Do you remember this song – “Deep within each heart, there lies a magic spark, that lights the fire of our imagination . . .”

In this first newsletter we want to talk about the ‘Power of the Dream’ and the power of the internet to make that dream come true.

The internet is quite an amazing site of human creativity and imagination.  As well as being full of sites that we might describe as functional to the point of being boring, there are some amazingly talented people out there doing some very clever and imaginative things.

A lot of this talent and imagination centres around Blogging as its structure.  There are millions of blogs out there in English alone and they are on almost any topic you can think of.  When I first heard of blogs I was a tad sceptical.  After all, I didn’t think I’d ever even seen one.  This was a couple of years ago, but I found that when I looked deeper, a lot of information is disseminated via blogs.  If you haven’t really had a look at any blogs up until now, go to www.technorati.com or www.blogsearchengine.com or http://blogsearch.google.com.

Blogs tend to be a series of posts or comments by the blog owner and sometimes open to visitors to comment as well.  (There are pros and cons to having your blog open to visitors comments, you will get lots of activity, which search engines will love, but you might find that most of your activity is advertising for casinos or some such.  We experienced a jump in our google position for one of our sites after a lot of advertising was loaded up onto our blog and we then removed it.  All that uploading and deleting of info made us look highly active to google!)

You could visit a make up blog, an irritable bowel syndrome blog or a blog on a certain breed of dog.  Topic specific, but fairly free flowing.

So, why blogging rather than conventional static web pages?

Partly because Blogging is more free form.  It is a very direct personal medium.  Blogs are fairly cheap and easyto set up, while websites can be expensive and therefore need to be held more financially accountable.

Also, at the moment search engine’s love blogs, so if someone has a message for the world, if they blog it it will likely get disseminated widely.

It is a web rumour that google (and perhaps the other search engines) are weighted in favour of blogs, as opposed to conventional pages, because they think a lot of clever web users are using blogs, and that therefore what they write will be worth reading.

Search engines also love blogs because they tend to get updated regularly.  Google believes that if it is being changed often it is relevant and full of great new info for web surfers. 

Because search engines love blogs, blogs are a fantastic advertising tool to attach to your commercial website. 

Blogs are also a great way to increase your relevance for your target key words for your website.  For example, if I want to rank higher for “Bible Stories” for our website MyChristianArt, then I will do a blog talking about Bible stories.  I can do the same thing for a lot of other key words.  The search engine sees that these keywords are on a blog attached to my site, so my site is ranked as more relevant for those keywords.

This is not to say that all you have to do is run a blog attached to your site, stuff it full of your keywords and the search engines will love it and drive streams of traffic to your site.  Blogs are not the whole answer, but they are an important tool.

In the future we will talk more about the advertising power of the Blog, but in the spirit of today’s theme, let’s take a look at a blog powered Dream.

The Sydney Morning Herald on July 12^th 2006 ran an interesting article about a young blogger from Montreal.  His name was Kyle MacDonald and he had a dream.  He wanted to swap his way from being the owner of a red paper clip, to being the owner of a house.  And he did it.  He posted his desire to trade a red paper clip on the website ‘Craig’s List’ and someone swapped him a pen for it. 

At the same time MacDonald, who wants to be a writer, wrote about what was happening on his blog.

His swaps started small, door knobs and the like, and then got bigger – snow mobile, trips to the rockies, a year’s rent in Phoenix. 

But as the interest in his project escalated and people followed along on his blog, it became apparent to a number of people that his blog was getting a serious amount of exposure.

To the point that Corbin Bernsen of LA law contacted MacDonald and said that he would give a speaking role in a movie in exchange for the year’s rent in Phoenix.

MacDonald of course realised that Bernsen did not need or really want the year’s rent, what he was after was the publicity.  MacDonald took the effort to find something that Bernsen actually might want (a snow dome of Kiss – Bernsen collects snow domes) and swapped that for the speaking part.

MacDonald maintained his integrity, Bernsen got his advertising and then the town of Kipling offered MacDonald a house in exchange for the speaking part.

Why? Again – advertising.  The town is like a lot of little towns all over the world that are struggling to attract people and money.  They wanted the publicity of being part of Kyle MacDonald’s project.

They have said they will hold competition similar to ‘Idol’ to find someone for the speaking part.

There are a couple of things that really interest me about this guy’s experience.

First – that people were willing to swap in the early stages, before the fame really got going.  One man’s trash is another’s treasure.

Second – that once he was well known that people were no longer swapping just to get the goods and get rid of theirs, they wanted to be part of the experience.  It was entertaining and there was a bit of secondary fame involved.

Third – that once it became really famous it was an enormously leveraged tool.  There are a lot of people who need fame as part of their jobs, either for their own personal brand (like Corbin Bernsen,) or fame and prestige for an organisation in which they have a stake (the town of Kipling). 

What does this mean – basically the better known our blogs are, the more useful a tool they are.  And also – amazing things are possible.

Wanna see a good blog creation site?  Go to www.wordpress.com.