So many people are jumping on the bandwagon of explaining the whole blogspotting, so I felt I had to add my two cents too. Let me offer a different view from all the “wow cool” stories: it’s overrated! Just like the other trends we’ve seen pass over the years. Remember the Bonzi Buddy, those cool big free first Tuesday parties, or this one: PointCast and their push technology .. That last one actually disappeared … click here for the story of their demise. It’s not a nice story, I can tell you. But they were hyped as ‘the next big thing’ back then too.
I do hope that it goes differently for Blogger, but I’m always cautious of things being blown totally out of proportion and heralded as ‘the next big thing’. So people can now take their views and nonsense unbridled to the web… so what? I’ll visit some if I want to have a good laugh, or read some interesting viewpoints… but that’s about it. “Reshaping contemporary media?” Hell no, I’ll still go to the CNN and BBCNews websites to know what’s happening in Iraq, not to Saddam’s Blogpage (click it, it actually exists).
And it is not an earth-shattering new thing: it’s just existing technology repacked in a shiny new wrapping with a big ribbon around it. The technology to update webpages like this has been around for some time, just not everyone thought about using it like that… well, some people did: news sites who let their journalists update the site using web-bases forms, and let people react to these articles. Thanks to Blogger now every man and his dog can get their stuff on the internet (and judging from some writings, some dogs have done just that).
Let’s make some controversial statements here: I don’t think blogger is a strategic inflection point. (if you don’t know what a strategic inflection point is, click to purchase “Only the Paranoid Survive” , a good book about recognizing, overcoming and even profiting from the inevitable ground shifts in commercial life that, by changing the fundamentals of the business environment, shake established enterprises to the core and raise newcomers to power and wealth (quite a mouthful, huh?). And for those to lazy to go there, a strategic inflection point is like a paradigm shift: a moment in time when circumstances shifted on you and you have a choice to make between two alternatives. At that moment two alternatives are very close to each other but in time they will take you very far apart, they will diverge. That moment in time is a strategic inflection point. Are we there with blogger? Is this the start of a whole new thing? I don’t think so … but then again, time will prove who’s right.
My advise: ride the wave, but don’t forget your Mr. Zogs sexwax. 😉
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