Omaha World Herald Article on Blogs

February 06 2005 – 06:02pm

I just ran across an article on blogs in the Omaha World Herald (this link will be dead within few weeks, a testament to the tech-savviness of the OWH).

They define a blog as “An online diary; a personal chronological log of thoughts published on the Web; also called Weblog, Web log” and make no mention of the benefits of blogging for businesses, self promotion, just how RSS allows one to “read entries from several different blogs on one site,” how blogs help power popular search engines such as Google, or how blogs are turning marketing and advertising upside down. I know newspapers are written at the third-grade level, but this is ridiculous.

The article explains how to set up a weblog like this: “Anybody can do it. If you’re technically savvy, you can create a Web page for your blog that’s based in your own machine. It’s not easy – there aren’t any places to click or windows to open, just long strings of computer commands.” Huh? In all fairness, they do go on to mention blogger.com.

WANT TO WRITE A BOOK?
Download your FREE copy of How to Write a Book »
(for a limited time)

Then there is the blogs that they link to in the article. I get the feeling they didn’t spend very much time scouring the internet for the best in Omaha blogs. Kenneth Ross’s blog is a pretty decent representation of what a blog is, but Cathie English’s blog hasn’t been updated in over nine months! Jitterblogs.org opens to an excessively prominent disclaimer, which links to another page, which links to five blogs, two of which have zero posts, one that has one post (from five months ago), and another that also hasn’t been updated in five months. Certainly, simply by clicking on “Omaha” in someone’s blogger profile, they would have stumbled upon the hub of Omaha-based blogging.

Maybe they don’t want to generate too much interest in blogs, seeing as how blogs and technology such as RSS threaten to make newspapers, and the old method of advertising that powers them, extinct.