While Timberline's primary business is building ecommerce websites and helping their owners market them, we do find ourselves designing blogs and other side-projects for our clients from time to time.
Blogs as a phenomenon were certainly overhyped a few years back. Douglas Quenqua recently wrote in the New York Times that according to a 2008 survey only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the Times tracks had been updated in the past 120 days -- with "95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned." I sounded a similar note in my Web 2.0 book.
The fact is, very few people or companies are doing things interesting enough to justify frequent posting -- or have the writing skills, persistence and work ethic to pull it off. While we strive to keep our own Timberline blog off the DOA list, it ain't easy!
That said, we still encourage anyone with a passion for their topic, with a story to tell and an enthusiastic audience of customers, members or other "community", to go for it. Blogs are still a terrific, low-cost, and high-speed way to publish online, and to elicit comments and other feedback.
We've lately been pushing Ning as a great blog platform with a constellation of other built-in social-media features: Members who can maintain their own profiles and establish friendships with one another; discussion forums; video and photo sharing; an events calendar.
The Ning platform is the brainchild of Marc Andreesen, who in the early days of the Web, created the Netscape browser.
All of Ning's social features combine to create more dynamic sites less likely to be DOA -- because your community helps generate content. Of course, a healthy community requires care and feeding, cajoling and cheerleading. But the network effect is a powerful tailwind once you get it established.
One plus: Most niche companies already do a great job of stimulating a sense of community among their customers. And if the niche is tightly defined, a small group -- say a couple dozen members -- can still feel very vibrant and energizing.
Check out some of our clients' Ning sites and you'll be impressed by how much you can do:
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Ray Allen - the online community devoted to Police & Military Dogs
We still appreciate Wordpress, Movable Type and Typepad as excellent blogging platforms, and we use the installed product .NET blogengine for this blog. But with Ning, for about the same price, you get all the basic blogging features offered by the other guys, plus all the extra social-media goodies. Check it out -- and email us at sales@tli2.com if you want help designing and launching your Ning site!
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