Saturday, June 03, 2006

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.

4 Comments:

Blogger Adam Elend said...

Interesting point. I neglect mine. I feel like the importance placed on this feature is cyclical - it used to be critical, then it wasn't, now it is.

Nevertheless, I'd like to provide people who check out my site with other interesting sites... so I'll work on mine.

12:22 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Adam, you are the first to really figure out what I am trying to do. Congrats!

11:25 AM  
Blogger Adam Elend said...

Thanks Char - much bigger congrats to you for being the first to actually do it!

7:13 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thanks for the nice words.

7:45 PM  

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