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For those of you who are really observant, you might have noticed I made some slight changes to baekdal.com earlier this week. Several sections have been merged, things were cleaned up a bit... and I have launched a blog.
Yes... a blog.
"But... wait-a-minute", you ask. "Isn't your whole site a blog?"
Ahhh... no. Baekdal Plus is a not a blog. And it has never been a blog. What I do on Baekdal Plus is exactly the same as what they do over at Econsultancy or GigaOm Research. You don't think of them as a blog, so why do you think of Baekdal Plus as a blog?
But what is the difference, you ask? Well, to me, the difference between blogging and publishing is that the former is inward, while the latter is outward.
A blog is about yourself. Not necessarily about you as a person, but it's about what you think. It's a reflection of what's inside your brain in relation to a specific topic. In other words, it's "I think...", "I believe...", or "I like...".
That's blogging.
Publishing is very different, because it's not about what I think. Any journalist can tell you this. When a journalist writes a story, it's not about what the journalist personally believes. Instead, the journalist is observing the world around him/her, and based on this he/she writes a news story. The personal opinion of a journalist doesn't matter, and is thus not included.
It's exactly same with Baekdal Plus. When I write a Plus report, it's never about what I think you should do. Instead, I spend a lot of time analyzing the shifting world of media, and based on this I identify a result. This result can be many things. It can be a trend that I identify, a pattern that emerges, it can be the be possible option of a probabilistic analysis, or a fact or figure pointing to one thing or another.
And it's this result that I then write about, of course, mixed with my experience and prior insight. But it's never about what I think.
One example was my latest article about Facebook:
"Brand Comparison Study: What's Really Happening on Facebook?"
This article has nothing to do with what I think about Facebook. Nor is it about how I think Facebook should work. In fact, when I was doing the analysis for this article, I told a friend of mine that I was surprised by some of the results. Sure, some things turned out the way I predicted, but other things did not.
And that's the value of a Plus report. If I was just writing about what "I think", nobody would ever subscribe to Baekdal Plus. I'm just one guy, and who cares what I think. No, the real value of Baekdal Plus is that it's not about what I think, but is instead the result of strategic analysis.
That's what you pay for. And I think this is a very important distinction.
So, after feeling a bit annoyed that people were constantly referring to Baekdal Plus as 'a blog', I wanted to do something that would illustrate that it isn't a blog. And I realize that maybe the simplest way would be to simply create a blog.
Then people would come the site and they would see "Plus, Books, Insights, Analysis" (all parts of Baekdal Plus)... and then next to that they would see "Blog". And maybe, some people would realize that if that's the blog then these other sections are something else, right?
Note: It's entirely likely that I will be the only one noticing this difference. But that's OK too.
So," you ask, "if Baekdal Plus is not a blog, what is the blog about?
Well, the answer is that I have actually been blogging for many years over at Google+. I write these somewhat longish posts about things I observe in the media industry. And these posts seem very popular, and we have these wonderful discussions around them.
The idea is then to also bring these posts to Baekdal.com, so that those of you not following me on Google+ can read them there. But, of course, I'm only going to blog the good ones. I won't just publish anything I find. The things that go into Baekdal.com has to be a really high value, so I will be very particular about what to post.
A few examples:
All of these were originally posted on myGoogle+ page, but now you can read them anywhere.
Note: I will still post them on Google+, of course, I love the community we have there.
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Founder, media analyst, author, and publisher. Follow on Twitter
"Thomas Baekdal is one of Scandinavia's most sought-after experts in the digitization of media companies. He has made himself known for his analysis of how digitization has changed the way we consume media."
Swedish business magazine, Resumé
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