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April 09, 2005

Blogs versus advertising

What with being boingboinged, slashdotted and spurled in the past few weeks, Jeremy Wagstaff has a fascinating series of posts on his Loosewire blog on the way information gets around, and the commercial implications for blogs.

The posts extend Jeremy's Wall Street Journal column,
[PAID SUB.] which explored the changing dynamics of the Web, and the different characteristics of certain audience segments. Slashdot readers, it seems, have a particularly short attention span. BoingBoingers are more catholic in their tastes, and not shy of commitment.

Part II of the series looks at the way news of the utility of the Clip-n Seal plastic bag got around, and the implications for manufacturers ... and advertisers. Part III explores the way the most enduring - admittedly a highly relative term on the Internet - blogs are becoming the equivalents of Reader's Digests of the Web.

It also raises the topic of Sturgeon's Law, which, we're delighted to report decrees that

90 per cent of anything is crap

Well, actually science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon said that 90 per cent of science fiction was trash, but extended that to "90 per cent of everything is trash". The other 10 per cent are anything but. As a measure of the relevance of blogs it's probably statistically sound, although, what with the fact that at last count there were 20 million of them, it's difficult to be completely accurate.

The other thing that's possibly of interest only to working journalists: Jeremy is something of a pioneer in the application of Internet Messaging as a great interviewing tool.

Posted by cw at April 9, 2005 12:10 PM