On Blogging Part Four: The Industrial Blog

In order to cure a case of the blogger's block, I'm revisiting some ideas that I started but didn't finish.

Industrial blogging is a term that I believe I coined. There are two categories of Industrial blogs and sometimes a third category that combines the first two. The first category of Industrial blogging is a blog that focuses on a particular topic or industry exclusively. Many times these blogs have multiple authors who write consistent articles in one space. There are thousands of these. There are gadget blogs, tech blogs, food blogs, wine blogs, guitar blogs, music blogs, political blogs and just about everything else you can think of. I'm a little too schizophrenic with my blogging to settle on one topic, so I stick to my own thing, but I could see having a Red Sox Blog like Laura and the Red Sox or Surviving Grady, or a fly fishing blog, or a gadget blog, but I'm discouraged from doing that not only by my topic schizophrenia but also because those ships have sailed and there are already plenty of people doing a good job with most of the topics I follow. The more specific the topic, the more challenging I think it is to be original.
The other category of industrial blog is one in which the blogger is paid or blogging in order to make money. Now, we all wouldn't mind making money blogging, and I've made a couple bucks here and there through iTunes, Amazon and Adsense ads, but I've never been paid to blog about something. Directly and indirectly there are people who are paid to blog. Most of the time they blog for a bigger company like AOL or Gawker but there are some people out there who accept payola in order to blog about particular topics or products. Part Three of this series looks at people who blog as a function of their role in a company in Corporate blogging, so I'm not talking about your company's CEO or PR joker having a public space, but rather their job (some people even do it full time) is to blog on a specific topic. You can see how Industrial blogging can cross over.
Another type of blogging that can sometimes fall into the Industrial blogging category is the A-List blog. If you googled for A-List bloggers are people who have or had a career in technology or tech journalism, but it goes beyond tech. Tech, as I've mentioned before, has its own self inflated ego of thinking that blogging and podcasting are terrain reserved for the techies, but you know where I stand on that. I think anyone willing to share their voice should. I may not read or listen, but I salute you for doing it.
A point that should be made before I cut off this ramble is that not all bloggers who blog about a specific topic are being paid, some do it for the love of sharing...imagine that.