February 2005

A moment for Hunter S who killed himself over the weekend. My favorite quote:

“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”

Glasses of Wild Turkey will clink tonight in a cheer for that which was gonzo.

One of the tools I have been using to “sell” blogging to corporate-types is Alexa. By showing traffic trends of traditional sites versus their blog counterparts, you can display how quickly blog traffic can match or eclipse their old-school equivalents.

A post on the thejasoncalacanisweblog provides a good example of this, comparing his autoblog to various long-time car sites. Here is a graph I just whipped up that provides an even more revealing, longer-term view.

The bloggers are blogging madly at Northern Voice this weekend. Live blogging, nonstop, went down at the first BBS05 and I wasn’t able to keep up. Here’s what to do, set the tags, aggregator, and let it fly, just like they’re doing up North.

In The Blog as an Advertising Medium Part One and Part Two, John Lowell adds his thoughts to the discussion about blog ads and why blogs are a unique advertising medium. The discussion started with the 25 large LifeHacker is making from Sony. Following Sony, I expect more sponsored topic (niche) blogs where companies want to target a specific market, blog, and sell to it. That may prove to more effective than the more random shotgun approach with Google AdWords. I can tell you from experience, that you can sell more product from a blog post than an Adwords buy.

One of the topics in my blog design presentation was Differentiation and why it was important to not have your blog like a million other blogs. That point came up last week for the oyayubizoku blog. The designer, Jason Fields, noticed that the same blog templates he was using was being used by a porn site and that weirded him out. Just like finding your voice and not posting about what everyone else is posting about, it’s important to find a unique design.

There are thousands of Blogger templates and tips from Everything TypePad to make your blog more personal. For Movable Type, it’s as easy as dropping in a replacement stylesheet, like those from MovableStyle.
For blogs like this one, it’s totally custom and you can view the stylesheet here. For inspiration, visit the CSS Zen Garden and blogs like Stopdesign, Coudal Partners, and Weighshift. And note just ’cause your blogging about business, doesn’t mean your site can’t be beautiful.

Six Apart looks like a real company now. I clicked through their new site this morning and was fascinated to see the redesign reflect a marketing staff. The site is less cool and more about people, smart people, all grown up. I told Anil that, “The site looks like a mature product site, but with it, dedicated, offering a product that’s worth the money.”

Some criticism is the busyness, jarring pages like this, when compared to the rest of the site, and the footer “drawer” that seems to have fallen out of the main box, like I want to push it back up.

At the Seattle Summit, Mitch Ratcliffe made an excellent point about malpractice suits and open dialog. He mentioned studies that indicate lawsuits can be reduced by honest admission of error. I had been meaning to study this further, and finally found time this weekend to gather additional data. The article “Why some doctors get sued more than others” reinforces the case for the honest blogging.

Grena Porto, director of risk management for VHA, an alliance of more than 2,200 hospitals was quoted in the piece: “Patients will often forgive honest mistakes when they’re disclosed promptly, fully, and compassionately,” says Porto. “But they become enraged when they suspect they’re being stonewalled.”

Also, stressed in the article was how appropriate “people skills” can diffuse many potential conflicts. Anyone who reads Scoble can tell you that a nice person representing an organization can do wonders.

The March issue (subscription or access code required for 30 days) of Fast Company features on article on Clip-n-Seal under the heading “One Thing Done Right,” and describes how Clip-n-Seal uses blogs almost exclusively to sell their product and how the blogosphere drives Google results and orders. The article, written by Cheryl Della Pietra, also notes how the key to successful blogging is authenticity. A good lesson in the article is to blog what you know and are passionate about it

During BBS 05, I wondered if the attendees understood why Clip-n-Seal was a sponsor. Brian Chin summarized it very well in his blog. Blogging isn’t all about tech. Clip-n-Seal uses blogs for low tech and so does the Stonyfield Farm Blog, the Tinbasher blog, and Eglus.

To get, “dooced,” is to lose your job for something you posted in your blog. It comes from Dooce.com, the website where the first reported blogger was fired for her reports on drug-addicted executives and dotcom debauchery. The ol’ El Dooce’ came up again this week when a Google blogger got fired. It was also a topic during the sessions at BBS 05 and was discussed as “fear of blogs,” “freedom of speech,” and “PR” issues. I’ve seen countless emails on it and get asked a lot about employee blogs. My answer for bloggers is that your freedom of speech ends with your employer. For employers, your employees need to understand that they can and will be fired for their blog. Regarding getting fired for her website, Dooce.com notes, “Be Ye Not So Stupid.” Good advice.

Washington is an At Will state, meaning your contract can be terminated at any time for any reason. An employer could fire me because they didn’t like the tune I was humming, the coffee I brought in for the staff, or the way I like to say, “Byronicus Maximus!,” when I enter a room. The topics on my blog end at the work I do for companies and I’ll keep it that way. I will not risk pissing off the people that pay me and I’m not surpised when bloggers do get dooced.

An MP3 file (30M) of Scoble’s keynote (44K, pdf) is now available. The keynote was blogged live by members of the audience, including

• Will Pate — Scoble at BBS05
• Lee LeFever — Scoble: BBS 2005
• Tri Hussy — BBS05: Scoble’s keynote
• Brian Chin — At the Summit

The main themes from the keynote are

• Blogging is grassroots
• It reaches people
• Don’t fear the blog
• Blog with passion

Robert didn’t know he was being recorded and was pleasantly surprised to learn that we had audio ready to go. You can hear the candor is his voice. Robert speaks much like he writes. If you know his blog, you know him.

We’ll podcast a few more sessions and with Eric Rice’s help, podcast the entire next event.

Jason Calacanis posts on the value of the Bloglines deal and makes predictions about RSS readers. I recently purchased NewsFire because it sucked the least of all the other readers I’d tried — I review it here. Before purchasing it, I paused and thought, “I’m buying something I can get for free.” NewsFire is well worth it, but I also wondered if there were any RSS business models. Calacanis concludes, “there is no business in RSS readers.” Do you agree?

Based largely on Google Adword analysis profiled on stage at the Blog Business Summit in Seattle, canonupdate.com has been launched. This blog is designed to provide tips, techniques, and tools for users of higher-end Canon digital cameras. It’s current pagerank is a lowly zero, but this BBS site has a pagerank of 7, so it will be interesting to see how this link out affects pagerank in a few days.

After my session in Seattle where I evangelized the AdSense program to entrepreneural bloggers, I received a lot of inquiries asking exactly HOW to integrate AdSense ads into various Blog platforms. To that end, here is the first of several Quicktime movies we’ve created to help make that integration easier. This file shows how and where to paste the code to get sidebar ads in place in Blogger blogs.

This movie is a fairly high resolution (800 x 600) movie without much done to restrict size/quality. It’s 16.8 megabytes, so it takes a couple minutes on my cable connection to bring into view. I suggest you right-click and save it to your hard drive before launching.

We expect to cover more AdSense material at the next Blog Business Summit, so let us know where we should hold it.

With apologies to blog books that have been published, being pitched, or otherwise in progress, here’s how to market with a blog in 15 words or less:

You blog, other blogs link to your blog, you link back, and Google loves that.

That’s the basic premise of blog marketing. A recent SVN post proves how simple it is. With blog marketing easily understood, what we’re hearing from our readers, BBS 05 attendees, and future attendees, is that they want “more info for the first timer.” They get the why, the marketing-google-juice part, and now they want the how, with hands-on, what to do, how to design, and how to code.

They’re also not that interested in ClueTrains or more theories of blogging. They want to dive right in and learn from the best on how to blog their business, their great idea, or their online community. They also need to understand the impact of RSS and related blogging technologies.

Bloggers typically aren’t the best evangelizers because we talk to ourselves too much within the blogosphere. We heard that as well and to grow this medium, to spread the word, we need to reach out more across industries and communicate a message about blogging that more businesses can understand. We need to answer why your website should be a blog, why you should publish RSS, and how blogs can be a platform for business.

And that’s exactly what we’re working on for the next summit. It’ll be an event chock full of blog goodness for the novice, business owner, or blogger that wants to be more successful.

Thanks again for all your feedback and for helping make the next BBS 05 even better.

Brian Chin is a Blogger for the Seattle Post Intelligencer, and covered the Blog Business Summit for the paper. His post event review is here.

Brian commented that “There are many ways that blogs can help build a business — but building a business out of a blog is another matter.”

While it may not be easy to get rich, people are making big money blogging. According to Churbuck.com, John Batelle is likely “raking in $30,000 to $50,000 a month” from his Searchblog. The entrepreneurial blog is a reality, and is poised to take off as newsreaders spike in usage. These success stories are the type of tales that the Blog Business Summit wants to hear (and help create!)

The business model for the Web was similarly “elusive” in 1994, but the true believers cashed in anyway. Just because you can’t see the train yet doesn’t mean it’s not coming. I think we can hear that whistle off in the distance. A main theme that drove the creation of the Seattle event was “it’s coming, get ready.” Hmmm–maybe it’s already here…

Let us know where we should do the next Summit, tell us your favorite (and not-so favorite) cities. If you take the time to fill us in, you’ll get a discounted pass to the next show.