October 2005

The blogosphere is humming with talk of this weekend’s Business Blogging 101 seminar. Here are some of the hilights.

Discover Eugene writes:

We just got back from the amazing seminar in Seattle Business Blogging 101. These guys truly run a professional and informative seminar that I recommend it for anyone interested in doing a professional weblog.

Joe Kennedy of Eastside Business Blog says:

Today’s 2005 Blog Business Summit in Seattle was great! Each of the speakers and presenters had a lot of great knowledge and experience to share and I took a lot of info away from it. The entire day was well-planned and professionally organized.

It was the first time I had visited Bell Harbor International Conference Center and it was first class all the way. Did I mention how great the food was???

I feel bad for anyone who thinks they have a web presence who was not in attendance at today’s Blogging 101 Seminar. I’m sure they will want to get to the next one, wherever it is …

We at Eastside Business certainly learned a lot of great information that we will put to use immediately. Our readers and businesses on the Eastside can look for some substantial changes in our web strategies in the very near future.

Thanks again to Steve, Kim and all the other great people at Blog Business Summit, as well as the great speakers who shared their knowledge today.

And as a very special bonus, we even got a comment about Steve’s satirical post on Forbes’ inane article “Attack of the Blogs” from Mauro Lupi’s blog in Italy. My Italian is terrible at best - but the gyst of it is that he was highly amused by Steve’s “realization” that blogs are too powerful. It’s just more proof that blogs bring the world that much closer together.

Slides from the Management & Strategy Panel [have been posted](/seminars/slides/bbs_mgmt_stratpanel.pdf).

[Blogtronix](http://blogtronix.com/) was here today and demo’d their .NET blogging engine to Steve and me and others. It’s impressive for businesses looking for a .NET, enterprise solution.

As Steve just said on stage, tell us about your blogs, if you’d like. Leave a comment here.

Thanks to the Forbes cover article “Attack of the Blogs” we’ve realized that this type of web site may just be too powerful for the world to assimilate at this time. It’s just too easy, too inexpensive, and too influential of a media platform. We’re concerned that if we accidentally make the wrong type of post, entire industries may be devestated.

We are encouraging our business clients to go back to static HTML and non-syndicating sites so that they have less influence and a smaller audience.

We will shutter this site immediately, forego Movable Type and boot up PageMill for any further communication.

All future events we have planned intended to teach businesses how to leverage this frightening platform will be put on hold.

As I mentioned at the seminar today, smart bloggers try to avoid the “echo chamber” editorial problem by attempting to post on topics that bring something new into the mix. Since your RSS newsreader is full of subjects already being discussed by bloggers, how do you detect interesting new topics? One technique might be daily surfing to non-syndicating sites, but that’s a lot of work.

Few people are aware that tools exist for converting non-syndicated pages into RSS feeds. One that I use regularly is feedfire. Feedfire scrapes the headlines at a designated URL and creates an RSS feed that you can subscribe to. It’s not perfect, about 1/3 of the sites I try just don’t work, another 1/3 sort of work, and another 1/3 work great. Give it a try.

Here are the slides from our [Getting Started Session](/seminars/slides/bbs_seminar_getting_started.pdf) (PDF)

Steve, Byron, and Molly are doing a session on getting started with a platform, so I think now is a good time to talk about Marqui’s new blogging module - which is designed specifically for business blogging.

I think one of the coolest features of their new system is approval-based posting. Providing employees with a public forum in which they might post proprietary information or criticize the company is a definite concern for many businesses. Approval-based posting takes that anxiety level down a notch, while still providing all the benefits of a blog.

[Marqui](http://www.marqui.com/) is presenting on the blogosphere and their new blog engine.

Scoble’s on stage, furiously typing, and I bet [he's about to post](http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/) about his session at the [Seminar](/seminars/)

The slides we have [are posted](/seminars/archives/slides/). Note that panels usually don’t have slides.

Steve’s demystifying blogging now, there’s a good crowd, and we’re talking about business blogging. A quick survey shows that most are just learning about blogging and not blogging now.

And! Thanks for spending your Saturday with us.

The [Business Blogging 101 Seminar](/seminars/) is on today. We’ll blog live from the event with posts on the sessions, speakers, and hallway discussions.

As soon as I posted on Tagging, within minutes actually, Matthew of Business Logs told me about Flickr’s interestingness. (I blame my lack of being in the scene on writing a book, which I’m also sure caused our site to crash repeatedly). Anil posted on all things interesting earlier this week, and I remembered that Amazon.com has been doing that for years, in the form of related items, what’s popular, and suggestions. However, I don’t trust what Amazon shows me because it seems random, weighted to what they’re pushing, like Segways and Heart Defibrillators, and Eric Meyer still loves me.

As Anil discusses, gaming and spamming is eventually going to enter a taxonomy, be it tags, popularity, or whatever it is that Technorati does.

More importantly, and at the heart of the Google Print debate, is a company making money of your content and not paying you. 37 Signals is discussing that topic and so is Blogebrity.

Much of what we talk about here, is business blogging, making money with blogs. We haven’t yet had a lecture on, “how to make money from someone else’s blog.”

That’s a Web 2.0 lecture, “Being a Content Pimp.”

Blogging for the Seattle PI, John Cook has been [posting on Bubble 2.0](http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/venture/archives/100308.asp). Tim Appnel [has posted](http://blogbusinesssummit.com/archives/2005/10/bubble_20_retur.htm) on the return of the dotcoms, as well as much of [the blogosphere](), including Anil Dash who’s talking about companies that are [built to flip](http://www.dashes.com/anil/2005/10/17/the_flip_2k5).

Scott Lockman writes from Japan asking if we’re planning an event there. I don’t think so yet, but that’s a great idea. Blogasia, an event in Signapore, was held last month. We’re also getting requests for New York, Austin and more.

Comments are coming in asking when the next events will take place and we’re finalizing the schedules and will announce it as soon as we’re confirmed.

Thanks for the interest. We can’t wait to get on the road in 2006.

I finally posted on [tagging](http://blogbusinesssummit.com/archives/2005/10/tagging_tag_clo.htm) and that’ll make it into the book somewhere. We won’t focus on it, but will explain it relation to business. That goes for tagging and other blogging technologies.

Blogging was a hot topic of converstion at this year’s Alumni Weekend at Pomona College in Claremont, CA. The liberal arts college hosted a symposium - “Headlines and Deadlines” - featuring Pomona alumni who have made successful careers in journalism.

This quarter’s Pomona College Magazine featured a few quotes about blogs from that memorable symposium:

“Bloggers tend to lean to the right simply because these people traditionally feel excluded. It’s very much like talk radio in that sense” - Harry Stein, ‘70, author and former ethics columnist for Esquire magazine.

“If you look at the ‘bloggersphere’ as a whole, bloggers show me things that I won’t see elsewhere.” - Verlyn Klinkenborg ‘74, editorial writer for The New York Times and 2004-05 Moseley Fellow in Creative Writing

“There’s less distinction between what journalists do and what bloggers do. There will be more bloggers going to press conferences.” - Adam Rogers ‘92, senior editor of Wired magazine.

All of this is just more evidence that the blogosphere has penetrated the media’s consciousness in a big way. You can bet that journalists as a group are tuned in to blogs if editors at Wired and columnists at The New York Times are commenting on them at a symposium about the state of their industry - and those are just the ones from Pomona!

It’s just one more reason why businesses need to integrate a blogging strategy into their existing public relations efforts. Journalists are paying attention to bloggers. So should you!

We recently started tagging posts on our blog and added a tag cloud to our archives. I’d written previously about tags, when Zeldman compared them to mullets. Tagging is assigning keywords to posts and is often called a folksonomy. A tag cloud is a visual depiction of the tags used on our blog. Tags are visually weighted in a tag cloud to indicate frequency of use. Selecting a tag within the cloud will lead to a results page showing entries associated with that tag.

An analogy is searching an entire card catalog in a library or viewing a list of the most active books. Tags have their limitations, as Zeldman so aptly wrote, but it allows our readers to see a snapshot of the content on our blog.

Business Tagging

Our tags are made possible by Tags.app, a Movable Type plugin that generates the cloud and associations automatically. Tags.app was coded by Tim Appnel and his firm, Appnel Internet Solutions. You can also see the plugin in use on O’Reilly’s Radar and Union Square Ventures. I asked Tim about business tagging and he said

As for business there are a lot of unstructured data being generated through out these organizations that gets rather lost or is hard to find. Tagging along with weblogs can improve this situation by giving users a better lens to see their data/content through.

When tagging, bloggers aren’t constrained by a category system and freely associate tags with their posts as they wish. In the tag cloud, they can can see what they’re posting on and that maybe the greater benefit of tags because the bloggers understand the folksonomy. They are the “folks” that created the tag taxonomy on an intranet, blog, or even an ecommerce site.

Tags become potentially valuable to business, when a customer can view the top sellers in all categories, weighted by the most activity and interest and buy more product. Or when employees can see what’s being posted about on the intranet and quickly find what they need.