j’s scratchpad

I don’t think Steven’s off base when he writes about how bloggers could be powerful book reviewers because of our influence and the speed at which we publish.

I told some software developers about using blogs to spread the word about their product just the other day.

For one thing, blogs can reach more than just an audience of librarians. Based on the limited interaction I’ve had with readers of this blog, I would guess the majority of them aren’t librarians or information professionals of any kind. The people I know who read my blog certainly are more likely to be doing something besides librarianship. (Okay blog readers: quick poll: if you’re a librarian, raise your hand. ha ha ha) Books about Opus appeal to far more people than just librarians.

Many public blogs offer free content that’s archived and searchable. In a month, it’s likely someone will find this post. (If someone comments on it, in less than a week, it will be crawling with comment spam.) It will be much easier for a member of the general public to find a post on this blog about, say, a personal information management tool than to find a review about it in a publication whose contents may not be indexed by a general Internet search engine or available online.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 4th, 2004 at 12:31 am and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.