Our Business Blogging 101 Seminar postcards (PDF) have landed. If you got one and are checking us out . . . welcome! Contact us if you have any questions and see these links for more information

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The seminar is going to be informative, entertaining, and fun with Scoble, Molly, Broback, and me.

David Bowen observes that (subscription required)

In the last 12 months they (blogs) have gone from being an obscure and little understood fringe activity to something we all have to think about, and quite possibly indulge in.

He continues with a review of corporate blogs

Wouldn’t it be interesting if Top Bananas from all over the business world started publishing blogs — if I could read the real thoughts of, say, Lord Browne of BP or Jeff Immelt of GE, I (and very many analysts) would undoubtedly sign up.

and answers what makes them work, including praise for The Flight Test Journal

There is no interactivity here, but it paints a good picture of an intriguing job. The latest posting is about testing in Iceland while sleeping overnight in Ireland: Clint Eastwood was filming and all the Icelandic hotel rooms were taken. Jolly human stuff, with a celebrity thrown in for extra zest.

We talked about the zest at the Blog Business Summit San Francisco and will cover it more in our Blogging 101 Seminars. I’ll also continue the discussion Chris Brownrigg and I started in San Fran about how Boeing built their blogs and what to do when your executives decide they want to start blogging.

Molly a cofounder of the Blog Business Summit and one of our featured Speakers, will keynote the Web Essentials 05 conference today. We’re damn proud and, as she said in email, “It’s a mind-blowing honor to be here and to be honored in such a way - one of the first women to ever keynote a developer-centric conference.”

Molly will be back speaking with us during the Blogging 101 Seminar and I look forward to sharing the stage with her again.

The Business Blogging 101 Sessions have been posted on the Seminars sub blog.

Blue Flavor, a new company whose business is the web, launches and their site should give you an idea of what they’re up to and where they’re going. They’re discussing it now on their blog. Blue Flavor is Brian Fling, Nick Finck, Matt May and Keith Robinson, all web luminaries. Nick and Keith spoke at our first event.

The name reminds me of, “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue,” a tradition for good luck and a good description for the web itself. It’s a great name and thanks for not putting a number in it (like 34Thingies or 29Doodads) or launching an endless beta.

Cringley compares Google Adwords to the house odds in Vegas, which means, the house usually, if not always, wins. The article was well-timed, as my wife and I were just trying to figure out the spikes in Adwords costs v. sales and projected costs v. actuals, and the crazy impressions on the ads. Just like SEO, it’s all the voodoo that Google do. Adwords has worked well for Clip-n-Seal, but at times we have no idea why the program is doing what it’s doing and I suspect no one else does either.

The Seminar Series sub blog has been updated with new copy, topics, and RegOnline. I heard from Molly today and she’s excited about speaking at the event. It’s going to be another great one with an appearance by Scoble and, “Everything You Need to Know to Get Blogging Now!”

A recent Business Week cover touted that “Blogs Will Change Your Business.” In the accompanying article they wrote: …you cannot afford to close your eyes to them, because they’re simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself. And they’re going to shake up just about every business — including yours.”

Learn why and how Oct. 29

Confused about what blogs and RSS are all about, and why they’ve become such a big deal for thousands of small businesses as well as big corporations like IBM, Microsoft, and General Motors? Want to know how blogging and syndication can bring you more visibility and customers?

We’ll answer those questions and many more at their full-day Business Blogging 101
Seminar coming to Seattle October 29 at the Bell Harbor Conference Center. The cost is $195.00. Register now with RegOnline.

You’ll walk out of this workshop with all the tools you need to start a successful blogging initiative right away, and to avoid the common pitfalls.

You’ll Learn

• What is a blog. Discover how blogs differ from a regular Web sites, and the key advantages they offer.
• Why blogs are getting so much attention. See why something that started as a system for creating online diaries has evolved into a powerful platform for business.
• How to take advantage of blogs. Get all the “how-to” instruction you need to start blogging now.

Speakers include

• Molly E. Holzschlag. Named “one of the greatest digerati” and one of the most influential women on the Web.
• Robert Scoble. One of the most popular bloggers, Robert works at Microsoft as an evangelist on the Windows team.
• Buzz Bruggeman. A founder and CEO of ActiveWords, Inc. and is responsible for all marketing, evangelizing and business development for the company.
• Steve Broback and DL Byron. Co-founders of the Blog Business Summit conferences, and authors of the upcoming book: Publish & Prosper: Blogging for Business.

More on the Seminars

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What will be covered

The Blog Advantage: What Blogs are and Why They are Taking Over

9:00am to 10:00am

There’s a reason Business Week magazine said “blogs are a phenomenon that you cannot ignore, postpone, or delegate” and it has nothing to do with personal diaries. In this session we’ll cover the basics of what makes a blog a blog and why blogging platform technologies provide significant advantages to businesses that leverage them.

• How to enhance your search engine presence
• Saving money through inexpensive database-driven Web pages
• Working with multiple site authors
• Driving readership through RSS and syndicated feeds
• Viral marketing benefits from community

RSS and Feeds: Monitoring the Blogosphere and the Buzz

10:15am to 11:15am

What tools and techniques are best for finding out what’s being said about you or your company? This session covers Web hosted services along with desktop applications that automate the gathering and analysis of blog, discussion group, and search engine content. See how to get the latest info without flipping through hundreds of sites or wading through too many feeds.

• The best RSS feedreaders
• Turning google searches into RSS feeds
• Scraping utilities that convert static sites to RSS

Smart Blogging: Essential Blog Design and Critical Features

11:30am to 12:30pm

Good content is a requirement, but there’s a lot more to a good blog than just the posts. There are critical features and technologies you’ll want to investigate. Standard designed templates are fine, but there are a myriad of reasons why you’ll want to customize and enhance with a unique layout. Proper blog design can insure your branding, position, and message are optimally projected. Beautiful, cross-device, navigable, and fast loading sites that search engines love are a must. This session will cover what top bloggers do to get the best of all possible worlds.

Lunch 12:30am to 2:00pm

Getting started: Choosing a Platform

2:00pm to 3:00pm

There’s more to a Blog engine than just price. Once you’ve made your choice, transitioning can be a challenge — so you’ll want to pick the optimal platform. If you have chosen, it’s not too late to move to a more robust environment. This session will cover all the major issues in selecting and migrating to the best system. Molly and Byron will cover:

• Insuring scalability
• Spam prevention
• Workgroup options
• Feature sets
• Pinging, publicity, and broadcast features
• Extendibility, plug-ins and upgrades
• Being “orphaned”, and how to prevent it.

Blog Promotion: Posting isn’t Enough

3:15pm to 4:15pm

You’ve got a fantastic blog. The design is beautiful, the content rich and relevant. But your stats are showing that only three people have visited since last July. What can you do? In this session, you’ll learn some of the best ways to build blog traffic quickly, increase interest in you and your product or service, and improve your bottom-line results.

• The pros and cons of comment systems
• How to use Trackback and Pingback to rapidly extend your blog’s reach
• How content aggregation technologies can quickly get your blog content to a wider audience
• How to improve blog ranking with both standard and blog-specific search engines
• Tips and tricks to keep your visitors coming back for more.

Blog Management: Strategies and Tactics

4:30pm to 5:30pm

Before you flip the switch and encourage employees or partners to blog about the business, it’s critical that you set the stage for responsible and effective posting. In this session, we’ll delve into the realities of workflow, policy, and content generation experiences to help those new to the game learn what works, what doesn’t, and what traps to avoid.

• Screening and editing posts
• Getting the team to contribute
• Choosing topics to write about
• Minimizing internal filters while maximizing “safe” dialog
• Resolving ownership issues
• Integrating blogs and confidentiality agreements
• SEC and “quiet period” restrictions
• Reconciling personal opinions against implied corporate representation
• Competitor linking and dialog — how open do you want to be?

As promised, we’ve improved our registration by switching to RegOnline and we’re ready to go for our first Business Blogging 101 Seminar in Seattle, October 29, 2005. The cost is $195.00 and you can register now.

This is a bit recursive as I am citing an article that quotes me, but in the September 23 WSJ article Time to Cash In? Three Signs Your Blog May Attract Buyers, Terri Cullen talks about the latest info regarding buying or selling a blog media property. The bottom line numbers she presents:

* Mediabistro.com bought CableNewser.com paying the original owner (who continues to write for it) roughly $7,000 a year.

* Jeremy Wright sold Wealthyblogger.com via online auction for $2,000 in August 2005, and he no longer posts to the blog. Traffic and other details here. My numbers indicate the value was about 7 cents per daily reader.

Some would not disclose specifics of their deals. These include: DefenseTech.org, and MediaGossip.com.

Terri told me on the phone that her numbers seem to indicate payment of 1-2 times revenue, which aligns with what I have seen some other online media properties go for notably www.searchenginesecrets.com.

As a new author (well, soon to be, when it’s published), I’ve been spending time on all things authorly, dreaming of ways to get our book on Oprah and topics current to authors. I’ve noticed the Google Print debate and the Author’s Guild lawsuit. What surprised me, as reported by Preston Galla, is that Google blogged that they don’t “show even a single page to users who find copyrighted books through this program.” Well, they do. I just read through chapter one of Designing With Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman.

Google’s fair user argument will be decided by lawyers and the copyright for DWWS is well expressed on the Google Print pages, as well as links to buy it. The program will certainly allow users to find and buy their books more easily, Amazon’s look inside feature does the same thing. The problem with Google’s plan, as discussed in Dave’s post on AdSense, is what if you have a problem? What if you want your book excluded or the wrong links are on the page, or whatever? Do you get a call center or a mailto that takes 6 months to respond? A FAQ isn’t enough.

Update

Search and Rescue op-ed by Tim O’Reilly

The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) writes today how “gaming” the search engines can have dire consequences for marketers in the article Sites Get Dropped by Search Engines
After Trying to ‘Optimize’ Rankings. Starting back in 1996 I started hosting Web Design conferences where we taught how to structure sites so that search engines would embrace them–and it seems pretty obvious to me that the modern blog engines automatically do most of the heavily lifting for you now. No need to hire an “expert” anymore.

I say the new smart “optimization” strategy (for many) is to just take the cash you’d throw at these services and just hire good writers that can add great content to your blog.

You know who I would listen to about SEO? Naturally, whoever comes up first in google when you search for “SEO”! I just did this, and it’s seochat.com. Their lead article? How RSS Makes Your Site Attractive to Search Engines: Deeper Look at Using RSS. Here’s a telling excerpt from that article:

“blogs are also a great way to get the search engines indexing your site… Google especially, seems to love blogs. In fact, blogs are search engine optimization powerhouses…utilizing this tool for search marketing is the cheapest, most obvious way to get your site listed in the search engines…it is almost foolish not to utilize this powerful and search engine friendly tool. “

Optimize your old static site, or go blog? What makes more sense–spending hours fine tuning the carborator on your 1973 pinto (while you’re smoking a cigarette!) or just start driving one of the free Lexuses with fuel injection that they’re giving away now? Hmmm.

Writing a book is like a Miyazaki movie. It’s a zeppelin of publishing that floats along with all these gears, characters, steam and knobs, and things to turn, and finally out spits a book.

Steve announced it during the Blog Business Summit San Fran and inFlightHQ has launched. A blog for being productive at 30K ft, with post on tools, tips, techniques, and trip reports. inFlightHQ is sponsored by Connexion by Boeing. Connexion by Boeing also sponsored the Blog Business Summit and our Blogging the Stratosphere event.

inFlightHQ joins a small network of blogs that include

• Blog Business Summit
• Clip-n-Seal
• Pug Blog
• Textura Design

Check inFlightHQ out, tell us what you think, and how you stay productive when flying.

RSS and beyond was a theme at the PDC last week, just like Dean’s Keynote at the Blog Business Summit San Fran. Todd Bishop reports that the PDC buzz was nearly all about RSS and Microsoft is expanding RSS beyond blogs to different types of data and information. See the search results for examples, it’s RSS everywhere.

In a related story to the Business Week cover on key talent leaving Microsoft, Jay Greene interviews Microsoft’s Deep Throat, the voice of Mini-Microsoft. The article shows that other side of corporate blogging and notes the shifting balance between employee and employer. As Charlene Li says in the article, “You can keep it hidden or get those voices out there and deal with the problem.”

For more reaction to the article, see Todd Bishop’s post and Ed Brill picks up Ballmer’s opinion of blogs from the cover story Q/A.

Scoble is joining us for the Seminar series and I’d expect he’ll want to talk about this with the audience.

Debbie Weil posts a great analysis of Google’s New Blog Search and there’s a ongoing discussion with Rebecca Blood and Dave Taylor commenting so far.

Luckily our editor has an encyclopedic memory. I panicked for a while earlier this week. When editing/rewriting content is getting moved around so much that I was getting lost and panicked trying to remember this example I had of a niche business blog. She remember, had it all memorized, and I was like, “cool.”

A recent Wharton article talks about brand rehab, how to recover from corporate scandal, and cites Boeing as an example. Boeing did that in part with their blogs, as the quote from Lou Rubin, managing director of DPrime Consulting notes

The company has never stopped telling people what it does, which is invent the most incredible flying machines in the world . . . .

Randy tells people what Boeing does in his Journal and you can follow the flight testing of the 777-200LR, an incredible flying machine.

The article also discusses how blogs can kill you and companies should pay attention to the blogosphere. I talked to an executive at a travel company recently about blogging and he said his company had no intention of ever blogging, but they were certainly aware of blogs and thought they should devise a response plan, if they were ever flamed, like Dell and Jeff Jarvis. I agreed and continued to talk about blogging without blogging, how business can indirectly engage the blogosphere.

One of the reasons more companies aren’t blogging is that they worry about the bully blogger. If you piss a blogger off it can turn into a never-ending stream of hate directed at you. I assured the exec that the blogosphere’s self-correcting mechanism can work for businesses and balance out the bloggers that descend like protesters with sandwich boards outside your front door. He wasn’t convinced, but interested. He definitely didn’t want blogs to kill his business.

Club Colorado has relaunched with more blog goodness. Jason, an attendee at our Summit, has been busy updating the blog and will ramp it up going into ski season by offering tips from the locals, special deals, and a few surprises.