Is Blog a Four-Letter word?

About a week ago I was in a meeting with an executive of a global business-to-consumer brand. He snickered and said, “Half the company would want to write a blog if we let them.”

It made me think, quite often I see clients and prospects cringe at the very thought of blogs. In a way I cringe, too. Several years ago I wrote a piece predicting that blogs would be so popular that advertisers would solicit bloggers for advertising opportunities. Many of my counterparts thought I was wrong — and many bloggers cranked out blog after blog calling me a capitalist and then some.

Here we are a few years later, and guess what? According to Technorati:

· The blogosphere is now 70 million Weblogs wide.

· About 120,000 new blogs are created each day; 1.4 new blogs are created every second.

· There are 1.5 million posts per day, with 17 posts made every second.

According to Wikipedia, a blog is a Web site where entries are made and displayed in a reverse chronological order. This simple concept has caused a ruckus. Why? Is it because anyone can create a blog and say what they want to say when they want to say it? If that’s the case, then I can see why corporations would want to limit or prohibit employees from blogging while being representatives of the company. For many companies it would prove to be too much of a risk. I won’t expand on the corporate side of things as I’ve covered that before.

On the other hand, journalists are starting to look to bloggers for insight. Go figure. Think breaking news for a moment. Also think raw truth. In this day and age there’s typically a blogger who bangs out his or her story before the news ever crafts its spin and writers perfect and fine-tune their words.

CNet’s News.com just did a story on students at Virigina Tech blogging about their tragic experience. A blogger posted a story of his girlfriend getting shot and surviving the massacre. In no time at all NPR, CBS Newsworld and MTV News tried to contact him after seeing his LiveJournal page.

Journalists are going to sites like YouTube, Digg and Flickr to get up-to-the-minute comments, photos and videos of what’s happening. Ask many and they’ll tell you these environments have quickly become primary new sources. Of course social networking sites, blogs and the like are vulnerable and often questionable. Aren’t most sources? Although it speeds up the ability to get the word out, we must fact-check the old-fashioned way.

We now live in a world with blurred lines between fact and fiction. Opinion versus fact also gets to be a grey area. For instance, how would you find a particular restaurant? Most likely you’d ask a friend or colleague. Many of them have already formed an opinion because they “Just read about it… someplace… and heard it was great.”

All of this has spawned a relatively new term called citizen journalism. Simply put, it’s user-generated content. Citizens play an active role in observing, reporting, posting an accounting for the world around them.

MSNBC even has a Citizen Journalists Report on its site, clad with MSNBC logos.

A recent study done for the PewCenter and Associated Press Managing Editors found that, “Forty-five percent of all editors surveyed say that their newsrooms use the tools and techniques of civic journalism. Sixty-six percent say they either embrace the label or like the philosophy and tools, suggesting that there are even more practitioners.”

So as you can see, we live in an online world of new buzzword after buzzword. Because of this, has the word blog become a four-letter word? Not to mention, are CJ and UGC now the hot shorthand acronyms that sound more credible? Are these trends? Well, this writer thinks it’s just the beginning of many platforms that will come about where you, me and anyone we know can say what they want, when they want to, online.

By Seana Mulcahy
Courtesy of http://www.mediapost.com