And the point is?

The aim of this industry analysis is to explore the potential of blogging as a tool for professional writers.

As James Henry explained: “Yes, of course all bloggers are writers. The 'Professional' in this case isn't attempting to divide the blogworld into cackhanded amateurs versus noble and dignified purveyors of the art like myself (the way a lot of journalists seem to think it ought to), I think MC is just looking into how blogging affects anyone who already has a primary income from writing.”

There are literally millions of blogs; the key difficulty in reaching any form of useful analysis in discussing them is the sheer size of the blogosphere.

With no clear boundaries of demographics or publication methodologies to work with I decided to use blogging as the primary research tool to analyse itself.

I posted a message on my blog inviting comment from writers who blog, with an intention to use responses to evaluate:

• How far the message would travel in three days – both geographically and to whom. (i.e. would responses come from people I had prior contact with or would the ‘thread’ reach new people).
• What encouraged them to start blogging and what they felt they got out of it?
• In terms of networking links, had it created career opportunities? (Implicit in this, was whether blogs offered a potential way for new writers to establish useful contacts within the industry)
• Thoughts on blogging’s future as a free/uncensored online community and its impact on print based industries

The aim of this analysis is to present the results of my research alongside a contextualised overview of current blog related trends and issues; in order to assess what writers might gain from blogging. Clearly there was an element of bias; I have a blog, all responses came from established bloggers. The findings could be viewed as unbalanced, raising the question – is there any merit in the results given that no non-bloggers were involved in the research?

This is a valid argument up to a point.

So, a further focus of this analysis is to establish, for those new to blogging – why bother? Is there any merit behind an uncensored online diary? Is the blog hype simply about self-indulgence and narcissism? Did I elicit anything from the research that might be useful for other writers?