In conversations with non-blogging friends and with people I don’t know well (at social networking events and job interviews, for instance) I’ve had to explain blogs and RSS. In the last little while, though, that hasn’t really been the case. Of course living here in Silicon Valley most people are tech-oriented even if they don’t work for a computer company.
Today The Big Guy and I had coffee with a friend who is setting up a site to promote her (very local) landscaping design business. Of course a blog will be the core content management tool. So that’s on the tiny end of the scale and on the other we have the New York Times buying About.com and (through one of it’s subsidiaries) BostonDirtDogs. Frank Rich, eulogizing Hunter Thompson, calling Doc Gonzo a blogger before there were blogs (or a web).
Scoble ripping a marketing team in his own company for setting up a new website without including an RSS feed. The team, taking the criticism in stride, promptly adds one. Coverville, previewing one possible future radio replacement, makes a deal with ASCAP and BMI to become the first(?) licensed music podcaster and immediately gets covered in Time.
Scoble teams up with Shel Israel to write what is probably the first big (that is, hyped) business blogging how-to book. Practicing what they preach, part of their deal was that the publisher start blogging himself and another is that the duo will write the book in public, posting chapters to the blog and incorporating feedback from the comments.
Dan Gillmor quit a pretty cushy, high visibility gig with the San Jose Mercury News to go out on his own and start a company (still in stealth mode so details are thin) to provide tools for citizen journalists. ABC News named bloggers People of the Year for 2004.
As they say at Club Med, it’s all good baby.
BillSaysThis 