March 2005

Earlier this week, Zeldman riffed on the Blog/Brand panel at SXSW and Jim Coudal’s question, “Should your blog have a business?” As Jeffrey notes, “do it right, and you might be free to quit your day job.” You may also become an accidental blogger, as Molly discussed, a traffic driving pundit like Glenn Flieschman, a manifesto machine like Scoble, or design a killer web app like Jason Fried.

We hope to have all of those bloggers, including myself, and more at the next BBS 05. We may even add a panel on how to quit your day job. As Mike Davidson noted, in his SXSW wrap-up, 2005 is indeed the next 1997. Except this time let’s do it with less foosball tables, real business plans, balance sheets, and less greed.

After posting about Textura Designs implementation of Google Ad Links. Jason suggests we call them “Tads”, short for tag-ads. The comments range from “this is an awesome concept” to “stupid”. I find it hard to believe the folks at Google would seriously deploy something in the latter category…

It was announced earlier this week that Warner Brothers is sponsoring the Eric Rice show. That’s huge news for the podcasting crowd, which is quickly emerging from a geek meme to a niche marketing medium. I’ve been dismissive of podcasts in the past, I honestly just didn’t get it at all. The name is confusing (it’s not broadcasted, but a downloadable file indicated by an RSS feed) and I thought, why would I want to do that? Why isn’t there an iTunes podcast microbroadcast channel that I can just subscribe to, like other stations?

Clip-n-Seal sponsored a podcast earlier this year and had a difficult time explaining it to our customers. As you can hear in that file, who wants to listen to two geeks talk about moving to Seattle? Great for independent content, but with no editor or programming, you’re going to get shows like public access cable and what large audience wants to listen to a Winer podcast or Adam Curry taking huge on-air bong hits?

Now, Eric’s got the numbers, sponsor, and a plan to change the world with his entertaining show. Eric knows his audience and I hope it grows exponentially. I also still wish that I could just subscribe to Eric’s show in iTunes.

Many people want to know what are all the changes that were made by Google to the AdSense terms as of March 8. Luckily, I kept a copy of my original agreement, and was able to run a document comparison in Word. A PDF file containing the redlined edits is here. The “Prohibited Uses” section needed a little more effort to decipher, as Word flagged the entire section as replaced. A more understandable version of that particular section is here. I’d love to see comments here about these changes.

We’ll be covering AdSense in depth at the next Blog Business Summit. Let us know where we should host it.

As of March 8, 2005, Google has updated the agreement that AdSense Ad serving sites must adhere to. I have compared the specific wording of the Confidentiality section from the agreement dated October 8, and here is a screen shot of the specific edit.

After the How to Build your Brand with Blogs at SXSW, I continued my nonscientific, informal poll of who actually uses RSS and the results are always the same. When I ask friends, colleagues, and conference attendees, “do you actually read RSS feeds?” the response is something like, “sure, I have an RSS reader, subscribe to a ton of feeds, but I never read them, because I’m busy.” If your job is to ride around on a Segway, read RSS feeds feeds all day and post on them, that’s one thing, but most of use have other work to do. Recent surveys find that I’m not alone in that opinion.

Nice. But not the same.

For consuming news, a page like Google news is more effective than RSS because there are pretty pictures to look at and those pictures are associated with a headline. I’m sure the RSS pundits will argue that I don’t get it and Scoble is reading like 2 million feeds a day now, but I ask where’s your stats? Sure, you can note how more people subscribe to RSS, but how many people are reading it? Not many.

The Does Design Matter? panel at SXSW apparently further convinced Scoble that he’s the prototypical RSS user. He’s not. He’s the exception to RSS users that are overwhelmed by all the feeds. What’s good for Scoble and his SmartPhone, isn’t necessarily good for everyone else.

As Zeldman wrote, “Reading Plastic Bag in a news reader is like getting the text of your favorite magazine in email. Nice. But not the same.”

For the love of pugs

Robert posted, “I’ve been telling audiences that those of you still using Web browsers are wasting your time.” To the contrary, RSS can be an enormous waste of time. I’d asked last year, what productivity gains with RSS? I’ve found two so far: NOAA’s weather feeds and Netflix. Those feeds work because they offer a specific feed on one topic. That’s helpful because I benefit from at-a-glance weather info or my Netflix queue. 12-a-day-shotgun posting from blogs like Wonkette and Gizmodo are absolutely not easier to read or use in a reader.

Furthermore, if no one visits your site, they can’t comment, buy from you, click your ads, discover your shared love of pugs, or all those other wonderful things we do on the web now.

Point Counterpoint

I’ll discuss blog design in depth at Web Design World next week. We’ll also discuss it more at the next BBS 05. Robert and I should probably have a point counterpoint debate on the topic. The debate started at SXSW, when I asked him who designed his blog.

At the SXSW How to Build your Brand with Blogs panel, I asked Jim Coudal about the Abba Effect. A few weeks earlier, Jim’s site posted 238 Miles, A long day’s journey out of Iowa and it was blogged everywhere. The resulting crush of visitors, nearly crushed their servers and panicked Jim, but also drove traffic and sales. Just like the Subservient Chicken or I Love Bees, memes can refresh a brand, drive traffic and sales, or be widely criticized like the French Fry blog. While I agree that blogs can communicate brand to niche markets, that’s what our panel was about, McDonalds’ Brand Journalism can’t change the fact that they’re McDonalds. Bloggers promptly pronounced the Fry blog as a a fake blog, instead of “loving it” like they did with the Abba video.

Beau is blogging Seattle area real estate news to keep prospective clients informed on current mortgage rates, homes coming on the market, foreclosures, and more. He wrote to say that, “I could possibly be the only real estate agent that’s blogging to the Seattle community via RSS and WAP.”

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Quick google check and I confirmed he’s correct. While Beau is connecting with customers, I wondered when a real estate blogger would take on HouseValues.com and start blogging house values and the Multiple Listing Service. I’d prefer to connect with a trusted voice, like a blogger, to value my house than to give my email to a lead-generating tool.

I tuned into CNN during lunch and it was all blogs. I saw the same thing last week and I guess now it’s a regular feature for CNN to read and show blog posts on the air. I imagine they have a crack news staff pouring over RSS feeds to find relevant posts. The topics today include Dan Rather’s departure and the FEC’s threat to regulate political blogs.

Focused more on business blogging, I don’t spend too much time on political blogs, but wondered how it long it would be before business start pitting blogs against each other (maybe they’re doing it already?). One example could be a FUD blog going against all the MSDN blogs. Or a company has a crisis blog at the ready to roll out, when some bad press hits. As company get blogs, will more sinister uses emerge? Are companies searching competitors blogs now for trade secrets and employees to poach?

At some point, I expect, it’s going to be enough with the feel-good blogging manifestos, buzz on CEO bloggers, and down to business as usual.

I’ll moderate the How to Build Your Brand with Blogs this weekend at SXSW Interactive. Joining me will be other BBS 05 speakers, including

• Jason Fried
• Robert Scoble
• Molly E. Holzschlag

Wondering what do blogs have to do with brand? Well, a lot. That goes for your business and personal brand. Check Molly’s post on the Accidental Blogger Effect for more on unintended traffic and how that can change a personal site.

In a televised lecture titled “Amazon.com: A Data-Driven Enterprise” presented to Computer Science students at the University of Washington, Dennis Lee of Amazon opened the kimono a bit and revealed some essential layout/positioning facts that their research has revealed. Some of the more actionable conclusions included:

Position matters: At the most basic level, Lee reinforced what experienced Internet marketers already know about positioning of elements: “little changes in where things are can affect conversion significantly”.

Simplicity may not sell. After repeated testing it was surprisingly clear that 3 column layouts sold product better than 2 column layouts. On the 2 column pages, orders were “significantly” compromised. Abandonment went up and adds to cart went down.

Top center rules. Lee confided that at the regular meetings of the category VPs, the main turf battle was over who would receive top center position on the home page.

We’ll be covering this topic in depth at the next Blog Business Summit. Let us know where we should host it.

The WSJ’s Riva Richmond announces that the blog as a business tool has arrived. One quote in an article that repeats much of what you already know is from Forrester Analyst Charlene Li, who says it’s a “new way of communicating, rather than marketing.” With a blog, more than ever before, it’s the content.

I heard echoes of the dotcoms this week. Terms like click-through, impressions, stickiness, and friction were all tossed around the discussions about blogging and ad revenue. Ad placement, weight, and tracking eye movements were also discussed and for the first time ever I actually cited a Jakob Nielsen article to support my argument. That argument is, ads on blogs are like ads on any other site and a pot of gold hasn’t been discovered at the end of the blog rainbow. As Nielsen notes, Text-only ads on search are far more effective and image ads are best for impressions, not clicks. What will drive sales is a credible blog post. You’ll get far more traction out of that than any ad campaign.

A FT.com article explains why executives should stay clear of the blogosphere. Or more specifically, if they’re going to blog, they shouldn’t just write platitudes in a disco dad voice and should open up the comments. The potential problem with executives blogs is that they can be one step removed from a press release or sound washed. A blog should be the exact opposite of Walmart Facts or similar sites.

The topic of who is going to write all the posts for a blog always comes up. I get asked about it all the time: what voice, who’s going to write it, what are they going to say. However careful and well-meaning a blog can be, if posts are ran though writers, editors, and PR, the blog is going to sound washed.

One suggestion is to have the executive host the blog and dialog with employees, line workers, the creative staff. The people that make the company work, not just the figurehead. Think of it like American Chopper for your company and consider what makes your company, or CEO, interesting. If you blog it like a reality show, it’s going to be far more interesting than a “from the desk of …” newsletter model.