JOMC 191.3 Blogging, We the Media and Virtual Communities

This Business Week article reviews why advertisers are going after blogs. “Why the push? While few blogs generate much revenue, they introduce a new, promising micromedia model. Blogs are cheap, easily updated, and can focus on a niche market with passionate followers — an advertiser’s dream. ”

If you ask the bloggers at the local meet-up, I doubt they would uniformly consider themselves an advertising venue–most blog for specific reasons–technical, personal diary, etc., but I doubt they would think of themselves as an advertisers dream.

This argument is basically that blogs allow advertisers to target a specific audience where they will see an ad presumably from a trusted source–the blogger. Do you think this will increase trust in bloggers or decrease it?

Usability guru (or all round pain) Jakob Nielsen lays it on the line to bloggers (including me) as he lists his Top 10 Weblog Usability Mistakes:

1. No Author Biographies
2. No Author Photo
3. Nondescript Posting Titles
4. Links Don’t Say Where They Go
5. Classic Hits are Buried
6. The Calendar is the Only Navigation
7. Irregular Publishing Frequency
8. Mixing Topics
9. Forgetting That You Write for Your Future Boss
10. Having a Domain Name Owned by a Weblog Service

See his site, alertbox, for the full description of each.
Note: Nielsen does not use RSS nor does he support comments or trackbacks. A number of my Top Ten Mistakes right there, Jakob.