In my book outline, I list the advantages of a small business blog. Here are two new ones.
Speed
Humans have been able to travel a thousand miles since the whenever it was that we began walking upright. But a thousand miles in two hours? Big impact culturally and economically. Web publishing has been around since the mid 90s but it typically took specialized knowledge and pricey software tools to get content up on a website. Blogging changed that for millions of people. Sit down at any web-connected computer in the world and you can publish whatever’s on your mind within seconds of composing it. Any phone can be used to blog an audio commentary within seconds of hanging up. Any camera-equipped cell phone can be used to blog a photo within seconds of snapping it. And multi-function PDAs like the Treo 600 can do all three: audio, photos, and text.
One idea at a time
A weblog makes it possible to publish one small idea or chunk of infomation at a time. A magazine article, a newspaper column, a paper for a journal, a newsletter — all typically require more comprehensive, flushed-out treatment of an idea, opinion, event. A blog has no such expectation and since each blog posting has its own URL, it actually encourages smaller, single idea posts which then can easily be linked to by site visitors who have their own blogs. I first heard these from Anil Dash, Vice President of Business Development at SixApart when we served on a business blogging panel together for Ad-Tech conference in NYC last fall titled Blogging for Business: Using Weblogs for Marketing and Nano-Publishing. SixApart is the developer of the Movable Type and Typepad blogging platforms.
