Beyond the blog hype

Without a doubt, 2004 was the breakthrough year for blogs. If my consumption of various media so far this year is any indication, journalists at traditional media organizations must now be having regular meetings to decide which one of them will create the “blog story” for the current deadline cycle. Whereas television network journalists used to interview actual people regularly, we now see anchors cutting over to correspondents staring at computer screens as props representing the expertise of the collective “blogosphere.” Soon, we may reach the saturation point.

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Despite the mass-media blog overkill, I find that when I meet IT professionals and ask them if they have their own blogs, the answer is usually “no.” IT professionals know what blogs are, but my sense is that whereas IT might be overrepresented in the universe of blog creators -- estimated in one study to be 7 percent of adult Internet users -- the vast majority of people who do IT for a living have taken a pass. On a recent trip to the East Coast, I was talking to two professionally accomplished CTOs who practically grimaced when I mentioned the word “blog.” Blaring blog stories on TV leave them scratching their heads. How are blogs useful to IT managers who are less interested in taking down network news anchors than running an IT operation? Yet I think IT pros might be missing useful signals amid the noise.

One key aspect of blogs that’s often ignored is the basic technical architecture, which makes information in blogs uniquely accessible. Most blogging software (such as Movable Type and Radio Userland) issues a “ping” for each new blog post to ping servers that allow blog-specific search engines and services to index or otherwise process content in near real time. (Technorati, which runs its own ping servers, has claimed that the median time for a new blog post to enter its index is 7 minutes.) This rapid inclusion into search indexes means that blog-specific search tools such as Technorati, Feedster, and PubSub beat the pants off the seemingly all-powerful Google when it comes to aggregating and indexing blog content quickly.

The real-time element of blogs leads to some productive new ways of approaching IT operations. Blogs are a good way to connect to users who share specific IT problems or to get the quick attention of vendors.

One recent experience proved to me just how valuable this real-time element of blog publishing is when it comes to dealing with IT problems. I was installing a piece of software called Quick News on my Treo 650 when I ran into some trouble, so I blogged about it in some detail. Within minutes I heard from a fellow Treo 650 user who suggested using an entirely different piece of software. Within an hour I heard from the support department of Stand Alone, the creator of Quick News, with some thoughtful suggestions that solved my problem. I don’t know precisely how they found me, but I do know that by subscribing to the name of their product as a search term in PubSub, Technorati, and/or Feedster, they would have found me quickly.

Even if the vendor hadn’t noticed, my public description of the problem in my blog was a not-so-subtle way of holding the vendor’s feet to the fire. In a world where an individual IT manager can sometimes feel like a drop in a sea of customers, blogs are an excellent way to amplify your voice and solve problems quickly.