Commercial blogging is not necessarily the same as business blogging. The latter means working for a corporation and blogging its products and services.
Commercial blogging is what this blog is doing. The Money Blog is part of a Web Network Magazine, called Syntagma. It lives, like its print counterparts, by selling advertising around useful content.
There are many types of commercial blogging. If you work alone, you are a “problogger” by one definition. If you work as part of a group, a commercial blogger.
Basically, we are what H.G. Wells called, Originative Intellectual Workers. In one sense, we securitize our talents and put them on a global market to sell to the highest bidder.
Originative Intellectual Workers (OIWs) face many challenges and opportunities in the new world of independent publishing. The opportunities come mainly from relatively cheap, universally-available means of publishing content. A short-list would include, print-on-demand books, ebooks, P2P file distribution, blogs, RSS, content management systems, Wi-Fi, and podcasting.
The challenges arise from the commoditization of information and the inevitability of supply overeaching demand. As Bill French put it: “… information nears the point of zero-price (not zero-cost).” In other words, how does one get paid? Many OIWs simply give away their content and rely on name-brand consultancy and speaking engagements to drive cash flow. Many writers are uncomfortable with that. Showbiz and the pen are not natural bedfellows.
Blogs have come into their own quite quickly. Although business blogging is still in its infancy (less than 1pc are business blogs), all the top OIWs are blogging. But why have blogs taken off in the world of business? Because, says Joyce Wycoff, they are
“Creating an environment where ‘serendipitous types of conversations’ occur, a place where people from various disciplines bump into each other and start talking about possibilities.”
So we’re talking innovation here. In an uncertain world situation where educated Indians and Chinese are taking intellectual and software jobs from the West, OIWs are right to be on their guard. They are also right to think innovatively. The East may be good at playing catch-up but, as Tom Peters clearly believes, through innovation we can ensure that they’re always chasing the game.
Blogs play an enormous role in this process. By capturing new ideas and keeping them alive. And by chasing new uses for ideas and testing them in a fluid, receptive environment, they cut the mustard in unpredictable ways.
Blogs can build and drive an innovation factory with the slenderest of tools. Robin Good’s “RSS NewsMaster’s Toolkit” follows up his recognition of NewsMastering as the latest job chrysalis for emerging OIWs.
In Robin Good’s terms, RSS channels — even those originating from simple blogs — are “News Radars” for a new breed of independent publisher and content provider. A News Radar is “a constantly updated thematic channel of highly relevant web references that are gathered in accordance with specific, persistent search criteria.” In simpler terms they are a new means of publishing our work, which may be on “topics, people, opinions, products, news items, events or passions.”
Whichever role you wish to play online, you have to do it very well, because competition is fierce and growing and is not restricted now to the English-speaking world. The whole world is now the English-speaking world.
