Adrants is a blog. Do you care? I didn’t think so. I bet you come here because there’s content you like which is all that really matters. In today’s Ad Age, Simon Dumenco wrote a piece entitled A Blogger is Just A Writer With A Cooler Name in which he breaks down the facade that blogging is something other than what it is: just a really easy way to publish a website. We read Dumenco’s piece with appreciative glee that someone finally agreed with our position on the topic.
While lots of bloggers (writers as Dumenco defines) seem to get a kick out of sticking it to the man or mainstream media as “the man” is currently defined, all bloggers do when blogging is efficiently publish content and offer commentary on news or another person’s opinion and the framework through which they publish that opinion. For some reason, the blog publishing platform has been equated to snarky opinion making which, to some degree, is fair as most blogs don’t have editors are are written purposefully to ruffle feathers. But plenty of feathers are ruffled through mainstream media as well.
There is a perception that blog equals snark and that’s why mainstream media steers clear of the platform for its main publishing needs. That’s stupid. Again, it’s just a really easy way to publish a website. Because it’s easy to publish, for sure, there will be a lot more published voices (mostly irrelevant)but it doesn’t mean Ad Age has to suddenly become Adrants or that The New York Post has to become Gawker. The blog publishing platform does not dictate the tone. The publisher does.
Dumenco also calls into question the vast array of widgets, segregated search engines and research tools that seek to separate blogs from the rest of the online world. From the average Joe’s perspective, it’s pointless to compartmentalize blogs when average Joe doesn’t know the difference between a blog and a regular website. He shouldn’t have to make that distinction either. Search should be search. A person shouldn’t be required to differentiate between whether the content they are searching for is on a blog or on a website.
All this developing technology surrounding the blog platform is a very good thing. Some very inventive and helpful tools have been created but there’s no reason they should be limited to blogs or that they should be used to somehow classify blogs as better or worse than a “regular” website. There’s also no reason a “regular” website should whole heartedly embrace weblog technology to publish its content in the exact same tone and style it always has – just a lot cheaper and a lot more efficiently.
It’ll all be moot in a few years anyway as Dumenco says publishers currently locked into archaic, dot-com era, expensive, legacy publishing software will convert their entire operation to the blog/rss/podcast/vidcast/conversational platform then we’ll all be bloggers. Or just writers as Dumenco says we are and always have been.
