When blogs first began to get traction – not sure when exactly, but several year back, I remember that the headlines and discussion really centered around how blogs were going to replace corporate news sources. The idea that anyone could produce, publish and distribute content was proclaimed to provide an end to the publics reliance on (possibly) corrupt or inept news sources. Fine – maybe blogs did a little bit of that. Maybe some people today read blogs and no longer rely on traditional media for their news sources.
But what I’ve noticed is that increasingly I am turning to blogs not for the latest news but for expertise on a particular topic. It seems to me that blogs are beginning to replace not just news sources, but books. When I search for information on a certain topic, I am not looking for the latest breaking story, I am looking for an authority on that specific topic. This becomes particularly powerful as you extend it down the long-tail to where there are all sorts of niches of expertise. Blogs can help you get vegetarian recipes, advice on horse breeding, inside tips on aquatic plant growing, or advice on traveling to argentina. This is a fundamental difference in how blogs are used and important to consider when organizing the information. I looked at some of the top sites that help someone find information in blogs and determined if they considered blogs as sources of news, or reference. It seems that Technorati, and Google Blog Search continue to regard blogs as news sources while some of the new entrants such as MyBlogLog and Lijit look at blogs more as reference sources, but perhaps still not as much as possible. If you really start to think of blogs as books and not newspapers, there seems to be some opportunity for a disruptive company here…