Tasha Harrison

Despite the popularity of blogs, I still get asked on a regular basis what a blog is for and why you would have one. There seems to be a preconception of blogs that they are a personal diary and that by having one you will have to give away many personal details. But, the personal diary is just one of the many applications for a blog.

I often think that one of the key problems of a blog is the name, derived from weblog, an online diary of events. Blogging has evolved to encompass any kind of site that is regularly updated with posts. In fact, many sites that began as blogs are much better described as online magazines or specialist news sources. Some examples of these are Mashable and The Huffington Post.

A business blog is not really a blog, as they were originally perceived. It is more a news source for your customers and a way of increasing your reputation within your industry. It is a replacement for the company newsletter. If you have a business you should blog to share your knowledge, give your customers an insight into your expertise and encourage people to use your website as a source of industry news and insight.

Image source

If you use Twitter then you will no doubt have come across the Twitter Fail Whale:

This image is met by a number of emotions – derision, annoyance, frustration and fondness. The way in which Twitter has developed has meant that they have gone through periods where they can’t handle the quantity of traffic, so users are shown the whale. As with so many aspects of Twitter, it is the users who coined the term ‘Fail Whale’, rushing to other social media sites to discuss the fact that Twitter was down and what they would do. Such is the obsessiveness that users feel for the site that this image has become something of an icon.

Now other sites are trying emulate the success of failure, by attempting to create their own fail pages. Here is the fail page for the new Digg that I came across this morning:

I’m not convinced that Digg’s users have the same obsessive fondness to make this page iconic, but what other great fail pages are there?

The outcome of Murdoch’s paywall experiment with the Times will have a huge impact on journalism. I have spent a lot of time changing my mind about whether Murdoch is a genius or has lost touch with modern media. Finally, the paywall is here.

Today Murdoch was full of praise for tablets and, inparticular, Apple’s iPad, stating that they are ‘a perfect platform’ to read news on. This is true and it is almost certainly the future for most newspapers once the paper format is extinct. The Guardian iPhone and iPad app is one of the best examples of this.

This leads me to think that Murdoch is actually very clever. He does understand modern marketing and the internet. He also understands business and the need to make money. While many journalists and newspaper owners are happy to watch and hope that it works, Murdoch is busy actually doing it. For someone who had the foresight to be the first to enter the satellite television market with just a few thousand viewers, you have to give him the benefit of the doubt when it comes to forming future trends.

For more analysis of the data and how it’s going read this: http://www.beehivecity.com/newspapers/times-paywall-more-analysis-of-the-data191807/