Eric Scalf has a great read on the transition from journaling to blogging.

I find his discussion of finding your target audience especially compelling. For me, the central difference between writing a journal (using the traditional definition) and a blog is the audience. A journal seems more like the online version of a diary (more on that below). Granted, the fact that it’s online indicates that the writer wants someone to read it. But the structure and the initial thought process is the same as the diary under the mattress: to chronicle your experiences for future reflection. In other words, it’s writing from the outside in.

Journaling is a powerful thing. Many years ago, I read two journals every day, written by people I don’t know. The first, The Semi-Existence of Byron, was written by a guy from Denton, Texas. I really got into his stories and the characters he wrote about. It was a really sad day for me when he quit writing. The link is still in my bookmarks, many years later.

The other was by a woman named (at least on the net) Tracy Lee. She was a photographer, wife and mother. I followed her story until she stopped writing it, around the time her husband graduated from law school.

Those were the two that I read consistently for the longest period of time, but I read others as well.

For a while I read the journal of a lady who was fighting cancer. Ultimately, she lost. Bob Clay and I were so touched by her story that we wrote a song about it.

Later I came across and followed another person’s struggle with cancer. I was sad when her son posted that she had lost her battle.

Heck, I even wrote a five day journal about the last time I saw my mother alive.

So I’m all about journals and the beauty of the personal word. Because they are written from the outside in, journals are generally more powerful on a personal level than blogs.

When blogging, you are writing not from the outside in, but from the inside out. You are adding your voice to a series of conversations about the topics that interest you. It is, by definition and by design, a communal experience.

In other words, while it’s possible for one person, with no interaction with others, to write a journal, I don’t think you can say the same about a blog. Blogs require the interaction that comes from links, comments and cross-blog dialog.

Which mean, simply, that blogs require at least some readers.

And that is why defining your audience is so important. To attract readers more effectively, we need to figure out who were are writing to. Maybe it’s just your friends and family, maybe it’s people who share your hobbies and other interests. Maybe it’s both.

The group can be narrow or fairly broad, but once we define who we’re writing for, we can begin to test our ideas for stories and topics against what we know about our target audience. Because blogs are no different that any other product or service, the more you please your customers, the more customers you will have.

Frank Ahrens of The Washington Post takes his turn today at the latest old media one question meme: has the blog movement peaked?

This is one of those questions where the goal is not to find the exact answer, because the exact answer cannot be found. It’s more about expressing your opinion about the status of the blogging movement and wondering aloud where it’s headed.

Blogging and the Bubble

I think too many people get blogging confused with other troubling memories of days gone by, such as Bubble 1.0 and all the non-companies that made the lesser fools wildly rich and the greater fools more poor back in the nineties. Yes, I think we have a lot of people huffing and puffing beneath Bubble 2.0 in the hopes that a new investing frenzy will permit a second generation of lesser fools to get rich, but that has very little to do with blogging.

For every lesser fool blogging about how the next social bookmarking service is going to change the world, there are two others blogging about how it won’t. Blogging doesn’t discriminate between the absurd and the realistic. And blogging is no more a cause for bubble growth than the pen or keyboard.

So is the Party Over?

I don’t think the blogging movement has peaked and I certainly don’t think it has entered its twilight. I think it’s simply maturing a little. This is about math, not rejection.

When anything new is invented, manufactured and first sold to the public, there’s always a ramp up as the pool of existing customers buy it. Whether it’s a car or a DVD player, millions of people who already travel or watch videos, are out there ready to replace their inferior tools (wagons and VCRs) with the better technology. The result is a ramping up of market penetration on the front end, which tapers off as the market is saturated. It certainly doesn’t mean the technology is losing its relevance or mindshare.

It simply means that most of the current customers have already bought it. Millions of new people (younger people; people in other parts of the world, etc.) are still moving into the customer pool all the time. Frank points out this possibility:

And it could be that the people who wanted to start a blog already have. Like settlers joining the land rush to Oklahoma, bloggers charged into the ‘sphere, chunked down their URLs and set up shop. Everyone else stayed back East.

All those people back East may one day get on the wagon train and become a citizen of the new media state. And if they don’t, many of their children will.

Blogging is Not New, Just Easier

Blogging is not a new and different activity. It’s merely an easier way to publish and manage internet content. Sure, it makes it easy enough that someone who wouldn’t otherwise have tried to create an internet presence might do so now. But unless and until people lose the desire to put content on the internet, blogging is not going to lose its relevance any more than video cameras or word processors will. It’s a tool that helps satisfy a need that was there years before anyone combined the web and a log into the Reese’s Cup we know and (sometimes) love.

Growth Potential is Obvious

Oddly enough, the one thing that is clear to me is that there is tremendous growth potential for blogging. That’s not the same as saying it will grow, but it certainly makes it harder to say it’s in its decline.

The fact that we have empirical data demonstrating that so few people currently read blogs is proof positive that market saturation is not complete. It sounds more like the web back in the mid-nineties. I was on it then, and many of you were too. But to almost everyone else, it was a novelty. Today, even those who have never read on word on a blog use the web daily. For news, email, etc.

If you believe, as I do, that old media will move away from current distribution models towards distribution via RSS feeds, then you have to believe that RSS feeds will become more mainstream in the coming years. Once people know how to use RSS feeds (whether they know they’re RSS feeds or not) then blogs will become just another selection on the information menu.

I think blogging, along with reading RSS feeds, will take its place beside email in the mainstream. It will take a while.

But it will happen.

I think Rex Hammock nailed it the other day when he said:

When you set up a weblog, don’t think of it as launching a “publication” or any other “mass media” and don’t measure success in terms of “size of audience.” Think of it simply as having a place on the web to easily post messages, photos and other digital files. Think of it as having something like email, but you don’t send it out — however, your friends or associates can “subscribe” to it, if they want to. Don’t make this too complicated.

Many of us, myself included, are inclined to think about blogs as being more revolutionary than they really are. Yes, I write about how a blog is really just an online diary, etc. And most of the time I remember that. But then my erector-set personality fools my brain into thinking that all this blogging stuff is some new creation that is rapidly shifting all of our paradigms.

The fact is that blogs are changing things, primarily by making it easier to do what we’ve been trying to do all along. We wanted to have distributed, archivable conversations with people all over the world back in the nineties. The problem was that we didn’t have today’s blogging platforms to help publish and manage our content.

Blogs are really just a technological advance in the personal web page. They make it easier for us oldtimers to manage our content and they lower the technological barrier to entry, which gives more people a place at the table. Good, yes. World changing, not really.

Look at what Newsome.Org looked like back in 1999 (ignore the date near the top, that’s some code that continues to do its job).

Click for larger view

See the “Latest News” in the middle column? That’s a primitive Perl based predecessor to a blogging platform. I didn’t call it blogging back then, but that’s what I and countless others were doing. We just didn’t know it.

Note the empty box in the right hand column where the Chat Room used to be? 2006 so far is the year of the blog-based chat room. But we had them back in 1999.

See the classified ads link in the left hand column. Again, primitive and Perl-based, but we had them way back then.

Scott Karp gets it too:

So what is a blog? It’s a content management and publishing platform. All online publishers use a content management and publishing platform. The difference with blogging software is that it doesn’t come with the huge price tag.

Blogs are just a better and easier way to do what we were doing back then.

And we didn’t even know it.

Adam Green has announced his desire to create some sort of a group blog about memetrackers.

I have very mixed thoughts about this, but most of them are not positive.

On the one hand, I use the memetrackers a lot and would be in favor of anything that helps them become even better. On the other hand, Gabe and Kevin seem pretty active right now when it comes to talking about memetrackers whenever they are discussed (and I’m sure Matt and others would join in if asked), so why do we need a central place for them to talk about this?

I was a part of the conversation here and on Steve Rubel’s blog that Adam cites as the inspiration for this new group blog. If these conversations are already occurring naturally in the wild, why do we need to try to grow them in a lab?

Isn’t the nature and goal of the blogosphere to promote distributed conversations? Maybe if Adam allowed comments on his blog some of the conversation would be occurring there right now.

Would those guys really want to blog together about the future of a space they are battling to own? Would Coke and Pepsi do a soda blog?

The bigger problem I have with this concept, however, is the potential for exclusion. Perhaps unintentionally, but the potential is there. For crying out loud, they have formed an advisory board to decide who should be able to participate.

That takes a second, not a committee. Gabe, Kevin, Matt, Laurence and anybody else who has built a memetracker.

Not yet addressed, but looming large over all of this, is who else gets to participate in this group blog? Just the memetracker founders or a select group of other people? If so, who selects them? The same advisory board or another one?

What happens if we need to change a lightbulb?

I hate to rain on someone’s parade, but I don’t like where this seems to be going.

We’ve talked about the gatekeeper thing.

We’ve talked about rules for good blogging.

And some of us have tried to add more voices to the conversation via “affirmative traction.”

But I don’t think we’ve ever really talked about the main reason blogging is so hard. We’ve talked around it. Others have probably addressed it in one form or another. But let’s just put it out there on the table and look at it for a bit.

Blogging is hard because of the grind required to stay interesting and relevant.

Day in and day out, day after day, night after night, you have to keep working. Read, write, comment. Over and over. A lot of the time, it comes natural and it’s fun, but sometimes it doesn’t and it isn’t.

Courting the Fickle Eyeballs

Fraser Kelton and I kicked ideas around about traffic and RSS subscriber numbers the other day. I did a little of the same with Doc Searls via email. My new conclusions are the same as my old conclusions. Readers are fickle and you have to work to stay relevant.

Yes, you can build a blog. I have sort of (though not entirely) disproved my own theory in that regard. If you write long and hard and interesting and funny enough, you can and will get links from Scoble, Om, Doc, etc. And those links will lead to readers.

If you build it, they will come.

But Will They Stay?

Some of your readers will become your friends. This part of blogging is really a cross-blog social networking thing that is, as I have said before, the natural evolution of the internet message board. We trade ideas, comment on each other’s post and generally carry on a conversation.

That’s a wonderful thing and it’s one of the main reasons I keep doing this.

But the other 98% of your readers don’t know you from Adam’s housecat. To them you are just a name in an RSS reader with a post or two to be scanned. They won’t keep reading because they like you. To the contrary, they may stop by once or twice, but if they don’t affirmatively like what they see, they’ll move on. It’s the same with blogs as it is with restaurants. You’ve got one or two chances to turn a visitor into a customer.

Going Up is Hard, Going Down is Easy

And just like any other upward climb, it’s not just about moving up the hill. It’s also about trying not to fall back down the hill, due to exhaustion, boredom or both.

Take Steve Rubel for example. He’s built a one-man blogging empire, because he follows his Four P’s. He’s a good writer, with demonstrated expertise in his area, and he seems like a nice guy. That and a ton of hard work on his part turned his blog into the destination site that it is today.

But what if he got lazy and stopped writing or decided to write only about his dog or something? Would he stay on top of bloggers hill? Almost certainly not. Over time, his thousands and thousands of readers would lose interest and move on to the next trendy spot. Of course he’d have a few dog lovers to take their place, but his blog would be a very different and a much less populated place.

And he’s at the top of bloggers hill. The exodus from this blog or another one still on the slope would be even faster.

Is the fact that my dog’s photo is at the top of this page the thing that’s keeping me out of the Technorati 100?

The Downward Spiral

The grind is exactly why so many blogs are abandoned after only a few weeks or months. It’s why even many of the blogs in Scoble’s feeds have fallen into the downward spiral of neglect.

It’s hard to have something interesting and relevant to say every day, much less several times a day. And if you’re still climbing up bloggers hill, the path is steep and if you aren’t moving forward, you’re probably losing ground.

So What Does It Mean?

It just means that like a lot of things, blogging is hard. It’s hard for all the reasons we’ve talked about over the past few months: because of the gatekeepers, because of the people who whine about the gatekeepers, because someone didn’t answer our email, because somebody else sent us an email, because of the blog networks, in spite of the blog networks, because some of our posts are boring, because the RIAA is suing dead grannies.

But mostly it’s hard because of the grind.

Guy Kawasaki has a post today that talks about the best ways to attract the A-Listers towards your product so they’ll write about it.

Mike Arrington and Om Malik respond by saying all that’s not necessary.

I’m going to defend Guy in a minute, but first I have to make a point.

I think it’s interesting that Guy talks in terms of the A-Listers. Does anyone think that if Guy wasn’t Guy (upper case) but was some equally smart but unknown guy (lower case) who’d been blogging for a whopping month and a half, Mike and Om would have seen his post and, even if they had seen it, bothered to read it much less respond to it? Guy, what do you think?

Om suggests simply saying:

“I got this story/idea I am pitching. Any interest?” Two lines – and absolutely no need to suck-up.

That approach works with me. I’m beta testing and preparing to write about several products right now that I wouldn’t have known about and certainly wouldn’t have access to if the developers hadn’t emailed me.

I don’t know, though, how well that approach would work with a card carrying A-Lister. I suspect it would work with Om, but I also suspect it would not work with some of the others.

Mike says two things of interest:

Some of the suggestions, like linking back to bloggers, are good ones.

Well, that’s never worked for me as far as Mike’s concerned. I’ve linked to him a ton. I’ve tried content and depth; I’ve tried humor. I can’t help but think he’s seen links to my posts via Technorati or on one of the memetrackers or even on a fellow A-Lister’s blog, but my attempt to reach out has so far fallen on deaf hands. Of course, I haven’t emailed him because I don’t want to violate the rule implied in the other interesting thing he said:

I don’t want people to be friends with me because they are planning ahead to the day when they need something from me. I want them to be friends with me because they like me.

Even though every single marketing person in the entire universe knows that one of the first things you need to do is become friends with your target audience, be it customers, readers or linkers, I agree with Mike on this point. It is a little creepy, and I don’t and won’t do it.

I have managed to become friends with a good number of other bloggers, some A-List, some not, simply by talking about the same topics and earning my way into the conversation. But a lot of people don’t respond to that, perhaps for a good reason (they don’t see your posts) and perhaps not.

But here’s the thing. If you’re Mike Arrington (who granted has earned his lofty perch in the blogosphere) or Guy Kawasaki (who got a free pass because of prior accomplishments and relationships), it’s pretty easy to make A-List friends. But all of us aren’t Mikes and Guys.

And even though he does it in a strange, roundabout way, Guy seems to realize that and offers advice for the rest of us.

Fellow Wagon Trainer Mathew Ingram is taunting the bear again by telling Dave Winer it’s time to let go of RSS.

As I’ve said before, Mathew is a future A-Lister, whose penetration into the blogosphere and the major memetrackers is both deep and well deserved.

But if I want to travel with him to the top of bloggers hill, I’ve got to keep him from getting mauled to death by the bear.

While we weren’t looking Mathew jumped off the wagon, grabbed a stick and ran wildly towards the woods looking for the bear to convince him to give up the honey.

We’ve got to watch him more closely.

Dave Winer has a post today in response to the Slate article that talks about the pending demise of blogs. The Slate article says, in a nutshell, that blogging as a business has been co-opted by the same frenzy that led to the last dot.com boom and bust, so it’s only a matter or time until those blogs crash under the weight of their over-sold worth and exaggerated influence.

Well, it’s that and the market equivalent of the Sports Illustrated cover curse.

I expect that the whole blogs as a business thing will either implode or deflate, since blogs as a business is simply a low barrier to entry chapter in the greater fool theory book that I talk about all the time.

The slate article contains one passage that makes me want to stand up and cheer wildly:

In the end stages of any investment mania, the clueless and the greedy flood in. You know things are really poised for a fall when people who have no management experience and feeble business plans somehow manage to raise cash for ventures.

Amen, brother. When people who don’t know a blog from a baseball card start trying to buy blogs and leverage them for some easy money, you know it’s time to head for the hills. Last time around it was anything related to fiber (the non-thread kind) or computers. Now it’s anything that might have some eyeball, since as I have yelled about for months, the current volume in the greater fool theory series is founded almost completely on ad revenue- which as I have also screamed from every available soapbox is not a sustainable business plan.

The people who are in the pipeline don’t want to hear that, at least until they get to the front of the line and get their money from the greater fools. But it’s true and I’m not the only one who knows it.

Dave’s point, which I love, is that all of these blogs set up to make some greater fool dollars aren’t really blogs at all. He correctly calls them “professional publications written by paid journalists that use blogging software for content management.”

Which is exactly what they are. They believe the citizen media movement is about to topple the old media (newspapers, network news, etc.) empire and they want to rush in and fill the void long enough to make some easy money and then move on to some other con. If Sawyer wasn’t lost on the island with the rest of the Lost cast, I guarantee you he’d be trying to make some money by starting a blog.

Just because it looks like a blog and calls itself a blog doesn’t make it a blog.

If all these pseudo-blogs magically fade away, there will be plenty of real blogs to take their place. And as Dave says, some good ideas will spring from the real blogs, because those blogs are not merely online substitutes for the old media, where all that matters are eyeballs. And those ideas and the products that result from those ideas will be standing by to fill the covers of all the magazines that are currently so enamored with the pseudo-blogs.

At the end of the day, the real blogs will be the only ones standing.