I was reading a couple of my favorite blogs recently and I saw a few examples of what is starting to become commonplace among the blogging community. Whether it’s somebody trying to find an obscure painting, or a well-known software firm attempting to secure an advertising contract, it’s become fairly common to see people trying to get something done via a blog post.

While it immediately struck me as somewhat lazy to outsource these tasks to your readers, I realized rather quickly that it makes a ton of sense. I’m sure that Jason at 37 Signals did his research trying to find the best marketing firm, but he’s limited to the resources of one or a few people. And I’m sure that Anthony scoured the web and Google images to try and find his painting to no avail. BEFORE they posted. But I guess that’s one of the good things about being a high-profile blog (that’s right I consider vdov high-profile) – you have the kind of distribution that makes doing something like this on your own almost selling yourself short.

I’m sure that there were tons of great ad agencies that were watching SvN feeds that day, perhaps too far-flung to turn up in a local search, or too far down the list of potentials that it wasn’t feasible to be contacted. And I’m sure that I and the other readers of vdov don’t mind clicking around for a while to try and find a painting to impress Anthony with our searching skills. So it makes sense to reach out to these readers because, shoot, maybe they have just the skills or interest to get the job done.

The defining characteristic of the blog favor is that it is inherently a “pull” process. Just like the RSS feed of the blog itself, when I want to read, I’ll get the latest posts from my feed reader. If I want to help, I’ll do it. Contrary to a “push” request (“Alex, will you help me move this Saturday?”), the task is just thrown out there into the blogosphere waiting for somebody to fulfill the request.

So it occurs to me that this could be a great medium for businesses to communicate, coordinating small-time-advertiser-A with big-time-but-still-acts-small-time-software-company-B, only if both parties are into it. As the technology improves in this area, (for example, Yahoo! Pipes), it will be easier for a company to write up a filter of some sort and aggregate all the requests for service X and decide what they want to work on.

So I guess this will change the meaning of “pulling favors”.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 3rd, 2008 at 2:36 pm and is filed under Site. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.