Recently, I’ve been seeing a few negative comments about blogs out there from webmasters who think of them as a mere passing fad and that traffic from them isn’t all that financially beneficial from a business perspective. All surfers have money or know somebody who has money, so pretty much any human being clicking traffic is a potential customer.

I think blogs are sort of mini-publishing houses, giving the common man (or woman) a publishing outlet that is very similar to building a whole website. And some people’s websites are already blogs, they just don’t call them that. Here is what I posted at Netpond a little bit ago in reference to this:

I’m curious, and no offense meant here, but are you talking from experience on working with actual targeted blog traffic that it wasn’t worthy for your biz? Or did you just have a few (or more) of your sites bumped down in Google rank from blogs and that’s currently affecting your outlook on them?

I had some sites bumped too in rank by blogs, and at first I was a bit ruffled by them (thought they would just be a passing fad, really), but then I thought, wait, this could be a new, different traffic opportunity and with AOL jumping on board recently with AOL Journals it really is something that webmasters need to sit up and at the least take seriously.

So the glass is half full for me on these weblogs at the moment.

There are lots of different ideas webmasters can use to make sales from blogs and you really don’t think Google would have bought them (Pyra Labs) if they were all just only a waste of space, do you?

Check out scripting.com and follow along with Dave Winer’s evangelism if you want to learn more about blogging and the national media exposure this blogging is getting.

I’ll grant you that some blogs aren’t all that useful content-wise, but like guestbooks (remember those?), it is another place to get out and sign your name and put your URL

And if anybody has blog traffic they don’t want, redirect it to my blog, I’ll happily take it and make $$ from it

See you all in the Blogosphere!

• Google Page Rank on the fritz or something new in the works?
• Google’s Page Rank, weblogs and the future
• Some bloggers worry too much about traffic
• Google swings Page Rank sword at blog networks and link sellers who pass PR
• Fark a sellout, Pluck a hypocrite and deeplinking responsibility?
• Web ads that takeover the surfer experience very unpopular, says study