Hugh Macleod (Gapingvoid) posts the latest update to the fascinating Stormhoek wine story:

So one of the people over at Stormhoek told this to me.

The Stormhoek boys were having a meeting with one of their largest customers, a UK supermarket chain.

After a long presentation explaining what they were trying to do with the blogosphere, the buyer at the supermarket called it nothing more than "Chatroom Rubbish".

The sad fact about blogging is that it means different things to different people.  If you are a big, popular blogger then it's very easy to think that blogging is truly huge.  Massive.  Universal.  This is amplified by the fact that bloggers talk to a lot of other bloggers. 

Somewhere in the middle are people who are aware of blogging (either through "doing" or "conscious reading") and see it as another style of web media (along with web pages, forums, chat ...).  These people dip in when it suits them.

At the tail are people who really don't understand what blogging is at all and are confused (these are also the people who are still confused by the difference between the Internet, web pages and email).  The problem is that as it stands now this that this is a pyramid, with a small number of people at the point who understand and a large number of people at the base who just don't.

It's very easy to forget how long radio took to penetrate the market and it's easy to think that blogging will penetrate the market with the speed that say DVD did.

Case in point - I've spoken with a number of well educated, technically minded people who thought that this site was a website and not a blog (there is a website aspect - that's here).  Why?  Because to them a blog was supposed to be "fluffy posts about how you felt not serious stuff".

Hmmmm ...

I remember the same issues way back in the Nineties with CDF push technology - people just didn't get it.  Why?  Because the differences between a website and a blog are subtle.  To a lot of people a blog looks like a web site.  To others it looks more like a discussion forum.

It's really sad that people who really should know better don't but that's life.  People like Hugh do a lot to promote the medium but it's going to take time.  The upside is that all these people are untapped resources waiting to be introduced into the blogosphere.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 28th, 2006 at 12:03 and is filed under PC Doctor's Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.