Too much has already been written about blogs. And many of you know far more about blogs than I ever will. So why am I adding to the millions of pages already written about blogs?

Because I'm a copywriter and direct marketer.  And I'm interested in any tool that will do the job and help my clients. And blogs have become a handy tool to keep in your kit.

In 1949, Pete Seeger and Lee Hays wrote "The Hammer Song"
"If I had a hammer, I'd hammer in the morning. I'd hammer in the evening, all over this land."
Then they went on to say "If I had a bell, I'd ring it.... If I had a song, I'd sing it...."  Today, they would also sing "If I had a blog..."

The "hammer" metaphor is particularly useful. In 1966, Abraham Maslow, founder of humanistic psychology, wrote The Psychology of Science, in which he criticized the reductionist views of behaviorists and others who took a totally mechanistic view of the human psyche: "I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail."

Blogs are not the be-all and end-all of communications. But as more and more of email marketing gets trapped in spam filters, blogs become an attractive alternative. One of the main advantages of a blog is having an ongoing "conversation" with your public. Unlike formal websites, blogs are by nature immediate and "transparent" (open and candid). Or, at least they should be. They are interactive--inviting comments from readers--and viral --inviting readers to forward blog posts to friends.

Speaking of hammers, I'd like to call attention to an article by David Teten and Scott Allen, authors of The Virtual Handshake: Of Hammers, Wrenches, and Screwdrivers.

I'll have more to say about this, but I just wanted to start with a bang.