Web2.0 Technology Marketing: Blogs of the influential

There is an impression that blogs are just for entertainment or to "get your rants" out in public (so you will not need to go see a psychiatrist). If you look at sheer numbers, that could be true. But my search for for commercial and professional use of blogs started with three of the most influential people in technology. All three wrote books and gave keynote talks in conferences. So a blog from these authorities would be a good example of how someone with a theory could use blogs to support their traditional mainstream communication. The three people I am talking about are:

Tim O'Reilly: computer technology publisher and Web2.0 trend coiner
Jakob Nielsen: Usability expert - Alert Box newsletter.
Clayton Christensen: Harvard business school and "Innovator's Dilemma" coiner

Individuals usually have less resources and are more focused on a specific message. Their core idea is usually articulated in their "main book" - in some cases you can even find it in an article. Blogs are simple and linear. They don't need complex navigation or structure so if you have one core message they work fine. The three people I mentioned above each have one very clear message. Basically an idea that explain something specific. For some reason all three people that I picked seem to analyze a behavioral phenomena on the Internet. (But I think this is just coincidental). All these examples show that one idea and a small team of domain experts can create a great resource. They also show that in depth work can be done gradually and does not need to be revealed at "one time" the way books or articles in professional magazines have been doing. These blogs seem to be addressing broad subject areas, but blogs do not have to be limited by their focus (broad or narrow). Let's look a little at each of the blogs.

Tim O'Reilly with Richard Stallman the founder of "open source" (it was first called "free software".

Tim O'Reilly: He has been a book publisher, mostly for the "open source" community for a long time. Even before Linux became popular the O'Reilly books were known as good, accurate, and useful references for many programs and software technologies. As software evolved from open source to the web to what we call Web2.0, Tim O'Reilly has been observing, analyzing, and publishing trends. He is also still involved in the software technology itself, but has definitely noticed that someone has to write about the "big picture". Now that Web2.0 is somewhat of a core mainstream mantra, O'Reilly has created a much bigger blog of sorts with many contributors covering a wide range of topics. If you want to know this corner of the software / web world, his blog is a great place to keep up.

Jakob Nielsen is well know inside the Internet world. He started out at Sun Microsystems (in the days where: "the network is the computer"). With one of the most read usability books for the web, he has been "evangelizing" usability for a long time. He started a newsletter 13 years ago, long before "blog" was even around. But I consider his Alrtbox newsletter to be somewhat of a blog. Sometimes I wish he did update the presentation to the more current blog format. But that is a small price to pay for such great information and knowledge.

Rattling the technolgy "geeks" all the way from the Harvard Business School

Clayton Christiensen is not a technologist in the traditional sense. Actually, I don't think that he started out working on technology topics. As a Harvard Business School professor he tried to answer the old question "what is real innovation?" He has been doing this for a long time. His "Innovator's Dilemma" book has taken the technology world by storm. Not because it is controversial as much as it is well researched, analyzed, and presented. I chose him because he did not come from the core technology world. His blog started out as his own comments on companies and products which either innovate or fail to innovate. Now like O'Reilly and Nielsen he has a staff which write about many areas of expertise.

Well, this is the introduction to the three blogs. Like anything else, I could write about this forever, but we need to get to many more things. It would be interesting to look at group, domain, media, and corporate blogs. At this point in time these are not as developed as other forms of media. Certainly not as other forms of Internet technologies. Next, I will look at grass root blogs like slash-dot and media blogs like New York Times. Both are interesting since they say something new in terms of communication.

Tim O'Reilly: RADAR is his company blog center, other contributors. http://radar.oreilly.com/tim/

Jakob Nielsen's: Alertbox - http://www.useit.com/alertbox/

Clayton Christensen: The Innovator's Dilemma: http://www.innosight.com/blog/index.php