An Outbreak of Blogging: Get the Doctor Fast, Print Magazines and PR Departments

I proudly announced to my dance class today that I had attended the BlogHer Conference over the week-end--800 women bloggers, a beautiful thing to see, etc., etc., still full of enthusiasm for what I had just experienced.

There was a group wrinkled brow and comments:

"I don't know. I don't get the blogging thing."

" I feel like I'm wasting my time when I sit at the computer and read all that stuff."

"A real time-sink."

These are women mostly in their 40s and 50s, who consider themselves with-it. Otherwise, they wouldn't be learning this new dance/exercise technique called NIA. In fact, someone, ironically, actually brought up this "willingness to take risks" and referenced an article they'd read in a magazine about risk-taking (it was in Men's Health!) and proceeded to say how we're all women ready to take risks (a good thing, judging from the directional shaking of heads around the room). They were talking about NIA, not blogging.

"How many of you have read a blog?" I asked. Everyone shoook their heads in the other direction, as in 'No."

"Wow!" was all I could say. Do they think they're just personal journals and boring diaries? I offered to make a list of some good ones so they could taste a pu-pu platter of blogs. We'll see what happens.

CEOs are apparently unaware of blogging, too. As the NY Times pointed out in "All the Internet's a Stage. Why Don't CEOs Use It?" this past week-end. They mentioned Jonathan Schwartz at Sun Microsystems as one of the only CEOs who blogs and who apparently values open communication. Although not mentioned in this article, GM's CEO is another. That's two. TWO??? I note that most CEOs are also in their 40s and 50s. Is this an age thing? Uh-oh. And the train is definitely leaving the station.

This reminds me of CEOs and other executives in the 80s who thought that the computer was only for secretaries and wouldn't be caught dead with one in their offices. We all know what happened to those guys (and they were all guys then).

Don't they realize that the pace of blogging is moving far faster than other technologies and comunication techniques before it? At least geometrically. Incredible that so many leaders are so far behind. I'm wondering: what's happening in business schools re: blogging? I think Debbie Weil will be teaching somewhere big soon.

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Lonely?

Researchers tell us that we Americans have fewer close confidants than ever before. A few years ago, the average was three and this year it's down to two people that qualify for important discussions. And the percentage of people who put one non-relative in this group went down fairly precipitously, from 80% to 57%, implying that we don't have time to make friends or we don't go outside our own families or our definition of friendship may have shifted.

On the other hand, we've just found out from the Pew Research folks that there are now 12 million people blogging, with males and females taking to this new communication form almost equally. Even more interesting, 57 million people are reading blogs regularly. And the majority of the blogs have to do with the experience of just living life, in spite of the high profile ones on politics and tech. Sounds like people are discussing important things.

And blogs, people talking about what's important to them, are definitely a huge way to get the word out--about almost anything, according to Steve Rubel, among others.

Does anyone have any idea how many emails a day there are or in a month or a year? Don't some percentage of those count as important discussions? Ironic that high tech has pushed us into what had become an outmoded way of expressing ourselves just a few years ago--writing. As some fabulous letter-writers of centuries past knew, far more depth and intimacy can often be expressed in writing than in face-to-face conversations. And, bonus for our minds, thoughtful writing usually takes good thinking.

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