I think your point about relevance is pretty on target. Except that relevance isn’t defined by “true” relevance but by what everyone believes to be relevant.

If you don’t have access to the most relevant information, it will never become relevant.

IMO that’s the sad state of gaming the system. Relevance is decided by eyeballs.

Is there still space for the small guys? Yup, you just have to work hard at it.

Interesting reading about your opinions.

I’d love to take you to lunch sometime.

Blogs focused on topic expertise and creative thinking are ones that allow you to build nice niche audiences. These tend to create business and sell, and can be complimented by social rather well.

My Google Reader is like a daily classroom, filled with wicked smart people saying wicked insightful things that are wicked relevant to my daily flow. They aren’t going anywhere.

Plus, I am very involved with my Spirited Woman Blogger Team and feel we are establishing good, informative content through what we do.

Sometimes, I just feel that social media sites have lost control of the content of their sites and therefore their power.

What has always attracted me to blogs has not changed. The ones I like to read are like a highly targeted newspaper written by someone with an attitude I like. If it does not meet these criteria, I won’t read regularly.

I personally write a blog as an online reference center. So when I get the same question about SEO or data structure, or color on a web site, I can point people to an information source and not have to keep repeating myself. I am trying to make time to slowly build and maintain my published knowledge base as questions come into me. I will never be a professional blogger at this rate, but I will always keep the blog.

Social media is for finding out who made out with who last weekend after drinking too much (for me

Be well,
Bob

All this can of course depend on what you are blogging about but for me I have tried to…

Build a voice and become respected
Keep my information relevant and fresh
Get Ideas from the other social sites for postings
Come up with something different
Really reach out to your readers

For myself, many of the social sites are too time consuming and when you have several postings a day (and there are always those few people that seem to run the social sites, ultimately making the site their voice) it becomes too much. That’s my opinion.

If you’re a blogger that is facing the grave but you enjoy what you do, reinvent yourself and your blog. Find your voice, do something different, find the weakness of your competitor and go after it.

Twitter and Facebook is no substitute for great information.

@Jeff – you absolutely nailed it. That’s what underlies Persuasion Architecture – getting to the heart of what matters to your audience, so you don’t have to worry nearly as much about how or when to reach them- they come and find you!

We all want to find that magic bullet for getting our thoughts across and sometimes we get too caught up on the medium rather than looking at the message.

There’s a great book called, “More Work For Mother” that was written by Ruth Schwartz Cowan that talks about how domestic technology didn’t decrease the workload at all: it just changed the expectations involved. I would argue that blog comments are asynchronous. I don’t expect responses to my entries, nor to my comments on other blogs. It’s everything to do with how you use the service. Twitter *can* be used asynchronously, it’s just not nearly as effective as an asynchronous communication method. Why not just use email? Etc.

Interesting stuff. I think I’ll be refining this into a paper for my STS program at Virginia Tech.

@Tom – very interesting read on your blog. I see some similarities between how you describe synchronicity and how MBTI would define introversion/extraversion. As most Introverts prefer time to ponder, they should more often favor asynchronous communication styles. I find it interesting you would classify the mechanisms for interaction based on the speed in which people interact though. For instance, some people comment immediately upon reading a post (blog, in this case) while others mentally form what they want to say first, and then return later to post their thoughts. Totally agreed on the diversification, as I am with sharing @Dr Pete’s sickness of what’s dead!

Blogs are largely asynchronous in their communication style. Throw a bunch of stuff at the wall, see what engages your audience. Twitter’s more synchronous in its style, where you’re playing in near-real time.

But synchronous/asynchronous isn’t the only spectrum. There’s also the narrowband/wideband dichotomy as well. I wrote a bit about this for my blog (yes, I still have one..) that as communications types vary, so too vary who’s involved.

Yes, I definitely read more blogs than ever: web analytics, online marketing, data visualization, etc. All those blogs score high as well on Google…