Web logs have attracted a great deal of news media attention. They have been featured in prominent stories in places like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. They been even trendier since the phenomenon of warblogging during the Iraq invasion drew more attention to the phenomenon. However, blogs don't get much respect.

It's easy to understand why. The whole idea reeks of geekiness. Perhaps more important, the quality of most web logs is low. Lack of focus and narcissism are rampant. The author of one popular book on blogs even encourages bloggers not to worry about whether their blogs ever attract an audience, but to be an "audience of one" by concentrating only on writing what makes them feel good. The prevalence of this type of attitude is a major reason why there are so many poor blogs. A sampling of some of the worst is available at Antibloggies.com.

Reacting to all this, a poster on the ABA’s Network2d mailing list probably expressed the view of the typical lawyer when he recently opined that the best a lawyer-blogger could hope for was that someone would tell him to “Get a life.�

Recent developments have caused more perceptive observers to wonder whether there could be something more to blogs than meets the eye:

Why did Macromedia, one of the most tech-savvy companies around, order its key staffers to start publicly-accessible blogs?
Why did Google, by far the world’s most popular search engine, one widely praised for technical superiority, recently buy out Blogger.com?
Why have legal professionals with national reputations for excellence like Sabrina Pacifici, Bob Ambrogi and Dennis Kennedy recently started blogs?
Have Macromedia, Google and the new crew of respected legal professional bloggers caught on to something most people don't yet understand?

Why Blogs Are Attractive
While blogs have many uses aside from marketing, and many advantages, for the time being I'll focus on their uses as marketing tools, and will restrict discussion to the following four advantages:

Ease of use
Low cost
Greater audience reach through the use of RSS and news aggregators
Better search engine visibility
Advantage 1: Ease of Use
Some of the better blogging software, including Blogger and Radio, makes it possible to have a blog up and running in five minutes. This factor alone is enough to make blogs tempting as a way to level the playing field between larger firms and small firms. This blog advantage is widely understood, so extensive discussion is not necessary.

Advantage 2: Low Cost
Blogs tend to be much cheaper than alternatives. Many of those who develop blog software belief, as a matter of principle, high quality software should be free, or nearly free.

Even though I was aware of this philosophy, I was still amused by an article in the March issue of Linux Journal. It seems that the $150 license fee requested for commercial use of the popular Movable Type blogging software is considered controversial. I would expect to pay thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to buy software of comparable power if it were available from companies like Lotus, IBM or Microsoft. However, in this community, many consider a $150 fee outrageously high, even for a top-of-the line product. In any event, the program is free for non-commercial use. If you want to splurge, you can pay to have an expert from Movable Type install their software on your web server. The price? All of $40.

Here’s another example: A friend of mine paid $2m000 for a template for his law firm's e-mail newsletter. Didn’t work very well. He decided to switch to a blog. Because blogs are such a hot item with the tech set, a programmer came up with a service called “Bloglet� that will automatically echo blog postings. The lawyer uses this to distribute an e-mail newsletter that works through his blog. The blog is easier for him to use than the original planned e-mail newsletter would have been, assuming he could have gotten it to work. What’s he paying for the blog and e-mail newsletter? The newsletter is free. The blog is fifteen dollars a year. That’s not a typo. It’s $15 per year.

Here’s the kicker: The blog version is probably more effective than the conventional e-mail newsletter would have been (again, assuming he could have gotten it to work). The blog version is more visible to potential new clients on the Internet, and it automatically archives past issues on the web, with no additional effort or cost on the lawyer’s part.

Before we leave the subject of cost, this is a good place for one more observation: Don’t expect most commercial web site designers and consultants to have much good to say about blogs. Why? They can’t make much money on blogs. They’d rather sell you something like an expensive Flash animation.

OK, so blogs are easy and cheap. But that's just for starters. The other advantages of blogs are so significant that many sophisticated people would want to have blogs even if they were difficult and expensive.

Most people can readily appreciate the concepts of easy and cheap. Understanding the more significant advantages of blogs is more difficult, because it requires some knowledge of the technical underpinnings of search engines and the Internet. Even if you’re not a techie type person, it’s worth persevering, so you can understand why Ernie the Attorney’s site is so popular - and evaluate your chances of duplicating his success.

I’ll try to keep the necessary explanation as painless as possible. First, some definitions of unavoidable jargon:

XML (eXtensible Markup Language). Simply put, XML is a way of putting special codes into web pages that make it easier for computers to process their information.
News aggregators are a relatively new and still-evolving type of software that reads and organizes into a readily digestible form the key content from web pages selected by the user.
RSS is a specific flavor of XML that produces pages news aggregators can handle. The acronym is variously said to stand for "Rich Site Summary" or "Really Simple Syndication."
Advantage 3: Greater Audience Reach Through The Use Of RSS And News Aggregators

Complaints about information overload are everywhere, right? People are overwhelmed. This means news aggregators are a technology to watch. Because news aggregators make it easier for users to handle large amounts of information from their favorite web sites, they have the potential to make major changes in the way most people use the Internet.

Sounds good. What’s the catch? News aggregators only work with web pages that have been specially formatted using RSS. Making web site information available in this format is called "syndication." Syndication is a tremendous way to increase the reach of a web site, hitting a whole new audience.

While relatively few people have started using news aggregators so far, this audience is already important to marketers. Marketers put a premium on getting to those who are early adopters and opinion shapers, those who tend to influence others. Today’s aggregator users disproportionately tend to be in this category. Skeptical about this? Ask Trent Lott what he thinks. He probably agrees with the one thing the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and well connected political insiders of both the conservative and liberal persuasions all agreed on: After the "liberal media" dropped the ball by initially failing to report on Lott’s admission of nostalgia for the days of segregation, it was blogs (many or most of whose readers access them through news aggregators) that kept the issue alive and turned it into something the mainstream media could no longer ignore. That’s influence.

Furthermore, the news aggregator user audience is only going to expand as the rough edges of the software are smoothed and more people learn about their advantages. News aggregation features will probably be included in web browsers and/or sophisticated e-mail programs in the future, which will further stimulate the growth of the news aggregator audience.

While conventional web sites can add RSS feeds and syndicate themselves, only a few of them have yet started doing so. The conventional sites that have adopted RSS tend to be only the larger ones like the New York Times, or the more technically sophisticated, like the Christian Science Monitor and Genie Tyburski’s The Virtual Chase.

OK, so what does all this have to do with blogs? Most decent blogging software has simple, built-in RSS creation/syndication features.

The result? Bloggers get the advantage of the broader audience that syndication brings to a quality site, without the hassle of trying to retrofit RSS onto older software.

Advantage 4: Better Search Engine Visibility
The final blog advantage to be discussed in this article is that major Internet search engines tend to rank well-run blogs higher than conventional web sites. We already saw how Ernie the Attorney turned this to his advantage. Here’s another example:

On the surface, Lexis vs. Jerry doesn't look like a fair match-up. LexisNexis has been around for decades. I estimate their corporate web presence expenses, not counting the underlying databases, to be at least in the six figure range, probably higher. My blog has only been around since January 1. It costs me $40 a year.

The Google search engine is renowned for its ability to sort group the most relevant web sites near the beginning of its list of results. In view of this, what would you expect to be the top result for the search request “Lexis search engine�? Surely it would have to be the Lexis corporate site, right? Actually, as of May 23, 2003, the highest rated result was my modest starter blog.2

Is the David-beats-Goliath experience of Lexis vs. Jerry a fluke? Not at all. In fact, as explained in Wired, such experiences have become common. Operators of large, expensive commercial web sites have begun complaining that they cannot compete against blogs:

Commercial websites believe scoring high placements in search-engine results is so crucial for generating traffic that many are willing to pay top dollar to sponsor keywords or hire "positioning" consultants to secure a good ranking.

Then there are bloggers. With no deliberate effort, many dedicated weblog publishers are finding their blogs rank high on search results for topics that, oftentimes, they claim to know practically nothing about.

Why Search Engines Like Blogs - And Will Continue To Do So
While competitors like Teoma are catching up, Google is the most popular search engine, and for good reason. It consistently gives high ranking to quality sites that are relevant to the user’s search request.

Google’s secret? The programmers found a clever way to incorporate human intelligence into Google's search results. Google gets such good results because it uses the assumption that if a site is good, the human beings who run other web sites will link to it. Further, a site must be really good if other good sites link to it. As explained at the Google web site:

In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

In summary, a page will tend to rank higher in Google's search engine results listing if many other sites have built links to it. Links from popular sites will provide even more of a boost.

Why does this matter? As a New York Times article explained, a high search engine ranking is critical in promoting a business on the Internet. In fact, experienced web site operators often find that they get better results from free search engine rankings than they get from paid ads.

Some conventional web site operators who understand how this ranking system works have gone to great lengths to boost their popularity. One method is to establish “link farms.� These are phony web pages that do nothing but provide links intended to artificially boost search engine rankings. Search engine operators look on this practice with disfavor, and have blacklisted web sites using them. Blacklisting can lead to significant financial reversals. One blacklisted site reported a subsequent 75 per cent drop in visitors. However, the benefits of having many links to your web site are so high that some web site operators are willing to gamble on link farms and other shady practices.

Now that we understand how search engines work, and why links to a site are so important, let’s examine why well-run blogs tend to get much better visibility than conventional web sites. One of the reasons is a side effect of something we’ve talked about already: RSS. A recent Wired article, Why Google Wanted Blogger quoted Chris Cleveland, CEO of Dieselpoint, a Chicago search software company:

[M]any weblogs are readable in RSS, or rich site summary, a standard syndication format that is easily parsed and indexed by search engine spiders, the bots that search engines use to crawl and index the Web. "Web pages are hard to index without a standard structure," said Cleveland. "But Google can easily index RSS feeds."

In brief, it is easier for search engines to understand blog content than conventional web site content. Therefore, they tend to rank blogs higher than they would a conventional web site that has identical substantive content.

In a few years, sophisticated conventional web site operators are going to realize why they are getting the short end of the stick. They will demand that standard web site design software like Dreamweaver and Microsoft FrontPage 2002 include RSS output features. When that day finally arrives, will the blog visibility advantage evaporate?

The blog popularity edge will be diminished when this happens, but it will definitely not disappear. The RSS advantage is not the only thing blogs have going for them. Search engines also favor:

1. Newer content over older, and

2. Sites that have more links to them, especially if the links are from other popular sites

Even when conventional web site operators wise-up, and the advantage blogs presently have because of RSS is neutralized, these two factors will still tend to give blogs the edge over conventional web sites:

Because it is so much easier to update blogs, it’s difficult for conventional web sites to compete with them on freshness of content. Further, this is a rich-get-richer situation: As the result of a policy change a few months ago, Google’s spiders now re-index sites that are frequently updated, including most blogs, every day, whereas they may only re-index the typical static web site once a month or less.


It’s also hard for conventional sites to compete on link popularity. There is an active community of bloggers, and the culture tends to encourage them to link to each other. There is even a category of blogs called “referrers.� They do nothing but link to other blogs that are considered interesting, sometimes with commentary, sometimes without.
The blog culture means it is easy for a decent blog to attract links from other popular blogs, thus boosting its search engine standing. Good blogs don’t need “link farms� or other shady practices. They don’t have to manipulate the system, because they attract popularity-boosting links naturally.

Hello guest,

Thank you for an excellent and most educational article!