video 2 zero

I mean real beginners. If you have been blogging longer than a week or so please move along there is nothing for you here, you already know this stuff.

Actually I’ve been blogging a lot longer than a week. But all the blogs I have built in the past have essentially been marketing fluff - blogs designed to promote the idea that you are a great company staffed by real people who care about the same things as your clients do.

This model has become very popular especially since the publication of Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands by Saatchi CEO Kevin Roberts. Nothing wrong with the model -   those blogs  perform  a  valuable function.

But there is another model altogether where the blog itself is the product.

Just about all the blogs on the Technorati top 100 follow this “real blog” model.

Some are just online diaries that generate no income. Others like girl with a one track mind start off that way and then turn into real blogs.

For me the two quintessential examples of real blogs are Ken Rockwell’s photography site and Hugh Mcleod’s gapingvoid. The two sites are very different from one another.

Ken Rockwell dishes out some of the most valuable and reliable photography advice (mostly nikon DSLRs) that you can find at any price. And his site is free! All he asks is that when you buy your equipment you do it through the links on his site. I guess it works. Both he and his wife have given up their jobs to spend more time with their new baby.

I should mention technically Ken’s site is not a blog at all, it’s a very basic html website, but it functions exactly like a blog without the comments. What is important is that he updates it a lot and the new stuff is at the top, so it’s a blog. Why doesn’t he use blog software? I have no idea.

gapingvoid started as a blog to showcase Hugh Mcleod’s “cartoons on the back of business cards”. The cartoons are still a prominent part of the site - but gapingvoid experienced explosive growth after the seminal “Hughtrain manifesto: how to be creative“.

Hugh works in the UK where he gets a lot of attention from the mainstream media and has several prominent clients. Microsoft recently signed on to his Blue Monster jag.

Hugh’s blog is kind of the studio 54 for the blogging cognoscenti. The people leaving comments (along with their blog addresses) are the folks behind the rope. The people Hugh blogs about are the folks inside the club.

So that’s it. Real blogs for real people, or the other type of blogs, “for when you want to give people the illusion that you care.” (Sam Kinison)

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