‘Quick Hit’ Blogs
Craig McGinty asks:
‘It would be interesting to hear thoughts on the value of setting up ‘quick-hit’ blogs to cover individual sporting events, entertainment stories or maybe even high-profile court cases.
It is clear that people are turning to the web for quick access to information, especially when news is still breaking on a story.’
Great question and observation Craig - this is something I’ve pondered with those that I’ve worked with and have actually explored a little. One of the wonderful things about blogging is that it is so easy to set one up. On our Breaking News Blog collective I can have a blog set up and working well (with a nice template) within a few minutes. Part of the reason for this is that we want to be able to mobilize quickly to take advantage of ‘breaking news’ whether it be on sporting, entertainment, politics etc. We’re yet to test it on the new network but its a plan that we’re waiting for the right situation to act upon.
In August of 2004 a friend of mine and myself started Athens Olympic Games Blog to test the idea that you’ve written about above. We learnt so much from the project (and would do it quite differently if we were to do it again) but overall it was a successful experiment where we saw over 1.6 million readers hit the site in just a few weeks.
So in my opinion Craig there is a lot of potential. The keys will be to find a way to get ranked quickly on Google for the search terms and to be able to throw enough time and energy into it at the spur of the moment. Whilst our Olympics blog was very successful there were at least another 10 or 15 blogs that we saw launched around the same time that didn’t achieve anything like what we did. Part of the reason for this was that between the two off us we worked around the clock on the site for virtually a month - no gain without pain as they say.