HW 16: Five Pillars

In the chapter "Blogs: Humanizing the Face of Corporate America", Robert Scoble talks about the benefits blogging has to offers to corporate companies. Mainly, that it sets up a more intimate relationship with the customers, and a better understanding of what they want. And knowing your customers' needs will help you design products that will sell better. And we're all about the bottom line...
To really take full advantage of blogs, Scoble instructs companies to "remember that five things made blogging hot" (Kline and Burstein). He refers to these things as "The Five Pillars of Conversational Software".

ONE: Ease of publishing.
The first appeal to blogging, as it hit mainstream, was that anyone could do it. You could set up an account and start putting in your two cents on almost any topic, and exchange dialog with anyone in the world. So essentially, blogging could possibly reach a wide variety of customers, in all sorts of demographics.
TWO: Discover ability.
When you check out one blog, you will ultimately be lead to about ten other ones, pertaining in a similar topic. As long as you word your tags right, more people will come across your site (product) that didn't even mean to. Companies should take full advantage of this: the networking paths are already set, it's just a matter of placing your ads on the right one to guarantee you the most customers.
THREE: Cross-site conversations.
Word of mouth was the original way for products to really become known. Now with the Internet, it's like having a world-sized coffee shop, or water cooler for people to stand around and just chat up their latest purchases. Like the second pillar, companies don't need to do much. Just put their information out there, and let it run its course.
FOURTH: Permalinking
If someone finds a post they find interesting, they can isolate it, and pull it up later on. This is really good for companies, because now the information can easily be re-accessed, granted someone has a computer. They can send that specific article or post to someone else who may be interested.
FIFTH: Syndication
This is the core of blogging. It's the exchange of ideas, posts, pictures, etc sent into the gigantic social network that blogging has become.

If companies fully utilized these five pillars, they can efficiently get their product out there, and make the most money using little to no sources.

HW 17: "CCC': The LiveJournal For Bored '30s Housewives"

I came across this post on the "Jezbel" blog. In the article they talk about the loneliness and guilt for feeling lonely that housewives experience. There are "intelligent women who found themselves married and confined to their homes, not exactly fulfilled by their roles as housewives and mothers". Women got together and formed Cooperative Correspondence Club, a group of about twenty four members who put out one copy of a magazine every two weeks. In the magazine, women talk about the monotony of their daily routine, and express their desires for something more stimulating than changing diapers and making dinners.
I'm glad I came across this. I believe that this is the Internet and blogging used in a positive way. It's connecting people on a personal level, and giving a group a creative outlet and support that they wouldn't be able to obtain any other way.

I have a pretty optimistic view on the project. Although I don’t think that this is necessarily the solution to the boredom of all housewives worldwide, it’s definitely a good step. However, the writer of the article seems to have a much different feeling about it:

“As cheesy as it sounds, what's fascinating is that this urge, desire -- to bond with other women through the written word, read their stories and secrets, without actually knowing or meeting them -- sounds a lot like what we do right here everyday. Just a moment of sincerity. We'll be back to jaded and superficial before you know it.”

I don’t know if that’s entirely fair. I think she needs to have a little bit more faith in these women, and believe that substance is what they really want, and what they will continue to strive for.

http://jezebel.com/gossip/ladymag-lookback/ccc-the-livejournal-for-bored-30s-housewives-306775.php

HW 14: Denton

In “Take the Obsession, Then Feed It!”, Denton recognizes the power and influence blogging can have on the business world. However, he says it is more of an evolution, than a revolution; that blogging did not “spring up suddenly in the last couple of years… in fact [there have been] some extremely successful independent media sites that have a lot of attributes of weblogs”. (Kline and Burstein 154)

Despite the fact that blogs have the potential to reach millions of people in an efficient, non-costly manner, the task of selecting out of the billions and billions of websites and blogs, both independent and main stream, that targets their particular customers, is an arduous task most large companies are not willing to take on. After all, there are other ways to advertise, that are tried and true.

Indeed blogging is taking communication to another level, but the idea of it completely taking out other forms of media is naïve: Denton has a passive look at the influence the Internet has on the Internet, and I completely agree with him. Although it is true that the main stream media tends to report events at an angle that best serves their investors, they are still the ones on the scene, and reporting first person accounts. So, blogging is just an interpretation of these accounts, and shouldn’t be depended on solely for getting information. To put bluntly, blogging is really an extension of main stream media, rather than a combative, opposing force.

However, something blogging has to offer that main stream media cannot is an opportunity for talented writers to get their word out, since it seems that “mediocre people end up getting jobs” due to “who [they] know and how well [they] can schmooze at parties”. (Kline and Burstein 152) So, blogging offers people a chance to exercise their creative energy and put it out there, and others to benefit; something they couldn’t do before.

To summarize, Denton expressed a lot of the same feelings have towards blogging and the Internet in general: It is simply a tool, not the end-all to human interaction and communication.