The advantage of blog networks versus stand alone blogs

New York venture capitalist and blogger, Fred Wilson has a good post this morning on ‘Utilities vs Networks.’

It’s interesting to see a network, Instagram, starting to replace the iPhone’s native camera application in many users’ daily usage of their phones. I see this in my kids’ behavior all the time. When they want to take a photo, they open Instagram, not the camera application.

In the PC era, when applications got bundled into the operating system, they became instoppable. All the competitive apps got left in the dust. But in the mobile era, it seems that a different dynamic is at play. The native applications are getting beat by networks. And these networks will eventually go cross platform which means that the native applications will be at an even greater disadvantage.

I see the same in the area of publishing.

• Look at the popularity of Tumblr, a blogging community.
• Facebook is a publishing environment, in and of itself, for many people. The reason is a network.
• Google+ is gaining traction for publishing because of its social network.
• Huffington Post and Forbes offer professionals the opportunity to blog as part of a network.

Networks offer member publishers any number of advantages.

• Discovery of likeminded thought leaders. Engaging those thought leaders enables one to engage others through publishing so as to build relationships and enhance ones reputation.
• Your content is curated by an editorial team who can create powerful distribution channels across web and mobile environments.
• The safety and protection of the masses. Rather than hanging out there by yourself on your own blog and feeling the pressure to blog all the time, you’re part of a larger network. You can also call upon content published by others to comment upon in your blogging.
• The reach of the network gives you multiple points of exposure you cannot get on your own.
• The people consuming blog content from attorneys and law firms cannot get their arms around all the content without some one curating the content and aggregating into easy to follow channels by area of the law and industry.
• Apps have been all the buzz for law firms over the last couple years. Law firms are now coming to their senses and realizing that separate apps for each law firm is not how people are going to consume content. Just as consumers of content have read curated content in the likes of the Wall Street Journal or New York Times for years, they’ll read curated blog content on networks ala LXBN.

For all of these same reasons we’re going to increasingly see law bloggers drawn to networks, as opposed to blogging on their own.

I’m with Wilson. “Networks beat utilities in the age when everyone is connected to everyone else.”