We Blog and in Incredibly Diverse Ways

By Indra Baatarkhuu

The term blog we use today has truly changed its initial starting point to this moment and now grasps every possible way and style of reaching the audience. For those who are interested in reading about politics there are blogs ranging from the ones written by experts such as Asia Unbound at Council on Foreign Affairs to the ones that are written by anyone who wants to wrtie. Photographers have their own photoblogs to share their work with others, “vloggers” use videos, while others publicize their opinion on philosophy, arts or promote certain ideas, and the list goes on. Today, a new blog is created every second of every minute of the day, Technocrati reports, and certainly majority of them are not much read by others.

So why people blog and what makes some blogs more successful than others?

Looking at the number one political blog Huffington Post, according to Technorati – a popular tool for searching blogs – seems like reading a usual newspaper at first. The head articles are news-style pieces that report some kind of action – mainly on international affairs. Actually, Huffington post defines itself on the top of its page as an online newspaper. The writers for this blogs are journalists, experts, and respected professionals whose opinion is worth listening to. Some links lead to New York Times articles, some to youtube videos; you can also find posts consisting of funny pictures and a paragraph explaining the picture. In short, Huffington post writes about a variety of issues in different ways focusing on news and commentary, and this is what helps them reach a big audience. The Observer in London named Huffington Post “the most powerful blog in the world.”

The expert blog, on the other hand, has a narrower audience than those that cover health, fashion and entertainment at the same time. Bloggers provide them in response with solid analysis, opinion or interesting information not covered by major news media or covered, but has interesting points that are in their view worth highlighting again or topics that are written differently in different news coverage and experts have their take on it. Asia Unbound blog posts are not too long and bring points taken from a number of selected writings, coming in the end to the small conclusion about the initial topic, which makes it more different from news style articles. They give answer in more simple and lighter ways than academic articles. It is certainly pleasant to hear views from senior fellows of the Council on Foreign Relations not having to read all of the background information or thorough analysis if readers do not want to do it now.

Although these two blogs differ greatly in their style, design and audience, both seem to be a good tool for outreach whether it is sharing their opinion or disseminating news already published by others. The word "weblogs" were broken first playfully into “we blog” by Peter Merholz in 1999 and “and somehow the new term—blog—stuck as both a verb and a noun,” says the Economist article.

Whether it may be your online journal about your travel, another place to post news, a way to share opinion, self-expression of teens, blogs should be regularly added new materials to it in order for it to survive in the sea of blogs.

“Higher authority bloggers are much more prolific content creators, posting nearly 300 times more than lower ranked bloggers,” Technocrati study says. There is no one way to create a successful blog, weblogs reach different people who are appealed to a range of styles and posts. If you find your own way to attract readers, what remains to do is post more and more.