Blogging is a first generation tool built on, and taking advantage of, the unique attributes of the Internet. Blogging has becoming a way for regular Joes to generate an income. Blogging has become a vital social media tool for any person or organization. When you first start to blog, you don't ever have any long term readers but all you can ever think about is blogging. After a while, you do find some regular readers, but then blogging becomes a chore and you start to feel guilty if it's been a while.



Blogs can be *used* for journalism, but they can also chronicle the daily habits of domesticated cats. Blogs represent just a very small drop into the big ocean of the IT and the media worlds. The bulk of the blogs will be of averagepopularity, and the highs and lows will not be too far different fromthis average. Though there are more new bloggers and more new readers every day,most of the new readers are adding to the traffic of the top fewblogs, while most new blogs are getting below average traffic, a gapthat will grow as the weblog world does. Meanwhile, the long tail of weblogs with few readers will becomeconversational.

Internet users found two percent of online households access a blog at least once a week and Forrester characterized the average blog reader as a "young, nerdy male. Vlogs also often take advantage of web syndication to allow for the distribution of video over the Internet using either the RSS or Atom syndication formats, for automatic aggregation and playback on mobile devices and personal computers. During the same few years that Video Nation was getting started the internet was evolving into a world wide web but, at first, the bandwidth and processing power required to do video online made it a difficult proposition for most people. Early blogs were started by Web enthusiasts who would post links to cool stuff that they found on the Internet. This is a trend well underway on the Internet as a whole. As the internet continues to be the future, the prominence of blogs will continue to rise.

Bloggers were quite critical in keeping the story alive and actually distributing some of the government documents and in forcing some very uncomfortable questions to the government. Bloggers would speak their mind about a product, service, or company and that was it. Bloggers themselves have mixed feelings about the impact of their work. Fortunately, more and more events invite bloggers as companies start to understand that bloggers reach a much bigger audience than *traditional* press. A persistent theme among people writing about the social aspects ofweblogging is to note (and usually lament) therise of an A-list, a small set of webloggers who account for amajority of the traffic in the weblog world. Because it arises naturally, changing this distribution would meanforcing hundreds of thousands of bloggers to link to certain blogs andto de-link others, which would require both global oversight and theapplication of force.

Implement a blog into your Internet marketing strategy, and you will see the advantages social media can offer your organization. Many companies are already part of the social media phenomenon, others still need to implement blogs into their Internet marketing strategy. It's a give-and-take conversation, much more so than e-mail marketing.