Over at the internet marketing blog One Degree, Toronto-based online business guru Bill Sweetman writes about how a non-computer, non-tech, non-internet business is making use of a corporate blog. The article, titled Blogging with the Whales, covers the blog run by a New Brunswick company that offers whale-watching cruises. Bill writes:

The blog is maintained by Danielle, a marine biology graduate in charge of photographing, identifying and recording the whales and sharing that information with various marine research organizations. Danielle’s blog chronicles through words and photos (by Danielle) the recent whale sightings and had been updated earlier the day I first looked at the blog with photos of whales that had been spotted that morning.

I was immediately captivated by the near-immediacy of this information and the fact it chronicled the spontaneous nature of whale watching. The “Sightings and Updates” blog also demonstrated to me that Quoddy Link Marine really cared about whales and the environment, not just selling whale tour tickets. Thanks to their blog, I also felt one degree closer to the people behind this tour company than with those from any of their competitors.

If you're wondering if having a corporate blog can help your company attract new business, you might want to read the article.

According to a report on blogging released by the Pew Internet and American Life Project titled Bloggers: A Portrait of the Internet's New Storytellers [260K PDF], 8 percent of internet users -- that's about 12 million American adults -- keep a blog. An even larger segment of internet users, 39 percent, or about 57 million American adults, read blogs.

Among the report's findings:

• Here's what bloggers blog about:   
         
  • 37% of bloggers use them as personal journals
         
  • 11% blog about government and politics
         
  • 7% blog about entertainment
         
  • 6% blog about sports
         
  • 5% blog about general news and current events.
     
• 54% of bloggers are under 30, evenly split between men and women.
• Where bloggers live:   
         
  • More than half live in the suburbs
         
  • One-third live in urban areas
         
  • 13% live in rural areas.
     
• Bloggers are less likely to be white than the general internet population, which is 74% white. Of bloggers:   
         
  • 60% are white
         
  • 19% are Hispanic
         
  • 11% are African-American
         
  • 10% identified themselves as members of some other race.
     
• 52% of bloggers said that they are blogging for themselves.
• 52% of bloggers said that their major reason for blogging was to express themselves creatively.
• 50% of bloggers said that their major reason for blogging was to document and share personal experiences.

If you'd like to read the report itself, you can download both the report and the questionnaire used to make the report from this page.

If you'd like to read some of the reportage on the report, check out these links:

   
• New York Times
   
• Washington Post
   
• San Francisco Chronicle

Tedra Osell, a professor of English Literature at the University of Guelph, says that blogging began back in the 1700s, when people published their own writing and circulated them around the coffee houses and homes of England. In a Montreal Gazette article titled Blogs a hit in the cafes of the 1700s, she says that these self-published works, "often just a single sheet, brought about social change by highlighting debates over politics, women's roles, fashions and behaviour".

The phenomenon was not limited to one side of the Atlantic. In the colonial U.S., the Pamphleteers did the same as the self-publishers in England. The most famous of them, Thomas Paine, wrote what were essentially blog entries on why the colonies should seek independence. According to the blog Eric's Grumbles before the Grave:

His pamphlet was printed enough times that virtually every adult man and woman in the Colonies potentially owned a copy, and very likely 80% of them did. He laid the case so well that, by the time the Continental Congress met in June to take up the case of What To Do™, popular support had shifted from reconciliation to independence. He did all this without being a major publisher, having the support of a major newspaper, being backed by any government or other organization or even being particularly wealthy. Indeed, he did such a good job that John Adams is known to have said, after the Declaration of Independence, "History is to ascribe the American Revolution to Thomas Paine."

The idea of bloggers-as-pamphleteers isn't a new one. Here are some other articles that put forth this idea:

• Bloggers: The Pamphleteers of Today
• Attack of the Printing Press! A good comeback to Daniel Lyons' poorly-reasoned Forbes attack piece on blogs in which the blogging/pamphleteer parallel is used well.
• 400 years of Blogging
  

The Daily Advertiser, which is based in Lafayette, Louisiana, has an article on how blogs are changing political discourse:

Ben Domenech, a former Bush administration intern who launched the conservative RedState.com, was dumped in late March as a blogger at Washingtonpost.com after liberal rivals unearthed plagiarism in his work, triggering a flurry of Internet commentary, known as a "swarm."

Then late last month, the Los Angeles Times suspended columnist Michael Hiltzik's blog after a conservative critic exposed Hiltzik's practice of using pseudonyms to post provocative comments on other blogs.

It's probably a combination of these polticially-charged times coupled with blogs' ability to act as an amplifier for word-of-mouth, which was traditionally had the same limits as your ability to physically travel. Your blog speaks for you even when you're asleep, and thanks to the fact that search engines rank them highly (since search engines "feed" off links and blogs are an excellent source of them), it's considerably more "findable" than you are.

The article has a list of politcal and news events in which blogs have played an important role:

Recent episodes dramatize how swiftly and powerfully they may react, sometimes rivaling mainstream media in their ability to track events and connect the dots in real time, and influencing traditional news coverage. Consider:

• Blogs applied the pressure that led to Trent Lott's 2002 resignation from the U.S. Senate after making what some construed as racist remarks.
  
  
• It was a blogger dubbed "Buckhead" who in 2004 exposed forged documents used by CBS News and Dan Rather in stories about President Bush's National Guard service.
  
  
• Former Sen. Tom Daschle, D-S.D., was unseated two years ago after conservative bloggers attacked him and forced the state's largest newspaper to modify its coverage of the race.
  
  
• Blogs raised early questions about the Bush administration's handling of the Hurricane Katrina crisis. A study by Loyola University Chicago sociologist Lauren Langman concludes that the blogs forced critical mainstream news coverage that weakened support for the president.
  
  
• Last year's U.S. Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers was withdrawn after conservative blogs derided her qualifications. Bush took the unprecedented step of holding a conference call with the bloggers in an unsuccessful attempt to quell criticism.

They say that you can learn many a thing at the foot of your grandparents. They have been through many an event, and had a lifetime of experiences. CNN would also agree. There is a new bracket of blogger out there: The Seniors.

They blog like the rest of us, about life, politics, religion, and interests. Proves again that blogging is for everyone, with every interest. Take a read!

E-marketer presents some good data related to why people blog, how often, and how they are viewed by their readers, take a look!


(article will be available until December 4th)

Some more Katrina-related blogging stories:

• Washington Post: Blogs Provide Storm Evacuees with Neighborhood-Specific News
  
  
• eWeek: An article about Michael "The Interdictor" Barnett (whom we covered earlier): Former Green Beret Stays Online in Katrina's Wake
  
  
• San Diego's North County Times: Web Sites Come of Age in Times of Trouble
  
  
• Ernie the Attorney is the blog of a New Orleans-based lawyer. Ernie has evacuated to Houston, where he's been posting a number of Hurrican Katrina-related entries.
  

He's been at it for a month, but just in case you hadn't heard, The Donald has his own blog, called -- as one might expect -- The Trump Blog. Its subtitle: "Ideas and opinions from Donald Trump and his circle of experts". As Jupiter Research's Michael Gartenberg says, this means that blogging is pretty mainstream now.

From an article on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's site:

Blogging is helping students to think and write more critically, says an Australian researcher, and can help draw out people who would otherwise not engage in debate.

These are the preliminary findings of PhD research by Anne Bartlett-Bragg, a lecturer at the University of Technology, Sydney, who has been using weblogs or blogs in her own teaching since 2001.

"[The students] are thinking more critically," she says. "They are learning to be responsible and they're communicating outside the boundaries of the classroom and the institution, and they like that."

The most fascinating blog to emerge from Hurricane Katrina is Michael "The Interdictor" Barnett's blog, in which he documents what's happening in New Orleans from the 10th floor of a downtown New Orleans building. Barnett is the "crisis manager" at the domain name registrar DirectNIC, which shares its space with its sister company, Zipa, and in a prior life, he was a soldier in the U.S. Army Special Forces seem to have served him well. He's been helping keep the company's servers up and running since the start of the storm last week and blogging about his experience. It's a fascinating read, and I suggest you read it from his first Katrina entry, which simply reads:

Hmm. This could actually be a nasty storm.

Wired has a short piece on Barnett.