A Blog? What The Hell Is A Blog?

A few years ago, it was all the rage. Everybody had a blog, and everybody linked to everybody else’s blogs and then along came Facebook and Twitter. All of a sudden, people stopped reading blogs. Sure… people still write things on blogs, and once in a while, people link to them and things get read, but not nearly as much as they used to. Suddenly, everybody and their brother (and sisters, mothers, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, grandkids, friends, bosses, employees, and anybody else with a pulse) started getting on “the Facebook” and sharing every little detail about their lives with anybody who wanted to “like” you.

They all started to grow crops and build cities together. They started to form into groups of people that were interested in the same things… music, games, ideas, political views, colors, cars… anything. All of a sudden, people stopped paying attention to the blogs that they used to read. They didn’t think they should have to go to some other website to be able to find out what was important to them. Sure, there were some blogs that remained relatively popular. In order to remain that way, they had to post links to each of their posts from Facebook and Twitter. They simply HAD to have people on those networks that would be willing to click on an external link and be led, like sheep, to their web sites.

Then, the businesses started to show up. Not only did blog readership go down, but visitors to business websites started to take a hit. The only way that they could get more people to show up was to be involved in social media. Since everybody started hanging out at the Facebook and tweeting each other all the time, they realized that they had to be there. They had to inject themselves into this new thing, in order to bring people back to the old thing.

Now, a new experiment is starting to starting to shine on the horizon. The world’s largest search company has decided to start their own “social network”. At this time, we’re just getting a glimpse of what it may become, and most of the people that have seen the light are drawn to it like moths to a flame. The big difference between what Google+ (Google Plus) is, compared to anything else is actually not very obvious, at all. A lot of people have tried to compare G+ to Facebook or Twitter, but trying to do that is like trying to compare apples and oranges to a 7 course dinner.

The difference in Google+ is a mixture of what is does have and also what it doesn’t have. Without going into detail, I’ll just say that it offers so much more, while offering a whole lot less (which is a good thing). Because of what it is, I see myself getting back to actually reading blogs that I used to read, and surely finding more that I haven’t yet discovered. Because of what it is, I also see myself spending a lot more time engaging in conversations about things that are posted there, since I don’t have to leave the site to read somebody’s blog, somewhere else. Full posts can be made, without having to create a link to make people “read more”.

In this post, I’m mainly speaking about the death of blogs. I’m still trying to wrap my head around how G+ will be able to help business websites. I have a few of those, myself, and most of the accounts that I’ve associated with those sites are also using Google Apps, I’ll have to wait and see. Google Apps users are not yet able to use Google+. In a big way, I think it might be a good idea to leave it that way. We’ll see what the future brings, though.