Today is June 2nd, which must mean that the issue of BusinessWeek with that date on the cover is a week out of date. Welcome to the strange and wonderful world of print, where that is just one of the counter-intuitive oddities of newsstand practice, similar to why everyone is now all abuzz with that Vanity Fair article on Bill Clinton, hot off the presses for July 2008. BusinessWeek figured out in April 2005 that print wasn't the only story — there were blogs, too — hence the super-big word "BLOGS" on its cover, as in "BLOGS WILL CHANGE YOUR BUSINESS." Revolutionary!
Revolutionary for 2005, that is. In between, a lot has happened, so they updated the story; now it's "BEYOND BLOGS: SOCIAL MEDIA WILL CHANGE YOUR BUSINESS." What's interesting, though, is that for all the "updating" required — it's been a fast and furious three years — the 2005 article has remained somehow current. See the opening, which I found striking:
In the frantic news biz, where stories go stale overnight, one of our old articles is behaving very strangely. Year after year it continues to draw swarms of online readers, more than holding its own against up-to-date fare. Oddly, while technology races ahead, our story remains frozen in time. It describes a world in which YouTube has yet to emerge from the garage and Twittering, today's microblogging rage, is left to the birds.
Even as the online world has massively evolved, there still remains a huge number of people who really don't have a clue about blogs and blogging and what makes a blog bloggy (items posted online in reverse-chronological order, generally; vicious invective, scurrilous gossip and cat videos optional). Hence this article remains as a key primer, a great intro-reference piece for help in getting up the curve (it's the number-one Google hit for "blogs business"). But BusinessWeek correctly notes that the advent of social media has flattened that out, big time: People who still don't quite understand what all this blogging fuss is about are doing it themselves, in the form of Facebook status updates. Per BW:
[D]espite the importance of blogs, only a minority of us participates. Chances are, you don't. According to a recent study from Forrester Research, only a quarter of the U.S. adult online population even bothers to read a blog once a month.
But blogs, it turns out, are just one of the do-it-yourself tools to emerge on the Internet. Vast social networks such as Facebook and MySpace offer people new ways to meet and exchange information. Sites like LinkedIn help millions forge important work relationships and alliances. New applications pop up every week. While only a small slice of the population wants to blog, a far larger swath of humanity is eager to make friends and contacts, to exchange pictures and music, to share activities and ideas.
The really staggering statistic there isn't actually from this article, but from another piece in the mag, an interview by Maria Bartiromo with MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe, wherein he offers up this stunner: "Forty percent of all mothers in the U.S., believe it or not, are on MySpace." Really? Forty percent? Wow. (I'd love to know the source for this - for now, I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he knows a lot more about social networking than high-ranking U.S. military officials.) He followed up with this: "Twelve percent of all Internet minutes are spent on MySpace. Forty-five percent of all the users on MySpace are over the age of 35." This helps explain the other wow-fact from DeWolfe: "We've been profitable from Day One."
(This also, incidentally, helps explain why General Motors now has a line item in the budget for social media, and 5 dedicated employees, according to GM's Manager of Social MediaNatalie Johnson at last month's Mesh Conference in Canada. Yes - GM has a Manager of Social Media. That's pretty ahead of the curve.)
BW cheerfuly mea-culpas about missing all of that three years ago (you know, back when Friendster was the premier social networking site) and also cops to having missed the boat on Wikipedia, YouTube, and iTunes (not to mention HuffPo, which was still a month away from launch in April 2005). It was also well before Twitter, which has done the world a favor and found a way to limit bloggers to a mere 140 characters (insert joke about the guidance I could take from that here.) Aside from the nod to YouTube, though, the piece is largely silent on online video — just an explosive development of late, still so new it's better measured in months than years; there's nary a mention of the sudden recent proliferation of embeddable video code, which has truly changed the world of online content. (Not that Twitter's not important.)
The article also didn't really talk about how information is becoming more and more customized (amazingly, the phrase "The Long Tail" was nowhere to be found in it). All the developments in information delivery — Facebook newsfeeds, Twitter updates, print-goes-online innovations like MyTimes — have combined to provide way more information but within a way more narrow sphere. This obviously has its good points (efficiency of content consumption) and bad points (we're all cherry-picking only the news we want to read, thus running the risk of missing so much more). Samantha Power has an excellent essay on this subject in last week's Time, worrying that online specialization is minimizing the "wide-angle perspective" one would get from a newspaper, where you come across stories by virtue of their placement on a page. (This, incidentally, is how I came to the DeWolfe interview, which I had to click around the BusinessWeek site for a while looking for. I have no idea why on earth it's not in the article's sidebar of related pieces. NB, BW!)
But — maybe that was the point, given that the updated story was the direct result of authors Stephen Baker and Heather Green asking readers directly for feedback via their blog, Blogspotting, one of many BW launched back in 2005 when they first figured all this out. According to Baker and Green — who wrote the original 2005 piece as well — they worked off the responses that "streamed in," annotating the original article and writing the new cover story about what had changed. The absence of any real mention of video, however (hello, Hulu!) seems to demonstrate Power's thesis — that by narrowing the focus we miss big chunks of the big picture. Other giant online developments the article didn't mention includes political fundraising (hello, wildly successful Obama campaign!) and the whole implosion/recalibration of the news industry (goodbye, many longtime staffers at the Washington Post). But then again, this is an article, not a book. And at least it does give us yet another glimpse of Mark Zuckerberg's toes. He just hates to cover those up.
Overall, the article largely achieves what it set out to do, which was update the 2005 story and assess where the industry is now, from a blogging point of view. Who knows where it will be in another three years — or if Zuckerberg's toes will still be on display or if he'll finally sell out, but I do want to point out an interesting counterpoint offered by Simon Dumenco today, in a rare personal column in which he, too, looks back on blogging, back when "there was something magical about the blogging moment." Through the golden haze of memory, he looks back on when new voices could make a difference and before things got so complicated (not to mention corporate — sigh, who remembers when Gawker was just 12 posts a day? Dumenco does).
The BW piece has none of that nostalgia, perhaps because by the time Baker and Green wrote their piece and started their gee-whiz-let's-see-what-this-bandwagon-feels-like blog, the early adopters like Gawker were already well-acquainted with the bandwagon, having built it. Will there be a day when people sigh about the sanctity of tweets, or remember when Facebook status updates were all about the third-person "is?" Probably. But by then it will be time for BusinessWeek to update their story again.
Beyond Blogs [BusinessWeek]
Blogs Will Change Your Business (2005) [Business Week]
Social Media Will Change Your Business (2008) [Business Week]
Related:
Facetime with Chris DeWolfe [BusinessWeek]
Technology's Power to Narrow Our View [Time]
From Media Darlings to Public Enemy No. 1 in Five Years or Less [AdAge]
Mark Zuckerberg, no one wants to see your toes [Valleywag]
