Riffing on SAI's post on eMarketer's analysis of how much ad money blogs actually get. One of the commenters pointed out a strength of blogs -- that they're optimized for search, and are a powerful publishing software. Here's my take:
Blogs are optimized not only for search, but also for all kinds of other exchange, import, export, sharing, "clouds" and so on: tagging, comment sharing across blogs, integration with all kinds of feed readers and bookmarking systems, easy feeds through RSS and the like, import into Widgets, trackbacks and pings that tell folks when you've linked to them, integration with Twitter and other third party apps, including some yet to be built.
Not to mention posting of all forms of media, easily, by a single individual -- video, audio, podcast, Flash (if the file's been built), images, graphics, etc. etc. And the individual needs next to no HTML experience on many of the platforms.
They allow for easy categorization and tagging, are optimized for flexible templates with CSS that allows changes throughout at a whim, with -- depending on the platform -- easy integration with email blasts and ads and on and on.
Blogs are a CMS, a publishing system, yes, but I would argue a publishing system that by their interactive and flexible and easy sharing and cross postin are much more likely to create what I'll call a three-dimensional network of media and information than other systems. They can be one-to-many, many to one, many to many, machine to many and many other permutations and combinations.
Yes, regular old Web sites can be build to do all the things I've said above. But one person with a minimal amount of coding expertise can do everything I've specified above. Not true for other kinds of sites I'm aware of.
