June 2005

Happy to say that Pete Blackshaw and Evelyn Rodriguez have agreed to present a new session for us at the upcoming San Francisco Blog Business Summit:

Staying on top of the Buzz: Blog monitoring tools and techniques
Since the last event, we have heard time and time again that this topic is essential for all Bloggers corporate or not. I remember Robert Scoble had proposed a similar session at the last show called “A Good Blogger is a Good Reader” (or something very close to that).

As I mentioned in a previous post, even those organizations that are facing internal resistance to blogging, can (and must) pay attention to what the bloggers are saying. This session will focus on those tools and techniques that allow for timely receipt of critical updates and facilitate response.

Pete is uniquely qualified to talk on this subject, as his company Intelliseek has created a number of tools for monitoring what bloggers and newsgroups are saying about their client companies.

Evelyn is one of the brightest minds in the business blogging arena today, and has been writing for years about Web-based tools and techniques for PR and marketing professionals.

I have directed them to cover all the best tools and Web services that help people stay on top of the buzz.

Please comment to help insure we create a session that meets the needs of our attendees!

Slashdot posts about spam blogs and wonders how to possibly, “filter the signal from the torrent of noise.” The torrent of noise is also present in tag clouds, which Zeldman compared to Mullets and wrote, “Tag clouds harness all that mindless accidental randomness.” See that accidental randomness in action on Technorati’s Blog Tag result. Technorati is, “currently tracking 12 million sites and 1.2 billion links,” and in those millions of sites and billions of links we find proof of Sturgeon’s Law: ninety percent of everything is crap.

Back to the future of tags

Tagging is like going back to the future. When I worked on SGML projects in the pre-dawn of the web, we tagged everything. Meta this, meta that and of course, years later search engines starting ignoring all that tagging (At the time, I sat through a mind-boggling presentation on Property Sets and Groves and spoke with tag vendors). While tagging folksonomies feel good, they also are freely based on whatever anyone wants to tag. Zeldman also noted that, “Tag clouds are not dumb,” but the rush to use them is.

So should business blogs tag their posts? That’s another topic for discussion at the next Blog Business Summit.

I’d written several draft posts on Microsoft RSS and deleted them all. The first remarked on not “believing your own hype,” the second realized MS RSS was to extend Office docs, and the rest were variations of the same thing everyone else was posting on. I finally realized, when commenting on Nick Finck’s RSS Ethics post, that the bigger story, “is the way we see them (MS) as a company.” RSS in XP 3, in 18 months, that big announcement thudded louder than the one for the super-hyped nofollow. Adding RSS lists for Sharepoint, great, the product will still be loathed by it’s users. Of course they’d add RSS to Internet Explorer, along with every popular feature that Safari, Opera, and FireFox offer.

How MS is engaging the bloggers via Scoble et al. and trying to play nice with an estranged developer community, that’s the real story and one that’ll continue to play out in the blogosphere and at the next Blog Business Summit.

Robert Scoble and I were discussing the sessions and the general editorial game plan for our upcoming Blog Business Summit, and he suggested adopting a theme/tagline for the conference of “Getting Past the Fear”.

Based on many conversations I’ve had over the past few moths, it’s clear that the fear is real. Many individuals and organizations are fearful of how competitive/outsider blogs might negatively affect their businesses — yet they are probably the most apprehensive about employee blogging.

My position is that if your company is fearful of employee blogging you can (and should!) begin to “blog without blogging”. Here are the strata of short-term approaches to corporate blogging that I see:

3) Might do: Maintaining and populating one or more blogs that discuss what the company or employees are doing. (Blogging required, needs careful thought and execution to minimize risk)

The third option seems to be getting much of the attention these days, yet is certainly the move that requires the most risk, attention, and effort. Number one and two are almost completely risk free, yet can reap huge dividends for any business that invests the time and money. It also can act as a training ground for the eventual move into a customer dialog weblog (which I suspect will be a mandatory move for most over the long term).

Naturally, we’ll be covering how to optimize all three approaches at the August Blog Business Summit.

Blinq, the Philadephia Inquirer’s blog, reported last week that a blogger had made it onto People’s 50 Hottest Bachelors. As the cult of celebrity inducts bloggers, it won’t be long before there’s a blogger getting voted off an island somewhere, groveling for attention on the Surreal Life, or adding their memoirs to a genre of steamy blogs to books, like the The Washingtonienne.

If the Runaway Bride can say I do to a movie deal for running away, then a blogger should certainly get a deal for, like, just blogging. My vote is for the C-list. The pitch:

A c-list blogger goes to various meetups, get’s no respect, dishes on b and a listers, builds an enormous fan base, and a page rank to rule them all.

Last year during my lectures on business blogging, I profiled TDF Blog. The blog is a great example of finding a niche, driving traffic, and making good money. This year, going into Lance’s last tour, the site’s traffic is again on the rise. There’s no shortage of cycling sites and what TDF Blog does is aggregate news and offer RSS, where other cycling sites do not. Earlier this year, Coudal asked, “should your blog have a business.” Considering Frank Steele blogs part time on the site, it’s a small blog business, but it’s doing quite well.

For a break from all the business blogging check

• The C-list — one post is all you need, a blog performance piece
• My Dopey World — Fun loving party girls
• Aussie Ravers — party on
• Why cats go bad — Pug Blog’s opposite

On the same day I read that Marketers Scan Blogs For Brand Insights, I read Dell lies. Dell sucks from Buzzmachine by Jeff Jarvis. I hope those same marketing firms are scanning for customers that hate their clients, instead of just looking for new marketing programs to appeal to teenagers. The Dell Lies post is remarkable because of all the Dell hate and horror stories in the comments and there’s not much CIA-inspired natural-language processing needed to read the words, “NEVER EVER EVER BUYING ANOTHER DELL.” As Pete Blackshaw notes in the article, you can’t just dismiss vocal complainers because of the emergence of blogs and Google.

A quick Google check on, “Dell Sucks,” and the Jarvis post is the 5th hit.

I agree with Halley that Michael Dell should make a personal visit to Jarvis and fix his computer because the complaints are going to just continue. One of the concerns business have about blogs is engaging with negative customers. “What if they say bad things?,” I’ve heard and responded, “they’re going to do it anyway, it’s better to engage them head on.”

In the Dealing with Bloggers: Partnering and Defense Strategies session from the last blogbusinesssummit, Scoble, Anil Dash, and Buzz talked about how some companies learn the hard way about blogs. Dell is a good topic for the next BBS05 in San Fran.

Earlier this week, Keith removed ads from his RSS feeds because they weren’t generating any revenue. Roger Johansson removed them as well. A problem with ads in feeds is that they’re not contextual (see Slashdot’s feed for an example). Adsense for feeds has much better text matching and text ads work, when they get the user to their goal. But in RSS, the goal is to read the feed, not specifically find a product or topic.

Headlines, blurbs, links

If others find that RSS ads aren’t working, we may also see bloggers returning to summary posts in RSS because they’ll want to drive readers to their sites and ads. Summaries v. full posts in RSS has been debated at length. Where some argue that design is secondary to the text and want the full post, others argue that the text is meant to be read in the context of the site and RSS is good for headlines, blurbs, links. NY Times and BBC News continue to offer summary posts, as noted by Dave Winer in his response to a comment from Calcanis on RSS ads. Winer also notes that, “RSS itself is an advertising medium,” because its driving readers to the site where the ads are.

I haven’t seen this yet, but a visual, interstitial ad between the “read more” in your RSS and web page maybe coming.

More on this topic

• Adsense for Feeds, say what?
• Why adsense for feeds is a bad idea (at least for now)
• Ads in RSS feeds? Corrupting the idea of information syndication

Here’s a quick study in why good blog design matters. Compare and contrast Rblg.org with Microformats.org. Both launched this week and concern microformats, a topic explained by Anil Dash.

I can’t figure it out what Rblg is and, as Molly noted to me in an quick conversation, “the
contrast is so low on the page even with very good (but aging) eyes I couldn’t read it.” Now, check Microformats. Much mo’ betta, with a welcoming design. I want to try and understand what a microformat is and why it matters. The blog offers an about box right up front with lots of resources. Even if microformats don’t matter to me, I want to know more. Like, “are there micropayments in microformats or are people getting paid?”

While developers are applauding themselves for the wonders of the new internet, they also need to spend some time explaining what all these newness does and is. Well, unless they’re just coding it for their geek friends. Plazes is another example, it could be cool, looks cool, but whatever, “a navigation system for your social life is,” I don’t quite get.

With this resurgence in web technologies, designers and developers need to do more to avoid a micro-understanding of microformats.

I’ll talk more about blog design at the next Blog Business Summit and I’m sure microformats will be discussed as well.

Update

Check Simplebit’s discussion of the Microformats’ design.

One of the top Web marketing and business gurus in the industry is joining the Blog Business Summit in anticipation of our upcoming San Francisco conference. I had the pleasure of working with Dave Taylor during my days with Thunder Lizard Productions. He was an excellent conference chair and speaker, so I was very excited to see that he was now focusing his editorial efforts on how businesses can succeed with blogs.

Dave has joined our founding board and will be hosting a special pre-conference “Business Blogging 101″ workshop on August 17. It’s for those who are totally new to blogging, and here are a few of the topics planned:

How to set up a blog * Why Google loves blogs * How to follow what the bloggers are saying about you * How to write posts that drive traffic * How to make money from advertising • Why you should care what the bloggers are saying even if you’re not blogging. * Integrating blogging into your existing marketing campaigns * Insider tips on how to drive traffic to your weblog.

Much of this will be covered in more depth at the main event, but this 4 hour seminar (also at the posh Palace Hotel) will take the newbie very quickly to a nice level of basic competence where they can get more from the Summit.

You can save $20.00 of the regular price of $195.00 by registering here.

We are going through the many excellent session and speaker proposals now, and will have much more news as we finalize the schedule.

I lost my will to blog last week. I was sick, in bed, and eventually numb from watching countless hours of daytime television. On Sunday, I started feeling better, got my groove back, made the blogging rounds, and

• Found a venture capitalist asking for Elevator Pitch podcasts, via del.icio.ius, and promptly tagged the Pug Blog Pugcast
• Googled blog books, read the Blogging Secrets Exposed site and thought, “wow,” in giant, red fonts
• Considered the future of blogs
• Noted that self-obsessed bloggers can check themselves even more with Mybloglog.
• Appreciated Edward Deevy’s post on how he became a blogging evangelist
• Watched an orangutan eat cereal at Errol Morris
• Read a pilot’s view of the airplane industry
• Thought about community activation
• Appreciated another article from the Seattle PI on Clip-n-Seal
• Observed Scoble being wrong
• Commented on a real estate blog that does exactly what it should. It offers a good mix of content, a certain amount of salesmanship, but not too much, with passionate, authoritative posting.
• Wondered what Google’s wallet will look like

Mark Jen, the fired Google blogger bounces back with another job and writes a blogging policy, as reported by the SF Gate. There are two approaches: lock it down or let it go. In the let it go approach, businesses let employess blog with the “don’t blog anything that can be deposed in a court” approach. For locking it down, see Apple. There’s no Apple employee blogs for a reason.

The dooce topic comes up everytime I speak and was debated at the last BBS 05. I always recommend that business allow blogging with guidelines. Those guidelines should be, “if you say something you shouldn’t, you’ll be fired.”

Earlier this month, CNN picked up an AP report on blogging and included a photo of a beaming Randy Baseler and his blog. I hadn’t seen the article previously and let out an, “awesome!” at that photo. That photo and coverage falls under the, “if you’re not blogging now, you should be category.”

We plan on having Boeing and GM Fastlane people at the next Blog Business Summit

The Knowledge@Wharton site explains the new internet in a Q/A with Kevin Werbach and Janice Fraser. The new internet includes lots of terminology and excitement from developers, users and can totally confuse a business person. As I learned in Colorado, all of these technologies, including blogging, don’t extend much farther than the blogosphere. I expect that to change soon enough and Wharton’s article is a good read for those that are lost. Blogging apps are probably the best example. (I’ll exclude tag clouds, amateurization, and folksonomies for another day.) I’ve seen audience members just blank out on what blogging is until you show them the application and how easy it is to use.

Besides all the hyped terms, what is new about the internet is how easy it finally is. That’s what’s revolutionary.

I checked in with a reporter and blogger I know at Fast Company to ping them on the Clip-n-Seal/NASA story and see what was shaking with them. The response was somber. They don’t know if they’ll have jobs or not and are awaiting their fate. The magazine is being auctioned with bids arriving this week. The editor has made his case, FC Now is blogging it, and another blogger is pleased with their struggles.

Fast Company wrote about Clip-n-Seal in their March issue and it was great press for us. I wish the staffers well and good luck. They were a pleasure to work with and it’s a great magazine.

Gnomedex is next week, sold out, and headlining with Adam Curry, Dave Winer, and Dean Hachamovitch. It’s going to be an all-out geekfest, with 150 bloggers so far.

Of all the blogs I talk about, Pug Blog gets the most questions. For whatever reasons, people connect with that example and I wouldn’t expect pet blogs to get more props than one about planes. Maybe it’s easy to think about all you could write about your pet or they just like funny photos.

I found myself out of the blogopshere in Colorado, speaking to business owners who had heard of blogs, but weren’t working, talking, or debating them. They wanted to know they how/why, and that’s what we talked about at the dinners, during my keynote, and parties. The discussions were as refreshing as the mountain air and the group is fired up because they realize that their industry is a perfect fit for blogs.

For example, telluride.com offers the standard how to get there, there’s shopping, dining and ski lifts, but no local flavor. I’d like to know where the best nachos are, what’s a good bicycle ride from the resort, and what the weather patterns are. In the ski/tourist industry resort owners could find that local passionate person and get them blogging about their town. There’s plenty of magazines and glossy brochures on Telluride and just one real estate blog.

As you’d expect, there are ski blogs, written by snowboarders, travel advisors, extreme sports extremists, and a mom.

Club Colorado is the industry’s first experiment with blogs. They get it and will roll out an updated site soon, minus the login screen. I’m anxious to see it and report on their progress (that could be a blog book case study) at BBS 05.2. Having never visited Colorado before, I’m interested in the culture, lifestyle, and mountains. I’m photoblogging some of of that now on Sample Blog.

ExperiencePlus! is based in Colorado and offers bicycle and walking tours all over the world. They use Movable Type as their content management system on parts on their site and don’t mention the word blog. Publishing with a blogging system may eventually prove to be far more revolutionary than just keeping journal of your business. I talk about that during my lectures, how it’s actually, finally, really easy to publish and that’s why there’s such explosive growth in blogging. A blog system offers Standards-based design, comments, categories, RSS, and more. Most importantly, non-technies can easily use the system.