Friday, January 05, 2007

The two basic types of bloggers


Firstup: a roundup.
The image above is a graphic representation of types of bloggers. Via.

I did a Google search and came up with the following lists of types of bloggers:

Mr. Snitch’s list is a favorite. He lists out 7 types of bloggers:

Meme-du-jour bloggers (example: Scoble), Caterers ( example: opinionated political blogs), , Nicheblogger ( example: shoemoney), Internet guides( example: Metafilter), the celebrity-blogger ( example: Huffington blog), the service blogger (example: all those feeding Digg), the long-tail blogger ( example:this blogger)

Another article mentions about three types of blogs:
Producers, Reviewers and Pointers.

This 2002 article lists 8 types of bloggers. They are:

Link Blogger(Blinker), Goth Blogger (Glogger), Hippy Blogger (Bippy), War Blogger (Woggler), Blog Blogger (HasTooMuchTimer), Trailer Blogger (Trogger), Techie Blogger (Togger), Teenie Blogger (Teenoger).


Google is a free and great school. I also learnt there were 6 types of business blogs:

Sales blogs, Relationship blogs, Branding blogs, Knowledge blogs, Collaboration blogs, Culture blogs.

Somewhat similar to Mr. Snitch’s list, this article lists 9 types of bloggers:
The Godfather (early entrants, like Dave Winer), The Conference Groupie, Target the A-Listers type, Diamond in the rough type, the namer (like Target the A-lister type), the pseudo-sage, the Tipping Point type, the hack, the would-be consultant and the lister.


At present, as this article shows, the listers are floating everywhere on the scene.

Another list of 10 types of bloggers:


The whinny Girl Blogger, the Funny Man Blogger, the Personal Porn Blogger, the Mass Blogger, the "you're obviously a writer" Blogger, the Overly Emotional/Opinionated Blogger, the Dynasty Blogger, the Schenck Blogger, the Causal Blogger, the Attention Seeker Blogger.


Then there are the anonymous bloggers, out to give vent to their feelings, which they cannot in person – workplace rants, personal fantasies, and so forth.


Treading where others have ventured before, I would say that all these types notwithstanding, there are primarily two types of bloggers:

1. Blogger with a full-time job:
For example, Steve Rubel, who is a senior marketing strategist and Senior Vice President at Edelman, the world’s largest independent public relations firm. Steve also writes for the popular Micro Persuasion blog.

Steve Rubel often uses his pioneer blogging credentials and his blog to further his interests, by ‘interests’, I mean his company’s goals. While fellow bloggers rarely attack each other personally, Steve would happily say that the popular Valleywag blog is ‘nasty’, when Valleywag dares to write about the space where Steve’s blogging meets his PR Company’s goals – a grey area at the best of times.


2. Blogger depending on blogging for his meals:
This is where most of us stand. Slowly, we are learning about the secrets of creating useful, entertaining, and mention-worthy posts. Whatever style, we may use, our desired result are some Google Adsense cents.

I think both these basic blogger types are well aware of the cons of blogging too.

Bloggers with full-time jobs learn to stay clear of writing about their organization.

This blogger learnt that the hard way some time back.

I left an editor postion at an Indian Blog Network some months back. A couple of weeks back, I wrote an article on the Sam Sethi- Arrington issue. I have been busy with starting an online news startup but startup in Delhi is hard. So, when I got an offer to join as an editor at another company, I grabbed at it. As due process, I gave the number of my Ex-CEO for reference purposes, fully confident that since I had left on good terms and my performance was satisfactory, the ex-Boss would do the needful. However, he went ballistic and advised the recruiter in the negative.

I guess that comes with the Job.

When you blog, you take a risk too.
However, when you blog, you let your voice free, too.

P.S.: The recruiter later informs me that she could sense the Ex-Boss was lying. I got the job. I have postponed the media startup for a couple of months.

1 Comments:

At 9:29 PM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

I dunno... seems kind of dangerous for bloggers to turn in on themselves and put certain bloggers up as suspect. All of a sudden you have millions of bloggers talking absolute bullshit, trying to be "different".

I don't know you, but well done on the job!

 

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