March 8, 2004

Blogs in the News: Baseball, Blogads and More

Reporter Michael Silence of the Knoxville News Sentinel is one reporter who understands blogging and writes about it intelligently. He's back with two more stories today. This one offers brief profiles of some East Tennessee bloggers. (For my non-Tennessee readers, Tennessee has three regions - East Tennessee includes the city of Knoxville, Middle Tennessee has Nashville, and West Tennessee has Memphis. I'm in Middle Tennessee.) Silence's other story today looks at how some Tennessee blogs are now carring paid advertising. HobbsOnline gets a mention - and, yes, you can advertise to my readers, now about 1,500 per day on average, for only $20 a week.

USA Today writes about baseball blogs today.

Some are sophomoric prattle, but a surprisingly high percentage have well-written articles and opinions worthy of any newspaper, magazine or professional Web site.

"Blogs haven't hit the mainstream yet," said Steve Outing, a senior editor at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. "I equate it to desktop publishing in the 1980s. A Macintosh computer could create a very professional-looking newsletter, and that was a powerful thing. Now you have this platform for people to address even narrow topics.

"This is just the start of it. Blogs are only going to get more popular."

Meanwhile, WebProNews.com says blogs "mean better listings on Google," and ticks off four kinds of blogs: the Thought Leadership Blog, the Customer Relations Blog, the Peer Marketing Blog and the Media Relations Blog.