BLOGS POWER BROADER VR AUDIENCE!
by Michelle Bienias
BLOGS POWER BROADER VR AUDIENCE!
A few months ago I discovered weblogs, or blogs, as they are commonly called. I had heard the term before but was vague on the details. One glance at the numbers in Hans Nyberg's commentary about the traffic blogs were generating for panorama.dk, and I quickly learned: Blogs are incredibly powerful.
Hans was one of the first in the VR community to discover bloggers, or more precisely, to be discovered by them. Largely due to bloggers' power and influence as a group, Nyberg's fullscreen VR of the week caught on like wildfire. Since blogs source news items and links from other blogs, traffic to popular sites can grow exponentially. In Hans' case, the juggernaut reached its peak when he published the fullscreen VR of New Year's Eve at Times Square by Jook Leung, of 360VR. Thanks to links in many blogs, over 25,000 people viewed that VR in January alone! (Hans gives a very informative rundown of how this happened to him in an article on his site.)
But what exactly are blogs? None of the blogs I've seen, and I've now visited scores of them, are graphically stunning or technologically complex and that's a large part of their appeal. Many are run by one person and structured as a personal website with a standardized format where updates are arranged chronologically, with the most recent at the top of the site while the older posts move down. They vary in range and sophistication; some are dedicated to one specific subject while others are just a collection of anything and everything that interests the blogger: New York gossip at Gawker, the self-explanatory WarDebate, or simply wonderful things, like the long-running boingboing. Because they are updated more frequently than search engines, they?re a great source for new content. In fact, they even have their own search engine, Daypop, and the most popular links on any particular day are featured on Blogdex. Run by MIT's Media Lab, Blogdex indexes and ranks the most popular links from thousands of blogs. If enough blogs are linking to the same thing it rises to the top of the chart.
Blogs hit the mainstream media's radar screen when Google, the highly lauded private company behind the world's most popular search engine of the same name, acquired Pyra Labs, the company behind the popular Blogger software with a million plus registered users. At the time, there was much debate over Google's surprising acquisition, and some wondered if Google had finally made a critical misstep in its meteoric rise from cult status darling of academics and techies to widespread Internet dominance. In a recent interview in AlwaysOn, Google CEO Eric Schmidt revealed some insight on the firm's motives when he said, "this notion of self-publishing, which is what Blogger and blogging are really about, is the next big wave of human communication; it has to do with the combination of empowerment from self-publishing and the sense that there are many, many more viewpoints than we are aware of."
This became exceedingly clear during the recent war in Iraq when "embeds" entered our daily lexicon, reporters at major newspapers started their own blogs (see a list of J-blogs or journalist blogs) and a young Iraqi man reporting daily on events in Baghdad raised concern worldwide when his blog went down for several days, due to technical problems it was later discovered. And members of the VR community have increasingly been joining the stampede.
Virtual Park's VR photographer Erik Goetze's Vrlog was one of the earlier participants with his blog dedicated to VR news, and Australia's Peter Murphy recently launched his Panoramic VR Weblog. The most recent entrant is VRMAG's Marco Trezzini, who launched 3z's Log: The Ultimate Virtual Reality Linksitewith daily VR links and news items (email Marco directly, 3z@webidentity.com, if you've got a new VR or VR news). And while panoramas.dk is not technically a blog, it functions as one for all intents and purposes
Taking my lead from Hans' documented success, I started emailing blogs suggesting links to some of VRMAG's articles and VRs. Bloggers are network-minded and I received friendly emails thanking me for my suggestions, along with the solicited links and subsequent heavy traffic. Before I tried the blogs, I'd worked hard marketing VRMAG to various travel-related and photography forums and portals, trying to bring VRs to viewers outside the VR community, with little success. I felt confident than the audience was out there, I just didn't know how to reach them, and blogs proved to be an excellent vehicle with their idiosyncratic reach of viewers who tend to disdain mainstream media.
In the process, I also discovered some great blogs, and wasted - er - industriously spent many work hours pursuing arcane and interesting trivia, games, tests and bizarre news items about stupid people doing stupid things, usually to themselves. I am sure all this newfound knowledge will prove useful to me, some day.
As a way of modestly thanking some of VRMAG's blog supporters and directing your attention to some cool and noteworthy blogs, here are some of my favorites: Fazed - I have spent more hours than I care to remember at this site with links to all things weird, unusual and cool; BBspot - another good collection of interesting links run by the amiable Brian Briggs; Spanish language siteXeron, dezain.net - a design and photography site in English and Japanese and one of VRMAG's first blog referrers; Bazooka - not too sure what this Swedish is site is all about but they've sent us unsolicited traffic; Taulard - another good blog in French, MilkandCookies- a great site with many cool links; Fark - an extremely popular site with offbeat and often salacious links, getting a link from this site brings a lot of traffic but is rather difficult; ShrimpWars - a popular site from Belgian; linkdump - as the name suggests, a site to dump links; SensibleErection - enough said.
Email: michelle@vrmag.org
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