BuzzMachine

The media pundit's pundit. Written by NYC insider Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine covers news, media, journalism, and politics.

Dander up

6 comments on Dander up

Dander up
: Jimmy Gutterman is trying to steal a trick from Andrew Orlowski — that is, baiting bloggers as a pathetic ploy for attention — with a piece at Business 2.0 that poo-poos blogs.

Several years into the phenomenon, even with solid tools like Blogger available, the blogging community is still, for the most part, self-absorbed and elitist. There’s only minimal evidence that anyone is using the blog format as a business tool.

Come on, Jimmy. It’s just a publishing tool. It’s just content. And, yes, I can name others making money — and other big companies using weblogs (start here). Maybe you’re just reading the wrong weblogs; you’re concentrating in your piece just on the founding bloggers when the field has exploded in every direction. Or you can’t get the hang of writing one. But you sound just like an old radio guy who thought this television thang would never pay off. [via I Want Media]

: Jimmy says weblogs have been around for six years, and so he judges their popularity on that time scale. Well, Filo T. Pharnsworth came up with TV a long time before it became popular. I’m not ready to start the clock on weblogs yet. September 11 brought on more writers. The war brought on more readers. AOL et al will bring in the masses. It’s still just the beginning.

6 responses to “Dander up”

  1. Anil Avatar
    Anil

    Interesting thing about Jimmy’s background is that he’s a consultant, not a journalist. If he were a journalist, I bet he’d have researched a few examples, and I could have given him, oh, about 100 companies off the top of my head who are using business blogs.

  2. Rafat Avatar
    Rafat

    the poor guy IS a journalist, but he’s really desperate in this one, as jeff says. it is a sorry excuse for an attempt to get controversial…
    and pray, wasn’t Media Unspun (and even Grok) a blog…a newsletter, yes, but blog ethic beneath all of it.

  3. Frank Patrick Avatar
    Frank Patrick

    Two addresses for Jimmy…
    http://www.up2speed.com/archives/2003/07/18/business_weblogs_the_big_list/
    …a list of “business blogs”
    and…
    http://www.focusedperformance.com/blogger.html
    …my “business blog,” through which my writings on project management and organizational effectiveness have garnered me attention and leads that are as serious and significant as any that I have been able to attract pre- or extra-blogging.

  4. Mike Masnick Avatar
    Mike Masnick

    What’s even worse is that Jimmy knows about business blogs that make money. How do I know? I’ve told him about them.
    A few months back in a different column (back when you could read Business 2.0 for free) he asked for examples of business blogs, and I told him about how Techdirt Corporate Intelligence has been making money for years by blogging.
    The thing is, among the many missed points in his article is that it doesn’t matter if most people don’t currently know what a blog is. I’ll be honest: the vast majority of our clients wouldn’t know what a blog was if one walked right up to them and smacked them in the face. In fact, that’s exactly what does happen, because they rely on our private blogs every day – but have no idea they’re called blogs.
    That’s the point. It’s not the focus on “blogs” that matter, but what the blogs let you do. In our case, they let us keep our clients informed, making them better at what they do. So, I don’t really care about the self-referential-ness of blogs or that people don’t know what they do.
    I (and everyone else at Techdirt) know what they do, and we use that to make our clients happy, and allow us to make money blogging… no matter what Jimmy Guterman has to say about it.
    Mike

  5. Chuck Olsen Avatar
    Chuck Olsen

    Blogs quietly rush by Gutterman, like a river routes around a fallen tree.

  6. Tagore Smith Avatar
    Tagore Smith

    Hmm, I dunno… I don’t agree with the tone of it- it seems to imply that the fault is with the blog format. But it does seem to me that business has been slow to capitalize on what the internet does well in the past- it’ll be interesting to see if big business starts to get it a little more with blogs. I’m inclined to think that the big payoff with blogs, and other easy to use publishing tools is going to be in inward facing rather than outward facing applications.
    I work for a very distributed company- in fact I’ve only met my boss face to face about 5 times in almost a year, and I’ve met him more often than I have met any other co-worker. But we’re awfully small- IM and email (and the occasional conference call) work for us, because it’s not a problem if every full-time employee in the company is cc’ed on every important piece of correspondence. Email is the one thing that almost every decent sized business has really capitalized on, and I would be very interested to see research into how much of the surprising productivity gains we’ve seen over the last few years are directly attributable to it.
    There are a number of interesting models for bnoth publishing and organizing information that have come about outside of corporate America in the last few years, that could be useful to it. Before the blog there was the wiki- I remember that someone tried to commercialize wikis a few years ago, and it doesn’t seem to have been a raging success. And despite the very interesting work people have done on various types of “intelligent” knowledge management systems in the last decade, they’ve seen very narrow penetration.
    Seems to me that a big business opportunity lurking out there is for someone to design a good suite of integrated browser based tools including those ideas, and maybe an easy to use front-end to an rdbms (filemaker or access in a browser, but with a more robust backend) along with webhosting (and good publishing tools for that as well) and email at a price that made it attractive to small and medium-sized businesses.