Making Sense of Blogging

This week I discovered two fascinating blogs, both through newspaper articles, which shows how retro I still am...

They are www.booooooom.com and www.365fashionrehab.com

I am fascinated by them because they are successful blogs with large readership, which I find amazing as I am still trying to figure out why anyone would visit a blog regularly.

The obvious reason for a blog's attractiveness and success is that the writer is well known. It could be a politician, sporting figure or someone in a niche. I like reading Seth Godin on Facebook, but don't do it nearly enough. I can't be bothered to visit regularly even though I know I should as he is brilliant.

And beyond the celebrity appeal? Why do people visit blogs?

The first reason, as with all effective communications, is a great story to tell. The Fashion Rehab blog is one of these. The two writers are taking a year from fashion shopping for themselves. Their site is successful in numbers AND that they have advertisers, which is in some way the ultimate seal of approval. Amazingly, they are writing every day, posting polls and keeping the site incredibly active. They have an engaged audience and it will be interesting to see if they morph into something else when their year is over or if this is just a one-year-wonder. I hope they come up with something to keep things going.

The Booooooom site is more fascinating. It is a Vancouver artist's posting of interesting visual art that comes his way. Started little over a year ago, he now has an enormous following and ad agencies worldwide are scouting his site for talent and artists, again from far and wide, are begging to be included. It is different from most blogs in that there is almost no text, it is pretty much all visual. This is the most fascinating blog for me as he is not telling a story, was not a celebrity when he started, but has hooked into something that has been hugely successful.

And to be fully honest, I am also jealous of the blogger. I am also a big art lover and aspiring artist. I feel as if I could have done this, but never pushed myself to think about something this creative. This is definitely a blog I will visit very regularly and is the only one I have bookmarked right now.

So despite the fact that I write my own blog, I am a bit of sceptic of their value. Largely, this is because I cannot quite understand how blogs can possibly work for any extended period of time and what is the mechanism that draws people to visit and return. Because of these two blogs, I am starting to glimpse at the answers. This is pretty important as I can understand the dynamics of Facebook, YouTube, Podcasts and even Twitter, but blogs already are getting pretty old school in the social networking world and I have been scratching my head.

Blogs are here to stay, there is no doubt, but understanding how they attract an audience and advertisers is the real key to gaining full communications value. I hope I am learning!

Thanks for reading!