Blog as Network

Chartreuse is one of my favorite bloggers.

He has a post today that's just great about building your blog network. Read it.

This gets at something that's been germinating in my mind for a few weeks. Ever since I saw this other post on Char's site.

Chartreuse is a character on his blog. He writes with force, he gives you insight into what he's up to. His opinions and writing style are consistent so that, as a reader, you feel like you know where he's coming from.

Loren (the guy in the video) is a frequent commenter on Chartreuse (Char has a bevy of frequent commenters - cult style, that's part of what he does well, like Jim Rome in the sports radio world). Loren is also in the new media business himself. He's popped up a few times before on the site, but here Chartreuse is introducing him as a character as well. As you can tell from the video, he's very good on camera. Here Loren pops up again as a character, and is even funnier.

I think a lot of people see "Blog Network" as a network of blogs. I don't think that's the way Chartreuse sees it, and that's not the way I see it. It's more of Blog AS network. A blog and its feeds - that's the wrapping paper that packages a creative voice in the new multimedia universe of web 2.0 into a form that people can consume. It's the best, most flexible and efficient way to do that right now. And it's cheap! So much cheaper than anything we've seen offline.

But I think network is off the mark as a description of this packaging.

What drives this medium is the voice and the community. It is a consistent set of characters, a unifying perspective through which we see those characters - basically a web world. NBC doesn't have that. You don't watch CSI because Les Moonves and the guys from CBS are a real hoot.



If you're going to equate this to something in the traditional media world, it's more like a series than a network.

And that's what's got me thinking in the last couple of weeks - that maybe what Char is trying to do relative to making himself into an entertainment brand can lead us to what I've been seeking since I entered the new media world - how to produce shows that work online, that people want to consume...



For me, that's the holy grail.