May 2005

Not to be outdone in the mainstream press, the Calcanis Weblogs Inc Network, a rival to Denton media, is getting covered for leaking Xbox photos, CNET is accused of stealing them, and fan boys and girls everywhere are discussing the new Xbox, which Microsoft promises will be the iPod of 2005 (uh huh, right after we believe MS that Longhorn isn’t XP3).

Where Denton thinks bloggers live a fantasy world, Jason encourages them to boycott CNET. Quite the day in the blogosphere, almost the makings of an epic greek tragedy or a good episode of Deadwood. Especially, when you factor in the HP censorship battle, as reported by Jeremy Wagstaff, and the Nikon stonewall.

What business plan? Nick Denton never had one for his blog network and thinks the blog revolution is for those that desperately, “want to believe there’s going to be this new revolution and their lives are going to be changed.” Gawker is old media company in new media clothes,” complains Stowe Boyd and Denton reminds us that “It’s Internet media. It’s just the latest iteration of Internet media.” A provocative 3-page article from the NY Times published today explores the nonrevolution of blogs, according to Mr. Denton. The article itself is pretty much the same as the wired article and say what you will about Denton, but he does stay on message.

As a case study of how not to manage bloggers and Web-savvy consumers, Nikon may supplant Kryptonite locks as the new example of what NOT to do. Count on this being a topic for discussion at the next BBS. Someone send these guys a copy of Cluetrain!

On April 17, is was discovered by the photoshopnews blog that Nikon had encrypted the white balance data in their proprietary Raw file format. The bloggers and bulletin boards lit up with negative commentary from professional photographers irate over the company wanting to take "ownership" over their image data.

Five days later, Nikon issued a surreal "advisory" (a press release written in total marketingspeak) essentially confirming people’s fears and to some degree insulting many of the small software developers who support their cameras.

Today, Engadget interviews Steve Heiner of Nikon and as the topic moves to what is clearly the most critical issue on everyone’s minds, the PR reps step in and stonewall, only allowing the content of the now 17 day old "advisory" to be referred to.

Here is a snippet of the other-worldly exchange:

Engadget: Another internal change, of course, is that you now have to write software for your products. How difficult is it for a hardware manufacturer to be producing software?

Heiner: Actually, it’s not, because Nikon has been real proactive about being in the software business. Even before our first digital cameras, we had digital film scanners that required special software designed by Nikon engineers. Every time we introduce a new camera, the software has to be compatible with all our previous cameras. So we’re doing quite well in the software business.

In the past two years we introduced a new browser and basic editing software called Picture Project. Plus, we have a very capable image browser and thumbnail program called Nikon View and we have Capture software, which is designed to be an integral part of our digital SLR systems.

Engadget: Adobe has been trying to get camera manufacturers to adopt the license- and royalty-free DNG or Digital Negative standard. Is Nikon considering that?

Saurabh Wahi, MWW Group (PR representative): Actually, let me jump in real quick. Let’s save that question for another discussion because we just want to talk about digital SLR cameras now. Is that OK with you, JD?

Engadget: Well, it’s not OK, because if you don’t address some of these issues, our readers are going to rip into you. So it’s for your own good to get in front of these topics that have been swirling around the past two weeks.

Wahi: I understand. But at this point, we have put out an advisory, and we want to forward that advisory over to you, but beyond that we have no further information. So I hope that’s fine.

Engadget: I don’t know why Steve wouldn’t be able to talk in general terms about these issues.

Wahi: There’s so much information out there right now, we want to make sure we can come back with specific information that can help people, and we are in the process of putting that together.

Engadget: There was a report in CNET on April 21 about the encryption being broken on the white balance metadata for RAW files in the Nikon Capture application, does Nikon plan to take any action against the programmer who broke your encryption code?

Wahi: Again, whatever information that we have available right now is available in the advisory, and I can make sure I can send that out to you.

Engadget: Could we just talk about the business decision of Nikon encrypting its white balance metadata in the RAW files?

Wahi: Again, the advisory contains all the information that we have available to give to you, and we’ll send that out to you.

Engadget: I’d like to know what you would say to your customers who are hopping mad about this.

Wahi: The advisory contains all the information and as soon as we finish this interview I’ll send you that.

Chapter 5 of the business blogging book Shel Israel’s and Robert Scoble’s are writing has been posted. It includes:

• Buzznovation
• Clip-n-Seal
• English Cut
• Haisha Business Blog
• Horsefeathers
• Leave it Behind
• Lloyd’s Antique Online Shop
• Stonyfield

and more. Among the chapter’s conclusions are “talk, don’t sell” and “post often and be interesting.”

In an interview about Clip-n-Seal and blogging posted yesterday on the The Red Couch blog, I stated that “It’s not about the blog. It’s about the product.” I talked about that with clients this week as well. The blog itself isn’t the means, it’s just the medium, it’s the snowball that can grow or melt.

There isn’t a secret formula to build traffic, get noticed, and have your voice matter in the galaxy of weblogs. Instead, as Scoble noted during his keynote at the last BBS 05, you have to have passion for your topic, a story, a killer app or product. It’s also a ton of work, not just being “damn lucky.” You can’t just launch that blog, you have to write it as well and figure out what you’re going to say.

Finally, as business blogs rush to fill niche markets, I think more businesses will ask themselves, “should our blog have a business?”

In a techno-fluff piece, ABC News reports on tagging and how it’s “all the rage among the digerati.” The reporter must have polled the digerati that are not using Google Desktop search or Apple’s Spotlight. As I’ve posted on my personal blog, “I don’t care where my data is, as long as an application finds it for me.” I get the excitement about how tags create relationships and that venture capital is pouring into firms with products that tag. But hold on, tagging is just like creating a hierarchy of folders on your hard drive, but it’s in the blogosphere. Once desktop search saves you in a development cycle, client meeting, or you recover that lost family recipe, you start thinking differently about how you find information. We shouldn’t have to tag anything for relationships to be created. For example, when I check the Technorati Tag on Blog, I wonder exactly what that’s showing me? There’s a red one, Gothic barbie, 15 entries in French, news from Boing Boing, and ads.

Back in the day, we meta “tagged” all of our pages and now Google purposefully ignores meta tags. Post-spotlight (as in life before Spotlight and after), I started thinking about blog information architecture and it might not be long before we don’t categorize or tag anything. We just post and let the application do the rest.

I’ve often thought about starting a meme watch blog to critique the memes that come and go in the blogosphere. For example, del.i.cious is cool until you realize the amount of time it takes. Tagging is nifty, until you see search results in Technorati that return with no weight or order to them. Tribe.net has this swiss-army-knife approach to put all possible social blogging functions into one container and does none of them well and, of course, no one reads RSS as much as they say they do. I can go on all day about memes that suck, but the point of this post is that two podcast radio deals were recently announced. Sirius is trying the one-podcast to rule them all approach with Adam Curry (they haven’t said if he’ll still take bong hits on air) and Infinity Broadcasting Corp is converting a San Francisco station to a podcast only format. Depending on who you talk to in the podcast community, these two events are either a harbinger of success to come or the first signs of the apocalypse. I’m neutral on either opinion, but I would certainly like to just add a podcast show to iTunes from a public radio menu. I don’t care where independent radio comes from as long as I can just listen to it.

We will be podcasting the next BBS 05 and I recently podcasted on Pug Blog.

Reporting on Bill G’s speech to the national convention of business editors and writers, Todd Bishop’s Blog notes that Bill said the only real challenge for corporate blogging is with executives who start blogs but don’t have time to make relatively frequent posts. Gates said he has so far stayed away from starting his own for that reason.

“What are we going to blog about and who is going to write all those posts” is the most common problem business face with blogging and I think a real showstopper for some. It’s easy to “get” blogs and another problem entirely to actually publish one. We’ll have how to write, get noticed, and more at the next BBS 05.

Prediction: in ten years there will be no more press releases. An article from the Wall Street Journal covering how Silicon Valley VCs are embracing blogging tells the tale.

Brad Feld, managing director of Mobius Venture Capital, learned a lesson early in his blogging career: Readers don’t like press releases.

Shortly after Mr. Feld began his Web log, Feld Thoughts, he posted a press release from a newly funded Mobius portfolio company, Stratify Inc. He quickly received a number of displeased responses.

“Now I go to your blog and half of it is stuff you’re trying to promote … So it’s already only 50% as interesting as it was when you started. Think about it — you actually are a smart guy with stuff to say, and half of what you’re doing is spam,” read an excerpt from one comment about the post.

They will become like doilies. Quaint yet useless historical artifacts. Those fully engaged with the new reality already ignore them–that’s why we never issued one for our first conference, yet had strong attendance anyway. The problem is that as William Gibson said “the future is here, it’s just not equally distributed yet”. With that in mind, we may have to issue one (sigh) for our next event as a key audience are those who still read them…

Following Steve’s post on the WSJ piece, I checked on Vespa Blogs and found a FAQ that reads like a manifesto and seemed to reassure itself and the blogosphere pundits that it’s going to be a real blog (see When is a Blog a Blog for my call for no more Manifestos). I wondered if any study went into how much Vespa’s demographic cares about a blog’s peer-to-peer transparency policy — that could be called Clear Peer. I’m guessing they’ll just want to debate features of a new model, “the products and broader Vespa lifestyle topics.” As discussed in the Abba Effect, communicating brand to niche markets is a smart use of blogs, but the content is what drives sales and traffic. I don’t think consumers will care that it’s a blog just that it loves Vespas — a lot.

I’m sure Vespa Blogs will be discussed at the next Blog Business Summit. Let us know where we should host it.

As profiled in today’s WSJ, blogs are identified as the “latest channel” for direct marketing to customers and prospects.
The article claims that they provide something crucial to any marketer: raw consumer feedback. Sort of a “virtual focus group”

The manufacturer of Vespa scooters, intends to launch two blogs written by Vespa owners in America this year. Paolo Timoni who is in charge of the effort says “This new blog is the way to do it nowadays,” The article claims he also sees the project as a way to “cull more opinion and research from consumers”.

As described in depth at our last conference, the article says corporations will need to be wary in this space to avoid having little more than a disdained “spin machine”.

One marketing adviser suggests leaving bloggers alone and just monitor the posts and comments. “If the intent is to have a real two-way dialogue, to gain real insight from consumers, a third party can be more effective at that,” said John Cate, vice president and national media director for Aegis Group’s Carat Interactive.

Apparently although there is a Starbucks gossip blog, Starbucks has no policy regarding blogs nor a formal system for monitoring them.

Michael Wiley, director of new media for GMs communications department, was quoted as saying “A lot of what blogging is about is authenticity, getting beyond corporate speak and PR, and really creating a conversation”.

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

Those in the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) industry are all a twitter over the recent patent filing(s) by Google. Because many suggest the processes/algorithms they describe are ones already in use, I believe we may have been given a peek behind the kimono as to why blogs are given preference in Google’s searches.

One of the patents appears to say that if site A links to site B, and then site B’s page content is changed after the link is established, both lose Pagerank. That scenario seems to describe the all-too-common common sequence when static html page A links to static html page B. For example, hand built, or machine generated home pages change constantly.

It certainly does not seem to describe the common blog post/permalinked “page” scenario. If a post references another permalinked post, the propensity for change is much less. I’d like someone to tell me though if Google considers the “framing” information surrounding a post to be part of the “page” that can change. In other words, if I change a sidebar link, has the “page” changed in google’s eyes? I’d apprecate comment by those in the know!

Either way, more fodder for the boss to get them onboard the blogging bandwagon. Also makes me less inclined to edit posts after the fact…

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