A week or so ago, I had a chance to meet up with some personal bloggers, and one of the questions that arose from that gathering was whether blogging as we know it would be around in five years. The basis for the question was the rise of simplified rich media creation and the development of semantic technology that makes locating the media more feasible.
I thought about this for a while. I've been reading blogs for around eight years. I've contributed content both as an author and as a commenter for about six of them. I've read a lot of blogs... personal, professional, and corporate. Rich media has a seductive lure, but I don't think it's for everyone.
Creation of video and audio content is certainly easier and cheaper to do than it was four or five years ago. Free or inexpensive video editing software, Adobe Flash's support for streaming video, and the ease of uploading content on sites like YouTube have created a boom in this area. Indeed, just about anyone with enough desire to be seen has put a clip or two on that site.
The downside to rich media is that if you want to stand out, the quality bar gets raised several notches higher. In the business world, minimally edited output from a camcorder or a webcam won't do it. You're going to have to look good, or at least have good presentation graphics, for people to not only push the Play button, but also stick with the clip all the way through. You're probably going to have to have an expert at the helm.
Contrast this with how corporate blogging works with Compendium's hosted service. Employees across your organization contribute, so you can harness the creative energies of many, not just a few. You get to retain content control through an approval process. And you can always add rich media, when it makes sense, by embedding an object in the post's HTML.
Blogs are also search engine friendly. Even with semantic aids that are becoming increasingly available for rich media, the added overhead of tagging and annotating media imposes an added burden that may not always be met consistently by your organization. Compendium's blog pages use a structure that is rich in semantic detail, aiding search engines in focusing upon the most relevant parts of your content.
Finally, blogs are reader friendly. Information overload is an undisputed problem we all have to deal with. To deal with it effectively, people have to train themselves to filter through the deluge for relevant bits and pieces. You can do this easily with a blog post. It is less possible with podcasts and video. When someone is in a hurry to find something, which do you think will help the prospective customer not only find you, but also learn whether you are going to meet their needs?
Compendium is helping to shape the future of corporate blogging, both on the consumption side, with people and search engine friendly content presentation, and on the creation side, with tools that make the blogging experience more enjoyable to the author and accountable toward ROI.
When you take all of this into account, corporate blogging is definitely in it for the long haul. We'll be glad to help you along the way.
