What Is The Blogosphere?

In an interview this week the Grand Madame of Madison Avenue and uber-boss of Ogilvy, Shelly Lazarus, spoke about current client queries noting that, among other things, brands wanted to, "know how to deal with the blogosphere."  Remembering that the type of clients that Lazarus talks to are super-senior grand fromages of their own, this comment bears scrutiny.  First of all, what is meant by 'the blogosphere' these days?  People who use blogs you fool, I hear you cry.  Well, while that may be technically correct, it is in increasingly misleading.  The term blog lost any precise definition sometime ago as people used it variously to describe websites, forums, social networks, Twitter, Flickr, del.icio.us, YouTube and mostly just people doing stuff online.  On occasion this was overlaid with a mysterious sect of folk called 'bloggers' who were viewed as troublemaking, angry, mischevious loners trapped in a strange echo chamber of their own making.  Then, further confusion was added to the blogosphere when professional journalists started using Wordpress et al in anger, bringing huge media brands into what had previously been a lively coffee morning for the world's geeks.  In a time when most Facebook profiles probably see more action than your average blog site, and the idea of sharing your life online, for some demographics at least, isn't weird but just what you do when you get up in the morning, it's unwise for clients to talk about 'the blogosphere'.  Instead, they should be relieved that they can drop the techie references and strange language and revisit the blogosphere as something they know all about.  Yes, it may be a new style of networked organisation and an ever-evolving environment.  But the blogosphere is driven by something they are completely familiar with.  People.

Comments

[neilperkin]

Great point James. The word 'blog' has got overused and underdefined e.g. there's a lot of professionally produced content which is effectively column pieces with a comments section at the end - it's called a blog but there is little interaction, reach out, or community to it.

[James Cherkoff]

Thanks Neil, indeed, best to just forget about the technology itself and focus on what people are doing with it. Terms like 'the blogosphere' just get in the way of that.