Dear Readers,
The train keeps rolling on! Welcome to the third issue of the BlogAbroad.com Express. This installment will focus on blogging in the news. There have been so many examples of this recently, that we will just pinpoint a few things we find particularly interesting.
What it boils down to is this - blogging has become incredibly popular. There are now Google-esque websites dedicated entirely to blogging. Education related publications now have entire sections of blogs. For example, Next Step Magazine has high school seniors and recent college students blogging their adventures in a similar fashion to our own BlogAbroad.com, and eSchool News has educators blogging about how they think blogging is the wave of the future for education. They are right, but the future is already here.
In case you need any more proof that blogging has arrived, multiple Emmy winning show The West Wing had an entire story line focused around the Deputy Chief of Staff getting mixed up with blogs. It doesn't get any more mainstream than that.
As always, we hope you enjoy your ride aboard the BlogAbroad Express.
Sincerely,
The BlogAbroad.com Team (John, Drew, Matt & Kim)
Blog's Number One
CNN and MSNBC both broke a story at the same time. It wasn't a scandal or a special bulletin, but it came as a surprise to many. It was a report that Merriam-Webster, the company behind the number one dictionary in the world, had cited "blog" as its most searched word of 2004.
What this means is that more people searched online for a definition of the word "blog" than any other word in the English language. Other words that made up the top ten searched words were directly related to big news events of the year. Incumbent, electoral, insurgent, and partisan obviously came out of the high interest in the last presidential election. In a year with an abundance of hurricanes, the word "hurricane" was the number five searched word. Cicada was number six, easily attributed to the massive swarms of cicadas that rampaged large parts of the earth last year.
What does this mean? If something was big news, words relating to it were big words. Blog was the number one word. That means it got a great deal of press in 2004. Enough to make people search that word over every other. That is astounding. That shows how important blogs have become in a short amount of time and how vital they have the potential to become.
Some people blog on a daily basis. Some even do it hourly. In some instances, blogging has even replaced e-mail altogether (it is seen as too "ancient"). The popularity of blogging shows that humans want to share their experiences with others. People seem to genuinely take joy in learning about the lives of others, even if they have never actually met the person in person. It truly is a virtual world.
Blogging and Business
Given the popularity of blogs and their prevalence in the news, it's hardly surprising that many businesses heard about them too and started adopting them as a form of marketing. The Geico gecko, for example, has a fictional blog about what is happening in his "life". McDonald's created a fictitious story of a French fry that looked like Abraham Lincoln's profile and you can read the blog from the fry's supposed owner. And here is a link to a story from the Detroit Free Press about how General Motors is using blogs in an attempt to change the face of consumer communication. These many examples demonstrate the power that blogs are establishing in the consumer arena.
Business Week identified this same trend in an article published by Lauren Gard on Monday, December 6 called "The Business of Blogging." In it, Gard discusses the sudden rise of blogs, particularly during the 2004 election. During the election, mainstream media struggled to keep up with the pace of blogs, which could publish valuable bits of information quickly and easily. This established blogging as a genuine media source that couldn't be ignored.
Advertisers saw this and thought, "Hmm, maybe we should take advantage of blogging." Then they saw numbers showing the effectiveness of online advertising. Then they saw the number of bloggers and blog readers. They quickly stopped wondering and started developing marketing for blogs. Now, according to Gard, media-buying firm BlogAds is, "placing ads on 50 to 100 blogs a day for up to 20 advertisers, including Sharp Electronics Corp. and Walt Disney Co."
What are these staggering numbers the advertisers are seeing? The Pew Internet and American Life Project published some amazing statistics on the blogging phenomenon in January 2005. They reported that in 2004 alone, blog readership rose 58% to encompass 27% of Internet users or 32 million people. That's quite a market and as the trend picks up speed, the numbers continue to rise even faster.
This is the third of many action packed newsletters detailing the adventures of Phil, Jackie, and Emma. We will continue to follow them as they explore the world. We will also continue providing useful information about studying abroad and blogging, as we feature different programs, provide answers to your questions, and more. Tell us what you would like to see in future issues of this newsletter.
