Planet of The Blogs.

Does anyone care about websites anymore?

I wondered about this as I saw some numbers through Technorati on the exponential growth of blogs, and the swift rate at which new ones are launched. Technorati’s directory alone lists somewhere in the neighborhood of 29 million blogs.

Chances are, if you’re one of the six people out there who happen to read this blog, you came to it via a link off another blog. When did this happen?

For a long time, websites were like the humans in the Planet of the Apes. They were in charge, and blogs were furry little pets you kept on a leash to do chores. Then, next thing you know, Chuck’s in a cage and the blogs are talking and running the show.

Weren’t websites, newsgroups and email lists supposed to be the de facto standard forever? (If not for the next decade or two.) Now, everywhere you click, there’s a blog. Name someone who doesn’t have one yet. Ok, maybe the Pope. Um, wait a sec, too late.

(Continued here.)

Technically, a blog is a website. Duh, that’s where it got it’s name – web log. In the bigger sense though, websites were supposed to be the one-stop shopping place for all our entertainment and business needs. Everyone had to have a website, it was just the way it was. An internet business card if you will.

Things changed though.

The car replaced the horse and buggy. The plane replaced the, well, whatever it replaced. TV almost replaced radio. With the introduction of the internet and web, they’re now on the verge of replacing radio and TV as we know it, if not altering the landscape outright. And mobile phones are fast threatening to merge all three. But websites were to be the real instruments of that media evolution.

Or so we thought.

When someone created an online diary around 1995 and called it a blog, they forgot to tell websites they would possibly end up as useful as an appendix. Keep it. Take it out. Doesn't matter. You’ll survive. (I could say sites might become extinct, but thanks to the Amish, even the horse and buggy survives to this day. So for now, let’s just say their 15 minutes of fame may be running out.)

But what’s happening now, is that most of the best content I get is from blogs. Same with my friends. Don’t take my word for it. See for yourself. Check out 1/2 the links on your blog or a blog of someone you like. Count how many there are and see how many are actually websites.

Blogs now have everything a regular site has – and more. Audio. Video. Stories. Links. Comments from other bloggers. They’re easy to update and maintain. Most can be hosted for free with little or no programming knowledge. All you need is a blog, a keyboard and a topic.

You no longer need a network website to get news and information either. Just subscribe to the RSS feed of CNN, the Weather Channel or ESPN and voilá! You save money by cutting out the middle-man: the websites themselves. All you need is a browser and an aggregator. Now the consumer has control over what info they get, and when they get it.

Turning our attention to brands for a sec, they are usually the last ones to figure things out. By this point in the game, we know all of them have websites. However, their experiment with blogs to get the message out has not been successful yet.

The best they can do right now are blogs geared around product launches created by their agencies, and seeded with comments and inflated claims that just don’t ring true with the consumer: ‘Hey guys! It’s really cool. Try diet Pepsi with vanilla!’

Consumers are a smart bunch though, and see through the act. (Especially if they hate vanilla.) The good ones though, take the brand message to a higher level in a way that engages, not enrages consumers. When brands on a large scale finally figure out how to use blogs the right way and talk directly to the consumer and engage those opinions, that’s when things will get interesting. And when that happens, goodbye brand websites.

One example off the top of my head is Marc Cuban on his blog, where he talks directly with the fans and solicits their feedback. There are others to be sure, but they are in the minority.

The bottom line is that blogs have now done what websites were originally supposed to: empower everyone to communicate better. That they have. And that they’ve done so at the expense of what we thought was the traditional website is the real twist.

Tags: advertising, blogs, brands, Technorati, websites