Why Does Blogging Work?

I gave a brief presentation on the Friday of the SSP Top Management Roundtable, talking about why blogging works. Here is a brief overview of what I had to say:

• There is a media source that is known for polemicism, sporadic coverage, mimicry, factual errors, superficial coverage, and cronyism. It’s the mainstream media. Against this, accountable, linked, and often long-form writing like that in the better blogs does well.
• Blogs are growing, from a traffic standpoint, at 4x the rate of traditional media sites.
• Blogging is the signature written form of our age.
• Blogging reveals hidden expertise, and unearths experts with perspective and access that the mainstream media can never replicate.

These are just a few comments from my presentation. I’m a convert, as this blog and the Scholarly Kitchen show. Just look at the expertise we’ve unearthed on both blogs.

What are you waiting for, expert who is reading this?

From SSP, A Look at Authors Ascendant – Part 4

Beyond the Book’s Chris Kenneally Interviews Chuck Richard
According to the old Russian proverb, where there are crumbs, there will be mice. On the Web, content mice — that’s us, folks! — feast on information and leave trails revealing their interests.

Building on that basic observation, Outsell Inc. Vice President and Lead Analyst Chuck Richard suggested on Thursday that publishers can track these trails for important leads on how to build their online businesses. In a short chat following his talk with Beyond the Book‘s Chris Kenneally, Chuck also cautions that re-thinking content leads inevitably to re-thinking staff and management assignments.

Interview with David Perlmutter

David Perlmutter is a professor at the School of Journalism & Mass Communications, University of Kansas. He received his BA and MA from the University of Pennsylvania and his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. He is the author or editor of seven books on political communication and persuasion.

He has also written several dozen research articles for academic journals as well as more than 150 essays for U.S. and international newspapers and magazines. He has been interviewed by most major news networks and newspapers, from the New York Times to CNN and ABC and most recently, The Daily Show .

MP3 File

Interview with Fabien Savenay

Fabien Savenay is the the Senior Vice President for Sales and Marketing at Seed Media Group. He participated in a panel called Editing, Branding, and Authority: What’s the Publisher’s Role?

As SVP, Sales & Marketing, Fabien Savenay directs company-wide sales and marketing activities since 2005.

Prior to joining Seed he was Global Head of Advertising & Sponsorship at Nature Publishing Group, as well as Publisher of Naturejobs, a classified career resource for professional scientists that won an EPpy award for Best Internet Classified Service under his leadership. Prior to that he owned the advertising agency Es Media in Paris.

Fabien was born in France and educated at the Grand Ecole de Communication et Marketing (Groupe INSEEC) in Paris and at the London Business School.

I caught up with Fabien by the fountain at the Opening Reception last night.

MP3 File

Interview with Terry Hulbert

Terry Hulbert is the Director of Business Development at the American Institute of Physics. We talked about how AIP is exploring social media and web technologies from two points of view: as a publisher, and as a content host.

MP3 File

From SSP, A Look at Authors Ascendant – Part 3

Susan Kesner Interviews Audrey Melkin
Taking the SSP TMR podcast microphone in hand next is Susan Kesner of Copyright Clearance Center and SSP’s immediate past president.

Sue speaks about the conference “takeaways so far” with Audrey Melkin, Atypon’s director of business development. Among other points, the two agree that scholarly publishing has a lot to learn from its B2B and trade publishing “cousins.”

From SSP, A Look at Authors Ascendant – Part 2

Bloggers vs. Journalists?
When blogging emerged in 2004 during the last presidential election cycle, many traditional journalists and media executives reacted skeptically – one going so far as to suggest that bloggers were to the media what fleas are to a dog.

Veteran reporter and Wall Street Journal health industry blogger Scott Hensley remembers those days, and four years later, looks ahead with enthusiasm to a world of co-dependency for bloggers and journalists.

From SSP, A Look at Authors Ascendant – Part 1

Where Blogging Meets Publishing
In Philadelphia over the next two days, at a gathering of top editors, authors and publishers, the Society for Scholarly Publishing will reckon with a sea change in the media ecosphere: Authors today can leverage incredibly robust, stable, and effective publishing technology to reach their audiences – so where does this leave publishers?

At this morning’s keynote address, David Perlmutter, University of Kansas journalism professor and author of “Blog Wars,” provided a succinct history of blogs and linked their rise to popular distrust of and dissatisfaction with traditional media.

What Is “Production Quality”?

An interesting conversation has come up at the SSP Top Management Roundtable: “What now constitutes ‘production quality’ for video, photography, etc.?”

YouTube and cellphone photos and videos of news events have become quite common, and people spend hours watching videos that professionals would normally dismiss as amateur, and not production-ready. The adoption of non-traditional TV viewing alternatives (Apple TV, Hulu.com, and others) have also changed the game. On-demand and iTunes program purchases, along with small displays that are immersive like on the iPhone and other devices make the question even more thorny.

Like many things in the apomediated online space, users define what is good enough. Professional standards can be a point of pride, but they aren’t the only standards, nor are they any longer perhaps the prevailing standards.

Half of Users Click on Ads

A surprising finding — half of online users click on at least one online ad per week.

And people say this doesn’t work?

Really . . .