Reposted from my personal blog (I thought it fit here too):
Noah Brier: Another blog that wasn't.
Ahh, the marketers are starting blogs without realizing why blogs have power.
To really understand this you need to go back to the depression days of 2001. The days when Evan Williams (co-founder of Pyra, the guys who started Blogger.com) was broke and looking like he'd go bankrupt. The days when UserLand was quickly running out of money (and did, under my watch). The days back when Ben and Mena Trott couldn't get a job. No one had any use for a cute couple who could write Perl scripts.
Other factors? Corporate scandals were rocking the land. Worldcom. Tyco. The bubble had burst and had exposed folks who were taking advantage of the system.
So, what do out-of-work web designers and developers do? They built systems to let them spout off. And then they used those systems to do just that and fight back.
Remember the site we all used to read every day to find out which companies were gonna lay off more people? Yeah, it has a vulgar name but 2001 was a vulgar time.
Another factor? The ascendancy of Google. Google's algorithm used inbound links. They treat inbound links as so important that my NetMeeting site is still listed two years after being turned off.
What's the best way to get inbound links? You guessed it right: change your content often. What's the best way to change your content often? Blog, baby, blog.
Blogging and Google were made for each other.
Another factor? The ascendancy of RSS. Why was RSS important? It let connectors watch a large number of sites. It let people have relationships with sites ON THEIR TERMS. No more email mailing lists. No more writing rules to stick newsletters into folders. No more giving our email addresses to marketers who'd then turn around and sell our addresses for 8 cents a name. No more spam. (Seriously, I still get spam from email newsletters I signed up for in 1998 because they make a lot of money selling email addresses to other companies).
But it goes back to those dark days of 2001. We were gonna take back the world from corporations. From mainstream media. From the government. We were gonna tell the world what we thought.
So, today, we've evolved a few "best practices" out of those dark days. No comments? Lame. That tells us you don't think we're important enough to listen to. No RSS? Lame. That tells us you don't want connectors/sneezers/influentials to talk about you and you don't want anyone to have a relationship with you on THEIR TERMS. No real human author? That tells us that you aren't passionate or authoritative about your product and you aren't willing to get over your fear of talking with real customers.
So, go ahead. Be lame. Make my day. At least we'll get another vulgar Gapingvoid cartoon out of it.
