Keynote by Pete Cashmore, founder and CEO Mashable

Pete starts with his main mantra to “build something you love” which not only applies to forming a blog but to any successful company. He uses the Waybackmachine as a resource to show screenshots from Mashable’s history and talks about its development over the years.

People spend many weeks on tweaking their blog to look really professional but according to Pete it’s a waste of time. To prove the viability of a blog you just have to sit down and blog. Just do it! was Pete’s slogan before some sports company ran off with it. Blog, eat, sleep and repeat. Don’t mess with templates and funding and waste your time.

Start at WordPress.com and if you have the skills install WordPress on your own server. Pete is obviously a member of the WordPress fan group and slightly bashes the Six Apart products and Blogger.

So what is important when building a blog empire? Stats. Find what your readers want and give them what they want and then monetize it. When asked, hardly anyone in the rooms actually wants to monetize its blog. Pete is kind of surprised, especially if he asks the same question in the US where everyone raises their hands.

Q&A: Apparently blogging is dead, it’s all about microblogging. Blogging is hard now. How do you compete with blogs created by established media empires who create blogs? Find a niche. What’s the future of blogs? According to Pete it is about how do you aggregate the dispersed conversation that’s on FriendFeed and Twitter, or do you want to completely distribute content as a brand?

Tomorrow I will be attending BLOG08, a Dutch blog conference held in Amsterdam. As a blog researcher this is a conference I cannot miss. Due to my background I am particularly interested in the “non-commercial” panels such as Blogging and politics and Journalism versus/ hearth blogging and less interested in How to build a blog empire.

I will provide the conference coverage for the British journalism site journalism.co.uk so keep an eye on the column ”Online journalism news for journalists or stay tuned here, on Flickr or Twitter.

Technorati released their State of the Blogosphere 2008 a few weeks ago and they now supplement their quantitative analysis with a qualitative analysis. While their main focus is still on the numbers they’ve supplemented the figures with interviews and quotes from bloggers to provide a more in depth analysis:

Since 2004, our annual study has unearthed and analyzed the trends and themes of blogging, but for the 2008 study, we resolved to go beyond the numbers of the Technorati Index to deliver even deeper insights into the blogging mind.

In contrary to the Wired article I mentioned yesterday that claims blogs are dead, Technorati claims that all studies show that blogs are alive and kicking:

All studies agree, however, that blogs are a global phenomenon that has hit the mainstream. The numbers vary but agree that blogs are here to stay.

The survey also confirms that blogging is hard work as “Bloggers invest significant time in creating and updating their blogs, as well as driving traffic and retaining their audiences.” In my thesis I described these practices as part of the software-engine regime the blogger is embedded in:

I would like to propose to redefine the current perception we have of the blogger because people might think of the blogger as a pajama clad revolutionary or the lonely writer who sits in the dark in his room. However, the blogger is an active researcher. One would have to admit that the main amount of this activity is engine based. A lot of research is done via engines, it is engine work. (Helmond)

Not only research is related to the engines also the amount of time spent updating, tweaking and modifying the blog. In my further research I would like to focus more on this “modding” user.

The report ends with “the future of the blog” which I think Brett Bumeter sums up pretty well when he says that:

This is just the beginning for blogging. People are getting better and better at this skill set [...]

Blogging has moved from the domain of the coder to the easy publishing model which has increasingly become more complex and less easy. If you take a look at the current WordPress release ‘easy’ is not what comes to mind first. While it is fairly easy to learn it has become an complex system which allows for various practices of blogging. Blogs are transforming into a media platform:

The word blog is irrelevant, what’s important is that it is now common, and will soon be expected, that every intelligent person (and quite a few unintelligent ones) will have a media platform where they share what they care about with the world. (Seth Godin)

After the trackback has been declared dead over and over again the phenomenon of blogging is now facing the same fate. Twitter and other social networking sites have been heralded as the future applications. The medium of blogs (“blogs are dead“) has been declared dead aproximately 14,800 times and the practice of blogging (“blogging is dead“) aproximately 19,000 times.

I read several critiques on the ‘blogging is dead’ article in the recent edition of Wired Magazine. Now that ‘Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004‘ has also been published online I guess the oldfashioned blogosphere is ready for even more critiques.

According to Wired Magazine blogs are impersonal, food for flames and you shouldn’t even botter with blogging as your blog will always be outranked by Wiki pages.

What Paul Boutin fails to recognize is the transformation of traditional blog software into more robust Content Management Systems. Boutin still sees blogs as a text-based medium that do not allow for different kinds of blogging practices:

Further, text-based Web sites aren’t where the buzz is anymore. The reason blogs took off is that they made publishing easy for non-techies. Part of that simplicity was a lack of support for pictures, audio, and videoclips. At the time, multimedia content was too hard to upload, too unlikely to play back, and too hungry for bandwidth. (Paul Boutin)

Not only has the popular blogging software WordPress been working and improving image and video implementation, tons of plugins exist to make these types of publishing easy for non-techies too. Multimedia is part of the current blogging medium and practice and will become even more important in the near future.

As a final note I would like to say that I see Twitter and social networking sites as complementing the medium and practice of blogging by integrating them into your blog. I use Twitter and my blog differently and some things are typical Twitter material (@mycolleague running 5 minutes late due to traffic) while other things require more than 140 characters and additional photos and videos (such as my lecture transcriptions).

Here are the slides of the lecture I gave at Mediamatic in Amsterdam yesterday titled ‘The Widgetized Self. Distributed identity and the role of software-engine relations in blogging.’

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Easy embedding of the slideshow thanks to Joost de Valk’s great SlideShare WordPress plugin.

My friends gave me this t-shirt as a graduation present two months ago. It is now the “T-shirt of the day” at Googlified.com, nice.

UPDATE: The t-shirt refers to my MA thesis which is now online: Blogging for Engines. Blogs under the Influence of Software-Engine Relations