challenges, hopes and triumphs of anyone facing a life changing health event.

I was introduced to CarePages this week by a friend who is in the hospital dealing with a number of side effects from Diabetes.   Upon receiving an invitation to join his blog on CarePages, I signed onto CarePages and within moments I was reading about his situation.  As the nurses gave him updates, he posted the news and when he was released I found out about it via an email from CarePages letting me know about a new posting on his CarePages blog.

Check out the full story here at Blogging Tips

Web 2.0 – Celebrating Failure

Any IT staff person knows the strain and stress that occurs whenever an application or server bites the dust, locks up or otherwise goes down.  User’s scream!  Customers kvetch!  And amidst all the rabble rousing, the IT staff has to get their job done and resolve the issue. However, in the world of Web 2.0, some companies have figured out how to market even the most dire of circumstances.

Check out the full blog at Tech Owl.

Contenture – The Anti-Ad Network

If you want to make money from a blog you have a limited number of options.  The most popular approach is to run ads – typically using an ad network like Google’s AdSense.  Many bloggers also join affiliate programs and post links and banners for those programs – but to the visitor it is just more ads.  You can also charge a subscription fee – but you will have to have some truly unique content to pull that off and also the systems to handle the ecommerce.  So your primary options are to run ads and annoy your visitors or collect money from and annoy your visitors.

Next week, Contenture is launching what they call the “anti-ad network.”  The basic idea is that you would add a subscription component to your blog/website.  You would offer some type of premium benefits to visitors who are signed up with Contenture….

Read the full article at Blogging Tips.

Limits on Employee Social Networking?

Many companies are still deciding whether they need to have a social media presence like a Facebook page, or a Twitter account, or a YouTube channel. But every business needs to realize that, regardless of whether the company is using social media, their employees are already using them, both personally and professionally.

What’s more, the potential repercussions of those employee activities are evolving on a daily basis, while most companies are sitting on personnel policies that are outdated, if they even exist.

Check out the full article at Internet Evolution