CES 2008 - As the Consumer Electronics Show comes to an end, one take-away is the rapid change in how the general public found out about what was going on in Vegas. As a blogger myself, I know the importance of this new form of communication all too well (as well as the discussion about whether it is "real" journalism or not), but rarely have I seen such a powerful demonstration of how widespread the blogging phenomenon has become.

The first video clip here is a traditional TV news piece that focused on the bloggers at CES (do you see the irony here, anyone?):

The second clip is from the French entrepreneur Loïc Le Meur's video blog. He is a very interesting guy who every year organizes the conference LeWeb3 in Paris that gathers more than a thousand bloggers and entrepreneurs from 40 countries. He is now liveblogging about (almost) everything he does as he's trying to launch Seesmic, a company dedicated to building a community driven video social software:

By the way, Seesmic is expected to go live in March and souces tell Beet.tv that Le Meur will attend the World Economic Forum in Davos later this month and will use a Seesmic-powered mobile device to stream live from the show.

Bottom line, both these clips show how useful blogging can be as a communications tool, no matter if you are just a guy trying to get a free ticket to the show or an entablished entrepreneur trying to launch a company.

Smart marketers also understand the importance of reaching out to these bloggers. From a PR perspective, a blogger's voice can be even more effective than one from a traditional media channel, because it feels more "authentic".

Joakim Baage

Image By dsearls