A cog in the marketing wheel
Greg tagged The Life Cycle of a Blog Post published by Wired magazine. I stumbled upon this post (not literally using Stumble Upon) by checking out my aggregator (Google Reader!) feed for del.icio.us tags. (I wish the Life Cycle had notations so I could refer to specific items on the diagram. Not a big deal, just would be nice).
The Life Cycle positions the blogger in the role of consumer, at least that’s how I read it. The blogger has slightly more agency than the typical consumer, according to this diagram, based on the ability to generate data that can be easily found and sorted for marketers. In part, this outlook is fueled by the presence if “adservers” and “corporations” are in the middle of the cycle. Of course, the relationship of your blog to adservers depends on whether you have registered to place ads on your blog. And, not to burst anyone’s bubble, but the significance of one’s blog for a corporation, I suspect, will still depend on the influence of the blog or whether more influential blogs pick up on a particular story and start to link to it. Of course, this can be a very powerful way to generate attention for specific concerns as a consumer, which is not easily replicated by non-digital means.
However, our role on the internet is as more than consumers, I hope. If we were thinking of the life cycle of a blog post beyond a consumer role, what other components might be a part of this diagram?
