Blogging in America

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Blogging in America

• How blogs are shaping businesses and mass media
  in the US

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Agenda

• Introduction
• Quick background about blogs
• Impact on American Mass Media
• Impact on American Businesses
• Privacy and societal changes
• QA

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About Mark

• University of Michigan, class of 2003, B.S.
  Computer Engineering
• IBM
• Microsoft
• Google
• Plaxo

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5 minute intro to blogs
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5 minute intro to blogs
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5 minute intro to blogs
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5 minute intro to blogs
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5 minute intro to blogs
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Components of a blog

• Easy to publish web page
• Comments/Trackbacks
• RSS feeds
• RSS aggregators
• RSS search engines

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Blog software/platform

• Wordpress 2.0

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Comments/trackbacks

• plaxoed!

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RSS Feeds

• not that interesting to humans

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Aggregators

• the lazy way to get news

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Blog search

• whos talking about me?

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Why now?

• Wide spread Internet access
• Storage costs going down
• Bandwidth costs going down
• Makes business sense with Advertising
• Power is limiting factor now, but not for long...

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Some stats...

• 200 Million blogs worldwide
• 105 Million MySpace accounts
• 40 of American Internet users read blogs
• Blogosphere doubling every 6 months

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Blogging impact on American Media

• Media is now democratized. Individuals are just
  as powerful as the MSM
• New news hierarchy MSM cues off of bloggers
• Every major news area technology, politics, music

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Effect on MSM

• Almost all American newspapers have moved online
• Small newspapers facing trouble
• WSJ and NYT doing well, they made good shifts to
  online
• Magazines are facing really tough times

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Case Study Politics

• HuffingtonPost.com, 750 Thousand unique visitors
  a month
• Drudge Report, 1.8 Million unique visitors a
  month
• InstaPundit, 3.8 Million pageviews a month
• DailyKos, 4 Million unique visitors a week
• George W. Bush and John Kerry used blogs in 2004
• Blogs have gone mainstream

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Whats going on?

• Blogging is growing at a breathtaking rate
• General population in the US is starting to
  incorporate blogs as a main news source
• Some traditional media outlets are facing
  extinction

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who is mark jen

• the 99zeros story

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who is mark jen

• the 99zeros story

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who is mark jen

• the 99zeros story

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What happened?

• I made assumptions about the culture at Google
• Google didnt have a policy about blogging for
  employees
• Google made a business decision to terminate me
• Turned into a PR disaster for Google
• Legal action?

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Free speech vs. Corporate strategy

• US constitution provides for free speech
• Only applies to government censoring
• Ideology vs. Capitalism

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Blogging and companies

• Company perception is affected by blogs
• Corporate secrets can be inadvertently leaked
• Companies can get direct customer feedback
• Anyone can start a grass roots campaign for
  something...

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Privacy and Societal Changes

• Privacy has always been a big thing in America
• Blogs disrupt the traditional private mindset
• New generations coming online are used to their
  lives being public
• Blogs, photos, social networks - all recorded
  publicly

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My opinion on Search Engines

• I think Yahoo is the best

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I got fired from Google

• everyone knows this anyways

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I went to Singapore

• just last week!

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I got baptized last year

• Im Christian

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Effects today

• Easy way to allow people to keep in touch
• People getting fired for blogging
• Interviewers always Google your name first
• Facilitating community around special interests

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Questions?

• I might have answers...