Blog Shmog – What the $%# are we all REALLY talking about?

I remember back in the days (when I used to walk to school uphill, barefoot, in the winter with 800 lbs of books strapped to my back) when the web was born – and the world was all about getting online. Connectivity and penetration rates were being monitored and reported weekly. People were buying up domain names like insane crack junkies. (I was one of them – registering any word or combination of words I could think of that might one day be valuable to someone or some organization). Websites were being developed and deployed at lighting speed. It was the gold rush. It was flying by the seat of our pants madness and it was a blast. But we were making it all up as we went along. It didn’t matter that nobody had a real strategy in mind. People had no clue what to do with this new media / new medium. Companies were putting up websites simply because they were told they had to. It was the “in” thing to do. What? Your company doesn’t have a website? Here’s my dot com. What’s your dot com? Do you have a dot com? Email me. Email me at my dot com. Fax machine? You’re still using a fax machine?

And then eventually…many broken or non existent business models and stock crashes later – we started to figure it out. We realized that putting up a site for the sake of it – was simply self indulgent and not worth all that much.

We’ve come full circle with blogs. I was at a trade show yesterday and over-heard two women talking at the table next to me. The conversation went something like this:

“What are you up to later?”
“I’m going to go back to the hotel room – and blog”
“What are you going to blog about?”
“I’m not sure yet…I’ll think of something”
“Yah I know what you mean – its hard to always come up with something to blog about”
“Yah”
“Yah”
“Do you have a blog?”
“No…but I should get one…”

So here’s the question – does anybody really care? For real...do you?