From the BuzzMachine (by Jeff Jarvis) on AOL Blogging strategies:
Today, they are used in one or more of four ways:
- Community: LiveJournal et al let people communicate; my space talks to your space.
- Content: Weblogs like this one, Instapundit, Gawker, Lost Remote, IWantMedia, etc. are just nanopublishing ventures.
- Marketing: Consultants, venture capitalists, law firms, and others use them to show how smart they are. If I had a restaurant, I’d use weblog tools to put up my daily specials.
- Personal space: Very soon, weblogs will be used to organize your stuff and your life. AOL webloggers will certainly use them to publish photos for family and the world to see. I see a family weblog as a way to communicate and stay in sync.
Weblogs will get more and better tools — publishing tools (for video, audio, photos, etc.) and also data tools (such as the amazing Technorati, which facilitates the conversations that weblogs really are).
In short: Soon, everyone will have a weblog because everyone will use weblogging tools of one sort or another to store or share their stuff — whether that stuff is opinions or pictures or school assignments or shopping lists or church calendars (my son just rebuilt our church website around a weblog).
There’s a much, much bigger strategy here. What AOL showed was only the first of many phases that should follow. The same is true for Movable Type and Blogger and About.com (which just converted itself to MT) and any wise ISP, not to mention content companies, commerce companies, and software companies.
More interesting point:
The real point: Ultimately, your content is more valuable than professional content.
Anil and I got excited lecturing these AOL-Time-Warner megolith folks that what they should do is give their bloggers back doors into the otherwise fenced-off content of People et al — as the New York Times is doing with bloggers, allowing them to link directly even to archived stories. That might sound like heresy, treating the expensive People gossip as a commodity. But the truth is — repeat: the truth is — that by creating such a back door, AOL would cleverly be turning its audience into its marketing force: AOL bloggers would be the privileged ones who can show you People content (thus selling AOL subs) and if their readers want to see more, they have to buy the magazine (thus selling magazine subs). Now that is synergy.
You see, the magnet that creates that marketing power is the people’s content. I’ve learned well in my online career that the audience’s content is valuable and the audience is your best marketer if you allow the audience to be the star.
Starting weblogs allows the audience to create content and to market and to create value.
That’s why it’s a big deal that AOL is blogging. They’ve taken a good first step. But it’s just a first step.