Saturday, March 21, 2009

Why I think blogging is overrated

I do find it ironic that I begin my foray into blogosphere by dissing the very medium I am using. However, with bloggers now being hailed as the new literati and companies falling all over themselves to curry their favor, I find myself feeling a bit skeptical about the power that bloggers hold.

Let me illustrate my point: Recently, I attended a brunch event which invited bloggers to preview a new technology. As the gadget has a wide range of use, the event organizer decided to invite bloggers of varied profiles. Still, imagine my surprise when one of the attendees started taking pictures of the food served rather than the gadget featured. Later on, I found out that the attendee writes a food blog and would, of course, focus on the food, not on the gadget. When I checked out her blog, it devoted at most two sentences saying that So-and-so Company hosted an event to introduce This-New-Thingie, and then a whole slew of pictures and dreamy descriptions on the fricassees, mimosas and sauces. It's like Microsoft inviting a Bon Apetit editor to preview and write about Microsoft Vista. Logically, there's not much that the blogger can say about the gadget (since it is not her area of expertise - or interest, for that matter), and even if she does write about it in her blog, the write-up would appear forced, which is just as bad.

This led me to wonder at the thinking behind appealing to a blogger whose blog is so irrelevant to one's cause (or conversely, one's cause is so irrelevant to her blog). I hope the organizer didn't invite her just to fill an empty seat, but if the organizer thought that this particular blogger could contribute to the discussion about the gadget, then the thinking was that any blogger would do, meaning that any blogger that would write about a particular topic is bound to influence the discussion on that topic.

I think blogging is overrated because of the influence ascribed to them. Yes, some bloggers do hold some influence. But only if they are credible, especially regarding the topic a hand. I'm sure that Ms. Foodie Blogger has a lot to say about fricassees, mimosas and sauces, and her readers may treat her word as law when it comes to all things gastronomic, but ask her to talk about something totally out of her area of expertise or interest, then, either she won't (as what happened here), or if she did, she wouldn't be credible.

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