Quote of the Day

[mdlbear]

Blogging and Newspapers, a Lesson in How Not to Brand and Market - Blog Maverick

Never, ever, ever consider something that any literate human being with Internet access can create in under 5 minutes to be a product or service that can in any way differentiate your business.

(from Don Marti)

The actual post is about why newspapers shouldn't have blogs, but it applies even more to things like web services. If somebody can duplicate your service on their own website in a couple of minutes (for example, by installing an open-source package), what makes you think you can make money selling it?

Yes, I know that I'm posting this on LJ. Ad-supported websites are another matter, but they're still vulnerable: a suddenly-popular open-source package could still make a deep hole in their user base.

Comments

[faxpaladin.livejournal.com]

Speaking as a newspaper blogger, Mark Cuban is full of it. (The main actual point of the post seems to be self-justification for kicking a Dallas Morning News blogger out of the Dallas Mavericks NBA team locker room, on the grounds that he isn't a journalist.)

If it's done right — and I can't claim for sure that I am doing it right; I as a blogger and my employer as a newspaper are learning a lot on the fly — you have the identification with the newspaper and the city to differentiate you. You have the centralized location, the newspaper website as a hub for local content. As newsprint costs continue to rise and the print product shrinks, blogs offer someplace for reporters to put the stuff they can't fit into the stories anymore, the little interesting stuff that you can't inflate into a full story without the stretch marks showing.

Yeah, it's a blog. You don't need to call it something else to sell it; doing so smacks of, well, "elfin magic." Why call it a Camaro when it's pretty obviously a blog?