Blogging

There is a lot of excitement about blogs, with almost 50 millions registerded by Technorati.

A very interesting analysis of blogging was published in Financial Times, showing that not all glitter is gold.

Selected paragraphs:

The writing may have started as an end in itself for many, but other interests have started to take centre stage. Successful bloggers, it seems, often find themselves under pressure to do anything but blog.

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Success in attracting a sizeable audience has led others to consider turning their amateur passions into full-time businesses. With 500,000 unique users a month and 1m page views, Om Malik, a journalist who specialises in broadband issues, says his pastime is now attracting enough of an audience to become a business in its own right.

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In at least one respect, though, the tech bloggers have something in common: the predicament of how to continue to nurture the very blogs that in many cases accounted for their success.

By its nature, blogging is time-consuming. "My frequency of blogging has dropped some because of all the things I'm trying to do," says Dan Gillmor. "It's a hard thing to keep doing. It's a beast that demands to be fed."

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Asked to comment on his own plans to give up blogging, Mr Winer [Dave Winer, credited with creating the really simple syndication technology ] said he would reply only through the medium of his blog. "Blogging is a lifestyle, not something you do in between things," he wrote. However, he says he is also ready to switch his attention to what comes next.

"If I'm blogging every day, I won't have the incentive to create new software. Blogging is good enough, but it may be possible to do something richer and more powerful and I want to find out."
Valley voices find their value, Financial Times