Chapter 1: "the Origins of Social Media," in the New Influencers, pp.1-14
- Article focuses on the power of blogging using the nation-wide issue of cancelling people's AOL accounts. It was unique for its time and quickly accessed a very wide audience from some individual's experience. A new medium became mainstream (i.e. like the tipping point).
- There are 5X as many readers of blogs as there are writers. I think that is interesting based on the time it was written. I assume this has changed dramatically since that timeframe (more blogs and potentially more readers).
- Blogging provides easy access to a wide audience immediately after posting. It enables people to become powerful contributors to the web in a short period of time. Almost challenges books (curious if there are any novels now written in blog form).
- There are four different formats - online diaries, topical blogs, advocacy blogs and link blogs
- Audiences must have a strong tie to the content in order for advertisers to see a brand value from the audience to market there
I think it is interesting that Blogger was acquired by Google. Google optimizes its advertising revenue based on search. By owning a blog company, it can package its search history of an individual user and combine it with a viewer's interests in order to paint a full advertising picture of the particular viewer. This is very valuable in online marketing and is no surprise to me that Blogger has become the most dominant blogging platform since the Google acquisition.
Good summary of the chapter. Your observation about Google acquiring Blogger is interesting in view of the recent launch of Google +, the competitor to Facebook. Google cannot scan many of the Facebook pages and thus is being shut out of a lot of web content.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, I believe your problem with accessing materials is due to your browser settings. When you click on a video or link, the browser will ask in some cases if "you only want to access secure sites." Your answer should be "no". If you say yes, then you will not be able to access many of the sites. Once you set this preference, you must close the browser to reverse it.
Frank