"We have to convince journalists that the consumer owns the story," says Dan Bradley, vice president of broadcast news at Media General and former news director of WFLA-TV.
"Blogging, I firmly believe, is the premier emergent marketing-brandbuilding-lovemarkcreating tool of our times! It is the premier way to have intimate-engaging-informative-WOWing 'conversations' with Clients and prospects!"
We Media : How audiences are shaping the future of news and information, American Press Institute,
September 2003
(English and Espagnol)
Outline
Blogs : characteristics, history, examples
RSS : characteristics, history, examples
Thoughts on diffusion of innovation
Step-by-step: subscribing to RSS feeds
Step-by-step: reading an RSS feed
Conclusion and crystal ball
Blog Characteristics
Reverse chronological journaling (format)
Regular, date-stamped entries (timeliness)
Links to related news articles, documents, blog entries within
each entry (attribution)
Archived entries (old content accessible)
Links to related blogs (blogrolling)
RSS or XML feed (ease of syndication)
Passion (voice)
Media-centric Blog History
1999: Poynter starts "MediaNews" blog
1999: Dan Gillmor starts blogging at SJMN
2004: Blog universe estimated at 5 million
2004: Pew Internet & American Life (spring)
11% Net users have read blogs
2-7% have created blogs (2.4 - 8.4 million bloggers)
2005: BBC starts podcasts; Pew says 6 million Americans
have listened to one
2005: Technorati monitors 12+ million RSS feeds
Blogs v. Mass Media
Mass Media
Capital and labor-intensive
Geographically distinct
Services like AFP, Reuters, AP provide content ... but
it has historically been
packaged in a "local" medium (newspaper, radio, TV)
Blogging
Not capital-intensive
Influence rests on the Internet distributed network that
removes the geographic barrier (space)
The Internet also removes barrier of time (asynchronous
communication)
What is Journalism?
Journalism is "our day book, our collective diary, which records
our common life. That which goes unrecorded goes
unpreserved ... The creation and preservation of collective
memory..." is the practice of journalism.
- James W. Carey
By this definition, "blogging" is a form of journalism.
Participatory Journalism
Facilitated by social software (eg, blogs, RSS, wikis) and
propogated via social networks
Characterized by expanded two-way communication between
media and readers.
With blogging, reader becomes author and author (journalist)
becomes reader, ending the one-to-many model of
communication.
"Having a settled spec is something RSS has needed for a
long time. The purpose of this work is to help it become a
unchanging thing, to foster growth in the market that is
developing around it, and to clear the path for innovation in
new syndication formats."
- Dave Winer
RSS Readers
With RSS 2.0 spec, developers were no longer shooting at moving
target
Examples:
Pluck launched in 2003, turns MSIE into a reader
Privately funded by two firms capitalized at $4+ billion;
cNet editor's choice in July 2004
My Yahoo! first quarter 2005
Microsoft unveiled the MSIE 7.0 RSS reader interface at
Gnomedex
the end of June 2005
About.com makes
it even easier, adding Yahoo to the mix (it's a two-click subscription
process).
Otherwise, right-click the Orange "RSS" Logo ... and copy the link to the
clipboard. The filename may end in .xml or .rdf . This will put
you at the same stage as the BBC subscribe process. Now you have
to paste this URL into your reader.
