Doc Searls Weblog

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Preferring BlogWorld to Flogworld

I’ll be at Blogworld Expo in Las Vegas in September. Gotta say that I wouldn’t be going if it didn’t coincide with another obligation in town. But since I’ll be there, I’m interested in seeing if a sharper distinction can be made between blogging and flogging. You can see the split by looking Blogworld’s own promotional jive. On the one hand there’s this…

  …if you want to influence decision makers, sell a product or service, if you want to promote yourself as an industry expert, or build your brand using new media…

And on the other hand there’s the Citizen Journalism Workshop, with a program developed by David Perlmutter, Ph.D. In addition to being the Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and Research at Kansas University’s School of Journalism with a distinguished adacemic pedigree — and a blogger — David is busy doing research on a grant from Knight Foundation to “study the relationship between reading blogs and newspapers”.

Generally speaking, I’ll be a lot more interested in the latter than the former.

Looking forward to seeing some of ya’ll there.

[Later…] I just learned that I might be on a panel. You can guess what I’ll be saying. Though I’ll be listening too.

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2 responses to “Preferring BlogWorld to Flogworld”

  1. Mike Warot Avatar
    Mike Warot

    Doc, I think one of the root causes of the flogworld is the economics of attention. When someone like me posts a photo on their blog, etc… they might get a response from a family member, etc… but that’s it. Because they don’t have a large audience, they never get feedback on anything…. which is discouraging and depressing.

    Guys like to solve problems, we’re taught not to comment on things unless we can solve a problem, or have our 2 cents to throw in to a discussion. This is why we make crappy bloggers, we’re not good at the relationship thing, with lots of feedback.

    We’re also impatient… it takes YEARS to find an audience, we’re used to getting new skills by working hard, the harder we work, the faster we get better…. blogging isn’t like that.

    When you’ve got no traffic, it also doesn’t make sense to put things in separate blogs… so the audience you do have gets a lot of stuff they don’t care about… which discourages them as well. In my own case I’ve realized this and am in the process of separating out my areas of interest into different blogs. Most of them get NO hits on a given day… and one or two every once in a while thanks to random web searches. Is it really worth it?

    Do we have a voice in this bold new world or not? From out here on the long tail, it’s VERY hard to tell.

    I think the #1 thing we can all do is to make it a point to at least leave 1 comment per day on someone’s person blog. Like complements, they only have value if they say something positive, and are true.

    In other words, The love we share, is the love we receive.

    Reply
  2. Rick Calvert Avatar
    Rick Calvert

    Thanks for the link Doc, and we are very glad to have you joining us this year.

    Personally I am with you and prefer the blogging for passion vs. blogging for business purposes but we realize there are numerous communities and nuances to the Blogosphere. For our event to represent the entire Blogosphere we need all of those different forms of content creators there.

    We are particularly proud to have Professor Perlmutter and his peers be a part of the event this year.

    Thanks again and….

    Blog on!
    Rick Calvert, CEM
    CEO & Co-founder
    BlogWorld & New Media Expo

    Reply

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