Blogging outside the US?
‘Corporate blogging is not existing outside the US.’
Many Europeans might disagree on the above sentence – but let me reassure you: this is not a recent statement. It is from a research my agency conducted back in 2007 on the business value of blogging.
Did things really change that quickly? Did only 5% of all companies in Europe and Asia have a corporate blog nine years ago? And more importantly, what would be the current penetration rate of corporate blogging?
Our blog in the early days
Only two years earlier, in 2005, we launched our own agency blog. In fact, the LEWIS 360 celebrated its eleventh anniversary only a few weeks ago. Looking back at the earliest entries we can draw a few conclusions:
- Blog posts have increased greatly in length
- Topics have stayed more or less the same, although titles used to be less geared towards generating clicks.
- Blogs used to be a lot less visual – text only
All these changes can, at least partially, be explained by the rise of social media. Twitter and LinkedIn serve as micro blogs where we share short updates on what’s happening and what we’re working on. Blogs are used to tell the bigger story, but you will need attractive headlines and visuals to get people to click.
Wayback Machine
I could browse through old websites and blog posts all day. The Wayback Machine is one of my favorite bookmarks: it allows you to see how websites used to look at any given time. I can get super excited about websites from the nineties that are still online in their original format, like the ones of the movies You’ve Got Mail (1998) and Space Jam (1996):
Internet is not a reliable archive
One would think that the Internet is a great archive that will tell future generations how we used to live in the early 21st century. But in fact, much information is being lost, according to members of an UNESCO conference in Paris; ‘In particular, social media commentary, which says a great deal about trends in society and news events, will probably not be available for historic research in the future.’ One of the participants even said that ‘much of the information from the early days of Internet has gone forever.’
The same goes for blogs: archives aren’t stored forever, at least not publicly. So how do ‘veterans’ think about the evolution of blogging? How do they pass their stories on to future generations? What was it like to blog in the early days and what has changed over the past ten or fifteen years?
We are considering repeating that research to find out what has changed. What makes history most interesting, however, is not only hard facts and figures, but the anecdotes.
So this one is for all the long-time bloggers: how has blogging evolved according to you? Please comment below!
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