I learned about the power of blogging when I spoke at a mommy-blogger conference called Camp Baby, hosted by Johnson’s Baby in April 2008. The invitees were women of incredibly diverse backgrounds who have been blogging on “all things mommy.” Within hours of my informational presentation about InfantSEE, dozens of them had posted blogs about my topic and their readers had already commented! More importantly, in the days that followed, the InfantSEE website showed an uptick in visits that rivaled the traffic seen after the June 2005 TODAY show episode where President Carter with Matt Lauer promoted InfantSEE.
More Than Meets The Eye aims to be a twice-monthly commentary that will stimulate thoughts that are thought by optometrists. With that, I am kicking this off by blogging on blogging.
According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog), the history of the term blog is as follows:
The term “weblog” was coined by Jorn Barger on 17 December 1997. The short form, “blog,” was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase we blog in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in April or May of 1999. Shortly thereafter, Evan Williams at Pyra Labs used “blog” as both a noun and verb (”to blog,” meaning “to edit one’s weblog or to post to one’s weblog”) and devised the term “blogger” in connection with Pyra Labs’ Blogger product, leading to the popularization of the terms.
So why do people read blogs? Blogs are found at on the websites of all genres - New York Times, ESPN, Better Homes and Gardens, etc. When I first started reading blogs I thought about the lonely souls who were writing them - do they believe that anyone actually reads this stuff?! Then I realized that I was reading the blog, and so were thousands of others.
I have figured out that people read blogs because the social connection that we have with each other is significantly electronic. We get information from the web, and we have blended the acquisition of news with the gathering of opinions. Everything is editorialized these days. Blogs allow us to both learn and analyze the game of life at once.
The web, specifically the social environment of Web 2.0, is a mechanism for us to share. Twice a month, MTMTE will be my blog engagement with you. I’ll make it worth your while to read it and I’ll take your feedback and share it with the community. Feel free to let me know what you think.
