Image by davemc500hats via FlickrThis is an excerpt from the upcoming book – Boom and Bust in the Blogosphere. The book has gone to the publishers, and should be out at the end of the year.

There is a lot of creative destruction to industries when people, regular people, take to the public forums and start talking. With blogging and community, building, creative destruction can be considered part of the business . One of the key commonalities amongst all the popular blogs is that they have been able to develop community. One of the commonalities of blogs that have failed due to their business model is that they have been unable to develop a community.

Some communities are better for you in the longer run as you build your blog and its audience. As your current and potential employers, family, friends, and others read your blog and have comments about it, you have an opportunity to break down barriers. Some barriers should not be crossed, like badmouthing your co-workers, talking about something in the family that does not need to be aired in public. Other barriers are good to break down, like if you are working on a problem and using the blog to write down your ideas on how to solve it, or talking about the arrival of a new family member.

While some of those will make decisions as to your employ ability, or ability to be a member of a community blogs can very creatively solve some problems for you. If you write a professional blog and cover the industry that you work in, when it comes to being employed, your potential employer will find that your work shows you do know your stuff. Blogs have had an enormous influence on many industries, and the way that people communicate to each other. This is the important part to remember when you start your blogging career, that the world will come visit your site.

One of my blogs only 23% of all readers is from the USA, the rest come from around the world. You quickly learn to write to an international audience if you want to keep those readers. The other issue is that it is very hard to find advertising that works in the international environment of the blogging world. Google Adsense is probably the best example of how international advertising can work for you, and works against you. This is where language issues come in, social issues, even the color scheme of your blog comes into play. The more you understand about localization or automated translation programs can help you gain a bigger audience.

If you know what you want to write about, what you want to do with your entries, and how you feel about what you are writing about on your blog will help foster an international break with what can be considered stereotypes in people. Your blog becomes your voice, and the communities’ voice for that niche and for what you are writing about on your blog. Creatively breaking down barriers between cultures is one very good benefit to blogging.

There is no debate that blogs have had an influence on newspapers, and television. There is also no debate that the internet has altered how business works, people communicate, and communities form. The internet provides a platform for people to do just about anything they want to do, get anything they want to get (illegal or legal), and explore or discover anything they want to know about. The internet as a delivery vehicle for data and information is superior to the paper, the radio, or the television. The idea of on demand information, what you want when you want it, and how you want it is something that some companies get, while others do not.

Big companies like Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle, and others all run company sponsored blogs where ordinary employees can write about the cool things they are doing. Larger press style blogs, Techcrunch, the Huffington Post, and Gawker media also have had an influence on how we get information and what information we subscribe to on line. It is hard for traditional media to meet or beat that process of instant information about what you want to know about when you want to know it.

While you might not know what a blog is, or you might not have worked out a business model for your blog when you participate in blogging you are joining the very few whom blog. If there are 120 million blogs as reported by Technorati, and the earth’s population is six billion, that is not many blogs in relationship to people. Most people do not participate in web 2.0 preferring to lurk on line rather than participate. Wikipedia’s own participation statistics point out that only .003 percent of people make the most edits on the site . This participation inequality is also going to influence your blog. While people lurk, few will comment, and even fewer will participate. While traditional media relies on lurkers buying the paper or watching the TV show over the air or on cable, the same rules apply. Before the advent of Web 2.0 we were trained as a passive audience , it will take decades to get past that to the point where we do start participating in media more.

If we talk with our audience rather than “at them ,” we stand a better chance of reaching out to our audience and developing community.

Blogs, wiki’s, and other interactive forms of communication break down barriers and enter into the idea of creative destruction of information models . Rather than information carefully controlled, blogs and other web 2.0 media sources open up whole new avenues for people to get information . People are blending traditional media and new media resources to come up with a more comprehensive picture of the things that are important to them. What might be important might be pizza and beer, celebrity screw-up news, or saving the planet.

The wonderful part about that is the niche you choose should be a niche you believe in, it will be easy to find readers, but harder to find people who will do more than read one article, or participate in your on line community. While you should not worry about not getting an audience right off the bat, as you develop your own style, you participate where few others do, and that is how you help create and add to a global voice. While some might call it digital anarchy , for many it is their one way of showing that there are bigger issues, and bigger ideas that must be presented to the world. It does not matter what the idea is, but that there is the desire to share the concept with as many people as possible.

While some people are geared towards doing blog spam, splogs, ripping content, and doing things that you might not agree with or even like, when you participate you join the very few, and in some ways very cutting edge group of people who are doing the same thing. It is hard to think that .003 percent of a population can have the influence and the effect on newspapers, television and other traditional media, imagine what the influence would be if one percent of the population would have. This is where creative destruction of current models comes into play. As globalization takes deeper roots in our culture, as computing becomes ubiquitous and more off the desktop and into the actual network (called cloud computing) the change in communications technology via blogs and other systems is comparable to the printing press, the mass newspaper, the invention of the radio and the invention of the television. The good part about the internet is that to take time out and start writing requires no overhead what so ever, just you, an idea, a desire, and the willingness to write every day and you can get started.

The changes in the journalism industry are the most documented, and much of it is caused not just by bloggers, but the freedom in how information can be obtained. Prior to the internet, there were magazines, newspapers, television, and radio that we used in very orderly hierarchies of the type of data that we would get. The information in magazines had to be durable enough to be interesting for the month or longer. Information in the paper had to be durable for 24 hours, or until the next edition of the paper came out. Television and Radio came closest to being entertaining in 5 to 60 minutes increments. With the internet, you have 15 seconds to engage a reader . The more you engage the readers on a regular basis, the better off you are as a blogger.

Magazines and newspapers were not geared towards this kind of shortened attention span, and have suffered reductions in readership and subscriptions as they have tried to reinvent their industries model to support the shortened attention span . This is classic creative destruction of their business model . Blogs might not be completely to blame, but they are a causal factor in how the industry is changing. This is also, why your voice as a blogger is so important; we need more than .003 percent of the population adding to the society. It is much like having newspapers owned by a few families or companies ; the most popular blogs are controlled and owned by a small group of people. Bloggers can change that too, all by engaging and understanding the audience we write for.