No longer exception to the rule... OR Why I finally got a blog

Today is a big day for me... I decided to finally start a blog (again) only this time I mean it; not because it’s time, but because it’s overdue… I may have jumped the shark with blogging in lieu of all the Geocities (Intellectual Confusion and Sonic Intoxication) activity I did in High School, and surely with the Looks Cool (entrapy.ismad.com) effort I mustered in college… I may have been ahead then, but now I’m behind, way behind. The proof is in the pudding, given the fact that Geocities and Looks Cool are both long gone now, and I barely understand WordPress or HTML. Obviously, I had to act sooner or later, or risk winding up shooing kids to get off my lawn in my late 20s, and then turn into Mr. Roper by 30. NAY, I say!

In order to readjust and dive back into the fray, I needed to do extensive research; what changed, evolved, or democratized since I’ve become a mere observer and not a participant… does a world need another blogger… and exactly how many blogs are there in the world?

Over a year ago the Blog Herald estimated there was roughly 185.6 million (adding those tracked by Technorati and The China Internet Network Information Center). Indeed, staggering numbers, but a year old none the less; so let’s estimate a modest growth of 10%... that number is now 204.2 million! However, with the dawn of microblogging and social networking by way of Twitter and Facebook, those taking advantage of the virtual soapbox presented by the Web 2.0 world has to grow as exponentially (a la Moore’s Law) and linearly to the growth of those two sites alone... which as we know has been uncanny (read: Twitter.com Quadruples to 17 Million U.S. Visitors in Last Two Months).

I would be remiss if i were not to blame my profession for the hiatus, since right after college I was hired into corporate PR and top tier media relations work for Fortune 500 clients and some of the world’s top C-levels… and, as we recently learned, those folks are STILL holding out not just on social media but also blogs (read: Heads of top U.S. companies snub blogs, Facebook: study, with the key finding that not a single Fortune 100 CEO had a blog). Monkey see, monkey do, I guess, but at least there are others behind me; even if they are twice my age.

Today, I stand up and take my rightful place on the babbling mountain that is the blogosphere. Tonight, I embark on my own leg of the 400m relay that is Web 2.0. Tomorrow… well, we’ll see about tomorrow, I have a very busy day.

Here we are, (am I really going to do this? seems like I already am), so strap yourself in, don’t hold your breath, and please don’t hang on every word… after all, who am I anyway?

Is A Picture Still Worth 1000 Words…Or Maybe 100 Characters & A Link

By Alex Aizenberg (Guest post on Aerocles Blog on June 23, 2009) First, a definition and origin, “a picture is worth a thousand words” is an adage stemming from an old Chinese proverb, popularized by several 1920’s articles from Fred R. Barnard in the advertising trade journal Printers’ Ink, promoting the effectiveness of images and graphics in advertising, a campaign that also appeared on the sides of streetcars.

What jumps off the page for me is the word “OLD,” and it is the age of the phrase that leads me to this conclusion: the further away we get from the present, the more impressive pictures, as an idea, become… today however, the phrase is growing more stale with each day.

Whether looking at timeline of art (from sharp focus of renaissance pieces, to nearly moving impressionists subjects, all the way to modern art’s avant garde ideas) or broadcast technologies (from telegraphs, to radios, TVs and the internet), pictures as a novelty have been losing steam while words have steadily been reclaiming their rightful place on top. This makes all the more sense today, given the fact that the ‘content currency’ of the social networking and social media catharsis that is Twitter, is built off of verbal descriptions of activity or initiatives (visual or otherwise), truncated to 140 characters or less.

Even still, this shift back to words does not deter visual search offerings – like ambitious www.searchme.com, or inclusive http://spezify.com and cutesy http://visibletweets.com/, among many others – from emerging. As a tool though, visual search is entertaining more so than useful, and often kitschy. The condensed forum of Twitter however, provides the ability to mine real people’s verbalized conversations and opinions for direct feedback (read: 6 Reasons Why Twitter is the Future of Search). Words, and character limitation, gives everyone the same modus operandi of driving content creation; add ‘real time’ and you have a boondoggle of information begging to be sourced… nearly all of it is words.

Of course, pictures still reign under certain circumstances. Take this powerful image of an Iranian protester… it was pictures, videos and other continuous chatter like this, via the #iranelection hashtag, which triggered a U.S. State Department call for Twitter to delay scheduled maintenance during the protests, to keep the information flow going.

The more time I spend on Twitter, the more I think of pictures as being very finite without as much as a caption attached to them, it’s almost as if you can’t say that much with just a picture anymore. I’ve always said that I’m in PR because “I can make words dance,” and now because of Twitter’s mandate of editing for conciseness, we all have to learn to tango.

So, is a picture still worth those 1000 words… or at most 100 characters and a link?