Thursday, June 09, 2005

The power of voice: Why blogs beat message boards

Lee LeFever of Common Craft has written an amusing little story about a hypothetical boxing match between Mean Mr. Message Board and Bad Bad Leroy blog. The gist of the story is that blogs beat out message boards because they are created and managed (usually) by a single person, while message boards rely on a group without a head for content creation and management.

This is one of the reasons why having a powerful voice is important to the success of blogs - voice personalizes a blog and makes it stand out from the blogosphere as a whole. It's also why blog journalism tends to toss objectivity out the window - it's much harder to develop a cult of personality when you're trying to repress your own opinions.

Thanks to BusinessWeek's Blogspootting for the link.