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John Blossom is an analyst focusing on B2B (business-to-business) content delivery and distribution. His research, in-depth quality research reports, his blog and his consulting work is all centered around the need to understand and make greater sense of the deep changes affecting traditional content publishers, the possible risks and opportunities available to them in the future.

I have had the honour of meeting John Blossom not long ago here in Rome, as he was here for an international conference.

Here is his comprehensive take on blogs, as captured during a long night walk near Castle Saint Angel. Here is what John had to say (click to read the full text transcript).

"First of all I'm a conservative person that way, so I don't say blog, it sounds like something I vomited.

I tend to like to use the word weblog.

It's a little bit more human-sounding or at least maybe something that somebody may want to use rather than rigurgitate.

A weblog is the ability of an individual to express himself to any size audience they please or that the world pleases, I suppose.

Anybody can publish it, my mother could publish it, I'm thankful that she doesn't.

But even people like myself who would like to communicate with the world, we get to write things in a very simple piece of software, push one button, and all of a sudden we are communicating with the world.

I hope it is something that will revolutionize the way people listen to and treat one another.

With a weblog people can be authors, in ways that other technology tools have not allowed people to express themselves as an author.

With older software that was used on the web such as community forums, and what have you, there's always an element for one opinion having the potential to be controlled or dominated by another opinion.

With weblogs, since there's no intermediary, no moderator, people have the complete freedom to express themselves to the world as they please.

So, I think that's probably the simplest thing about weblogs that is perhaps the most revolutionary. That unimpeded expression can make its way to the web with virtually no technology in between.

That to me is the true advantage of the tool. The technology is trivial from a technology perspective, but the fact that people can use it so powerfully is the true value of the thing.

[Weblogs] are and have become mainstream media in the process. In many instances. After all we have more than 10 million blogs,...and I know that's an old number at this point. We're probably, it's not quite exponential, but we probably have more than 15 million blogs, one blog is born every second.

In many instances, we have people from mainstream media using weblogs. We have people who are respected by the media, who are breaking news on weblogs.

Sometimes journalists use weblogs as sources for their own newstories and occasionally even attribute them as sources. So the importance of weblogs to mainstream media at this point is already established although not highly popularized in mainstream media.

With the recent acquisition of Weblogs,Inc. by America Online, now called AOL, we see that weblogs are indeed media properties that the media has recognized that they are valuable enough in their ability to pull advertising and audiences to be worthy of being incorporated in large media properties.

Their importance cannot be denied in any sense."

This entry was posted by Robin Good on Friday, December 23, 2005 at 2:25 PM and is filed under Video Clips. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

 

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