HW 16b: Scoble's 5 pillars

Robert Scoble is very adamant about blogging. He states “To me, a good blog has two things: it’s passionate and it’s authoritative.” (Kline 125) He feels that blogs do nothing but good things for companies who allow their employees to blog about certain brands or products. He feels that there are 5 things that have made blogging “hot” over the past couple of years. They are ease of publishing, discoverability, cross-site conversations, permalinking and finally syndication. I think ease of publishing and discoverability are relatively easy to understand. Part of what has made blogs so popular is how easy they are to make and how anybody can publish a post anywhere and about anything. They are open to so many people that it is hard for them to not become popular, they have impacted many aspects of today’s society. I took discoverability to mean that is easy to become discovered when blogging. There is always somebody that will respond to you and blogging has made a huge impact on companies such as Google and Microsoft. It is easy to become noticed on the web. He said that cross-site conversations allowed him to see who was linking to him with trackbacks. Not only do blogs help you communicate with other people but you can see where these people are coming from and who is keeping track of your own personal blob. Permalinking was a term that was new to me, I think that Scoble feels it is so important is because he can isolate a URL that will take him to a post. I felt that this aspect of blogging made it easy to find other blogs on the web, it brings you right to something that you are interested in without having to search. The fifth topic is syndication, which allows you to view a large number of sites. This allows you to keep track of more things at once and introduce you to more things about blogging.