It's Time for a .Blogs Domain
It's no secret that weblogs are becoming powerful source of information. However, if you need proof, check out this stat.
According to Google News, since July 2 there have been more than 3,470 online news articles that have mentioned either blogs, weblogs, blog or weblog! This by far eclipses the number of articles that have mentioned Britney Spears in the same period (2,820).
Despite the huge buzz, however, the vast majority of Americans still probably do not know what blogs are. The Pew Internet and American Life Project says that 11% of Internet users read weblogs. My theory is that this number is actually far higher because many news consumers can’t differentiate blogs from professional sites because of their high-quality design and content.
Compare and contrast the following sites, for example …
Not much difference right?
There is a solution, however, to this problem - a ".blogs" top-level domain name. This will immediately make it easy for everyone right off the bat to differentiate a weblog from a professional news site. Alternately, there also could be a special graphical identifier – perhaps an icon that says “This is a Blog” – that bloggers can integrate into their site template to make this distinction even more clear.
Regardless, such a move I feel is critical to help blogs gain awareness as a new medium.
