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Trade Association for bloggers
By Wolfie | May 20, 2008
I’ve been browsing discussions over at BlogCatalog.com (if you haven’t already, you should check it out - puts you in touch with lots of new bloggers, and can be really good for promotion) and came across this post about a Professional Blog Owners Association.
The guy that started the discussion is involved somewhere along the line (open and frank he has not necessarily been) and he was looking for people to sign up. He was probably expecting an overwhelmingly positive response; if so, then he must be mightily disappointed. Whilst some have said they would be interested, more voices have been raised in opposition, for various reasons. Some have taken him to task for his lack of openness about the whole project, others have argued that they can’t see the relevance or point of such an organisation.
I chimed in with my own two cents, which - as it had grown to blog post length - I’m republishing here.
According to Wordpress.com’s homepage just now, there are 3,160,529 blogs hosted with their service. Even if only 10% are active, that’s still in excess of 316,000 - on one blogging service. Think of all the blogging services there are, and all the self-hosted blogs there are and you come up with a huge number - and you’re starting with 25. Hardly representative and not a very good indication of whether the software will scale properly.
For a ‘Trade’ or ‘Professional’ association to be successful and representative of its industry (as opposed to a bunch of people trying to make themselves sound important) it needs to have a large proportion of the industry as active, supportive members. It doesn’t seem like you’re going to achieve that.
Also, an industry association should work for its members. I don’t mean perks like free hosting, I mean proper work, supporting the members, and the needs of the members. If a member blog gets sued for copyright infringement when in fact they’ve done nothing wrong, will the association be there to fight the bloggers corner with legal advice and representation? That’s the sort of thing I’d expect from an association and what you’re suggesting sounds more like a club.
And what about those members? If you’re only going for the ‘big’ bloggers (which is why you’re only starting with 25 - because there aren’t so many blogging stars to choose from) like Arrington, Scoble, Calacanis and such then I think you’re going to be out of luck, as they won’t want to know; why do they need an association to tell them how to blog? They’re the ones that continually tell us how we should be doing it.
So, perhaps you’re going for the ‘intermediate’ level - those bloggers that run a bit of advertising, do sponsored posts for PPP/Izea/SocialSpark, PayU2Blog, ReviewMe, etc and have a bit of traffic. But they’re not going to want to join either because those services already restrict what they can and can’t do to earn money off their blogs.
Which leaves you with the Wordpress.com, Typepad, Blogger multitudes. Who aren’t going to care because they just blog in their spare time about what interests them, and by calling it a ‘Trade’ or ‘Professional’ association they’ll think it isn’t aimed at them anyway.
I hate to pour water over your idea, as you’ve obviously put work into it and feel it’s worthwhile but I think you’re missing the boat both with the type of organisation you’re putting together and the type of membership that you can expect. Sorry.
But who’s right? Would you - as a blogger of whatever level - want to join such an organisation? Do you think the world of blogging needs it? I’d be intersted in your views, or you can head over to BlogCatalog and leave them there.
Categories: Blogging |
Tags: Association
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:: timethief had this to say:
Hi there,
Thanks for re-posting your submission here. Suffice to say that I said what I had to say in the Blog Catalog discussion thread. I’m not inclined to join such an organization which the OP has now revealed already exists. He is also trying to purchase blogs in another thread http://www.blogcatalog.com/discuss/entry/i-will-buy-your-blog-right-now
timethief’s most recent blog post: GetSocial for WordPress.com bloggers
9:10 pm :: May 20th, 2008