Late last week, I was asked to search the blogsophere to see what I could find out on the prevailing views within a controversial industry. With the correct keywords and tools, I was able to cull some recent and relevant postings together however; I noticed something rather bothersome during the searching phase. There were “posts” which were simply press releases that were copied from its original source. As a matter of fact, there were a lot of posts of ripped releases or articles that I had to discard in my search.
Based on the Wikipedia definition of a “blog”:
“A blog (an abridgment of the term web log) is a website, usually maintained by an individual, with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse chronological order.”
The keyword to focus in the definition is “commentary“. Since when has copying and pasting press releases passes as commentary?
Any posts that are just mere press releases or republished articles should be considered a trap in the blogosphere. A trap that will get you to visit a blog without an value added content on it. There are millions of blogs online that do republish snippets of articles HOWEVER these blogs provide their own insights into the discussed topics.
There is no doubt that as a competitive intelligence researcher, I have fell into the trap many, many times. Besides a very good search tool that has a filter to weed out blogposts that are copied releases and articles, these traps will continue to appear.
One possible way of curtailing the growth of these traps is making present and future bloggers aware of possible guidelines of writing a proper blog.
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