The Void Between Blogging and Building
[SUMMARY—It exists.]
(WORLD) I bet you didn't even realise there was a void, hey?
Introducing Hubpages. Nothing new about that. It's been around for a bit. However, it has only been brought to my attention due to a rather attractive competition they're offering for valentines day, whereby you can win a MacBook Pro, iPod Touch, Sony Handycam and Canon EOS 30D. Nice.
For any other reason I wouldn't have even looked at the site. But the compo did get me trekking around their pages wondering what on earth is it. Is it a wiki? A blog? A web page creation tool? Well, yes and no. In a way it's all of these. The idea of a Wiki is you create a 'page' on a chosen topic. Same with Hubpages, however other people won't be editing your page. As with a blog, you can write multiple entries, and visitors can read all others you read. And finally, as with a web page, you can monetise it with adsense and others, revenue split with Hubpages 60/40 in your favour.
OK, so assuming I've got all that right (I haven't signed up yet), then the big question is "why, would you want to sign up exactly, when there's plenty of other services out there that offer pretty much the same thing?."
But the clues in the question (or rather the answer is in my paragraph above). Not everyone wants a blog, they might only want to write a few articles, or maybe aren't technically turned on enough to want a whole website dedicated to themselves? maybe people just want to know that their words are going to get search indexed and be available to all the blog sites?
It appears that the selling point of Hubpages, is really that you're building something simple. It's a step up from a simple blog post, minus all the commitment, yet its nowhere near as much hassle as creating your own website, but with all the benefits of generating revenue from it.
Selling the idea of creating a blog or a website to those that don't have the motivation or interest to build on it continually, might just find this site 'the' page to get them started on sharing their knowledge.
So without further ado… Hubpages.com—quite a good idea actually.
Filed by Mark on February 14 2008
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