The Entrepreneurial Blogosphere

Hey, how are you guys doing? I found blogs run by a few guys I look up to. Those two guys may need no introduction but I'll help them out. Ryan Sheckler is the first. He is one of the most successful athletes on the planet (at only 18 years old) and he's a self-made millionaire with his skateboarding talent. He has multiple cars, including a Range Rover and a new Mercedes. He has his own show on MTV and he has just recently been on the cover of ESPN the Magazine. On top of all of that, the newly legal Ryan Sheckler has just bought his own huge house. That's only scratching the surface on how much of an impact Sheckler has made on the entertainment industry. I looked up his blog on MTV.com, advertised on his show, Life on Ryan's website.

The URL to his blog is http://remotecontrol.mtv.com/category/shows/life-of-ryan/.

Starting out, he posted all of his own blog posts. I guess recently since he's been too busy to keep up with the site, so another person writes for him... but not in his point of view, from an outside perspective.

The second blog I looked up was of another one of my favorite athletes, Gilbert Arenas from the Washington Wizards of the NBA. He's one of my favorites because of his colorful personality but also because he defied the odds with his driven mentality and hard work. Coming out of high school and attending the University of Arizona, he was told that he would play zero minutes and he had to prove them wrong. He ended up starring for that team and when he got drafted to the NBA, the same thing happened and he had to prove them wrong again. For that, he wears number zero permanently.

The link to his blog is http://www.nba.com/blog/gilbert_arenas.html

These two examples of blogs both are used for entrepreneurial purposes for they are self-marketing and business promotion. In these times, athletes like these two are essentially businesses. They do commercials and most things in order to sell themselves.

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I think blogging as a form of business promotion is very effective, as I think the technological world is becoming more advanced and adapting more to the Internet. More people look on the web for information and articles more often that any book, television set or newspaper. In an article I found it has been said that:

"...blogging is an extraordinary form of communication. And it is ALL about maintaining the best qualities of journalism... nothing has changed the fact that great blogs are about great journalism, which is about telling compelling stories truthfully and fairly (not impartially).This is why blogging is the most honest form of self-promotion out there bar none."

The link to that website is http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2005/01/blogging_is_the.php. I believe that if a reader would want to find the truth and the most honest form of communication and/or advertisement, blogs would be the way to go. But thinking in the ideology of business promotion, the things that sell businesses are how often you see ads, where you see ads and who supports your business.

I also think that blogs will be successful in business promotion in the case that blogs keep it short, simple and to the point where readers don't need to read a lot in order to sift through information in order to get what they want. This article listed on this website: http://webdesign.about.com/cs/weblogs/a/aa061603a.htm, has backed those ideas up.

Other options an entrepreneur has to market themselves to the audience is having television commercials, billboards, plenty of them and famous celebrities supporting their doings. I think blogs can see the other side of a entrepreneur that isn't easily visible to the media when they're in front of cameras and it makes the reader feel as if they are closer. I think blogs are more effective than any other medium.

The research material I found is a 4 on a scale from 1-5 and it somewhat supports my thesis. I'm going to continue to back up my original thesis and say I am FOR the idea that blogging has significantly impacted the print journalism industry.