2008 April archive at franticindustries - web 2.0, social networking, IT technology trends.

The answer: this. Marc Andreessen is not in it for the money; he’s not trying to be a journalist, and he certainly doesn’t care about posting frequency too much. But, he knows a lot about certain topics (in this case, he gives a very thorough MSFT-YHOO analysis, a must-read if you’re interested in the subject) and he writes about them with ease and authority that very few journalists can hope to achieve.

What’s the secret? It’s simple: a good blog is a guy/girl writing about a topic he/she knows a lot about. The value of such a blog is in the fact that no general-purpose (or even specialized) journalist can come close to the level of knowledge, depth and passion a blogger can reach. Of course, not all bloggers are that good; in fact, most aren’t. But if you want an example of a really, really good blog, in the purest sense of the word, you’ve got one right here.

In a sense, a good blog relates to a bigger media publication in a similar way as a small, specialized IT magazine relates to a daily - it doesn’t cover everything, but it focuses on a specific audience and goes much more in-depth. Good blogs usually deal with their topics with fanatical attention to detail, and that’s what makes them interesting. Pick a topic - any topic, however narrow - and there’s a blogger out there covering all aspects of it.

There’s also the question of what category a blog should fall into - is it a commercial site which earns money from ad revenue, just like any magazine, or must it stay a non-profit affair, with the blogger offering his/her content freely and forgetting about making any money off it? I say: if the blog is great, who cares? I remember a recent article by Louis Gray who says that most bloggers don’t deserve any ad revenue. I agree with some of his points, but some of his economic logic is flawed. If I were an advertiser with a $10.000 budget, I’d rather have my ad shown on 100 small blogs than once on NYTimes. In this sense, bloggers - good ones - deserve not only respect for going deeper than anyone else, but they also deserve some ad revenue.

What Louis aims at, though, although he’s not quite clear about it, are the blogs written by people who don’t have anything to say. I agree: there’s a lot of those, and they all suck. But keep an eye on the ones that are good; they’re definitely worth your time, if you’re a reader, and money, if you’re an advertiser.

The debate on whether printed newspapers and magazines are going to die out or not comes up fairly often. I’m not going to into pro or con mode right now, but I will share a thought that comes to me every time I write an article for a paper mag (I do, now less than before, write for Croatia’s leading IT magazine Bug).

I’ve written thousands of articles (most not in English, mind you) for paper media in the 6 years I’m in this business, and frankly, it feels like wasted time. Unless you’re an avid collector of these magazines, which most people aren’t these days, you can’t read these articles anymore. They’re lost in dusty basements, and forgotten archives, and most of them are - for all practical purposes - non existant.

By contrast, the stuff I’ve written on this blog, however casual, is available for everyone to read, indexed by search engines, saved on social media sites such as Digg and Delicious, linked to by other blogs - in short, it’s there.

And I won’t even go into the financial implications; the articles that went out in print, well, I got paid for them once, and that was it. With the small amount of advertising I have on this blog, my old thoughts are still making me money. We’re not talking huge amounts of money here, but it’s enough for all my monthly coffee needs. Whenever I drink coffee, from now to forever, it’s been paid by this blog.

It’s funny that many of my colleagues and business associates still value the stuff I’ve done for print mags more than the stuff I’ve written online. Many of them don’t even know I have a blog. Little do they know that in fact, if I had started, 6 years ago, to spend my energy entirely on my online endeavors, I’d probably have done better for myself.

I still love print magazines, I always did. I love having that shiny copy of Wired in my hands, even though it’s 90% ads and 10% articles. Today, most printed publications also archive most, if not all, of their stuff online. But let’s face it; today, if it’s not online, it’s dead. Print is just an afterthought, and - unless we see some real breakthroughs in e-paper soon - I expect most of it to fall into the same category as vinyl records and wrist watches; a bit of cool, a dash of retro, a pinch of exclusivity, but not really a necessity.