October 2005

I hope our hosting problems are behind us. I joked to the team that it was like the “100-year flood” of hosting problems. I’ve been working on the web for nearly 12 years and never experienced any catastrophic problems like the ones we’ve had. After the Seminars this weekend, we’ll move to a new server and reboot. Until then, and while the site was in domain name server limbo, we reorganized to focus on

* [Blog Book](/book/)
* [Seminars](/seminars/)
* [Conferences](/conferences/)

That should make the site more navigable and to better explain what we do and who we are, we added an [About](/about/) sub blog.

The first Seminar in our series, Business Blogging 101, is this weekend. We’ve posted [Tips & Reminders](/seminars/archives/tips_reminders/)
to ensure you have a great experience and the [Seminar sub blog](/seminars/) has everything you need, including [what will be covered](/seminars/archives/what_will_be_covered/), the [speakers](/seminars/archives/speakers/), and more.

I’ll speak about blog design and blogging engines with [Molly](http://molly.com). I look forward to meeting you and discussing blogging. [Chris Brownrigg](http://www.brownriggproductions.com/) from Boeing will be there, as well as Ignition Partners, who are about to launch their new blog.

Ranchero Software’s MarsEdit is - for the most part - a useful tool for the busy blogger. It comes in particularly handy when you’re juggling a number of blogs. Or when you need a real-time preview of the interplay between text and media elements in your html code.

It also makes html a breeze by automatically providing you with common codes and inserting them directly into your post. You’ll never forget to close a tag again. And the layout is modeled after Mail and iTunes - so using it is like second nature already.

That said, I do have quite a few gripes with the program. It buries automatic pinging deep in the preferences menu instead of putting it out front where it belongs. Its html preview feature is sometimes misleading, leaving posts oddly formatted when viewed online. It seems to have some problems accurately translating accent marks to TypePad, leaving weird glitches in its wake. It also doesn’t align all its functions perfectly with TypePad’s interface. I still have to upload pictures by hand to the TypePad site if I want to resize them or use a thumbnail instead of a full-size image.

It gets an A for usability and convenience, but a C- for compatibility. Overall: B.

The bottom line: I’ll still be using TypePad’s interface until the program works out its compatibility issues.

We apologize again for any confusion with our blog and what’s going on. Our host went down and so did our domain name. The domain name is our address on the internet.

The site is slowly coming back. You may see a temporary site, but don’t worry. We’re here, working on it, and the Seminar is on for this weekend.

Our blog will be back online shortly. Registration and details about the Business Blogging 101 Seminar this weekend are available at regOnline.

Please call with any questions you may have: 425-556-1941

I remember thinking, “wow,” when the Wiki creator, Ward Cunningham, joined Microsoft. I hoped that it could mean the end to widespread Sharepoint suffering and it was a good example of how ad-hoc knowledge management works on a corporate intranet. I was equally interested, and I expect most we’re not surprised, to read that Cunnigham has left Microsoft. Dan Richman reports on Cunnigham’s exit and how it’s another example of talent leaving Microsoft.

As proven by the recent acquisitions of several popular media blogging companies, companies that understand how to garner Google ad revenue are in demand. In the article Venture Capitalists Return To Internet Investments (subscription required) Wall Street Journal reporter Rebecca Buckman describes how “it’s looking almost like 1999 again in Silicon Valley” as VC’s are pouring significantly more cash into Internet investments this year.

Steve Baloff, a general partner with Advanced Technology Ventures says many companies are receiving funding because they are leveraging online advertising from sites like Google, to make money from visitors. In addition, Baloff ads “It is the Internet, and the consumer Internet in particular, that is vibrant”.

Internet, consumer sites, google ads — sounds like blogs to me.

In Really Simple Sale? As RSS feeds catch on, advertisers are taking notice (subscription required) Wall Street Journal reporter David Kesmodel presents an approachable yet comprehensive overview of what RSS feeds are and why they may become a significant platform for web advertisers. A perfect read for that manager that still doesn’t get why blogs and syndication are a big deal for businesses.

“We’ve seen a huge amount of interest in RSS from the advertising community,” says Caroline Little, chief executive and publisher of Washingtonpost Newsweek Interactive, the Post’s online publishing arm. “Across the board, advertisers are interested in reaching people in new and different ways.

Some relevant tidbits from the article:

• Bill Flitter of Pheedo says advertisers trying to reach a niche audience may pay as much as $2 per click.
• Cailin Pitcher, senior marketing manager of Citrix Systems Inc. says their RSS campaign “has been successful enough for us to justify continuing to use the channel.”
• Shuman Ghosemajumder, a product manager at Google says demand for Google RSS ad space is outstripping supply.
• MSNBC is placing ads inside feeds of news summaries from WashingtonPost.com. The Post developed the system in-house and ads are slightly cheaper than those on the paper’s Web site.

RSS feeds “are the next avenue for smart marketers to look to,” says Jeff Hinz, a senior vice president for ID Media, an Interpublic Group unit that helps companies decide where to spend ad dollars. “You’re reaching a consumer who’s raising his hand, who’s looking for relevant information.”

Another reason for smart businesses to blog. More fodder for discussion at our upcoming event.

John Jurgensen, reporter for the Wall Street Journal describes how museums are jumping into blogging as a way to create interest in his article For Attention, Museums Get Gossipy Online (subscription required).

Jurgensen cites several museums that have started blogging recently to drive traffic:

* Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis - Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts
* The Walker Art Center
* the Katzen Arts Center

Blog features include the ability to download audio tours as podcasts.

Jurgensen says:

“After trying open houses, audio tours and other traditional methods for engaging visitors, some museums are starting to use Web logs to attract interest. Museum officials say that these blogs, which offer views of installations in progress, chatty stories about staff members and links to the art community, are an effort to make their institutions seem more approachable and less stuffy.”

Classic example of the kind of blog applications we’ll discuss at our upcoming event.

Boeing blog designer Chris Brownrigg - who is responsible for Randy’s Journal and other Boeing Web design projects - will discuss his experiences with business blogging at the upcoming “Blogging for Business 101″ seminar - which will be held October 29, 2005 at the Bell Harbor Convention Center in Seattle, WA.

Brownrigg spoke with me about the evolution of Randy’s Journal over the past year:

“I got a call from Boeing Commercial Airplanes. They wanted to start a blog for one of their executives, Randy Baseler, and they wanted it in two days.”

So he looked at how other blogs were formatted and came up with html code that he thought would serve Boeing’s needs.

“We started out with a flat html page and then incorporated features like commenting and an RSS feed as we responded to the needs of our readers. I’d say that the history of blogging at Boeing has been one of evolution and change.”

The all-day event also features presentations by successful Web entrepreneur DL Byron, ActiveWords CEO Buzz Bruggeman, well-respected Web designer and blogger Molly E. Holzschlag, and Microsoft web evangelist Robert Scoble.

Like Brownrigg, Scoble is no stranger to successfully blogging for business. His own blog - Scobleizer - began in 2000 and boasts over 20,000 daily readers. It covers issues relating to Microsoft, tech news, and whatever else is on his mind.

“He’s a pioneer in the blogging community and understands firsthand how to translate blogging into a connection with customers and markets,” said Steve Broback, Blog Business Summit Co-Founder and host of the event. “We are extremely pleased that Robert has accepted our invitation.”

The event, which is the first of its kind in Seattle, will teach participants to leverage the blogging platform to increase sales, create emotional connections and enhance their existing marketing and public relations efforts. They will also learn the practical skills necessary to set up and maintain their own business blogs.

“If you come to this seminar with a laptop, you will be blogging successfully when you leave,” says Broback.

Click here to register for the event. The cost is $195.00 per person and space is extremely limited.

I was thinking maybe I was just a Web 2.0 curmudgeon after I wondered what happened to [Web 1.5](http://www.blogbusinesssummit.com/archives/2005/10/what_happended.htm). Maybe I haven’t seen the latest AJAX website or another service that’s going to refine Google searches for its users. I have been in a book-writing cave, so I think sometimes I’m missing big chunks of the blogosphere and there’s a new social app out there I know nothing about. I was relieved to see Tim Appnel’s comments from Web 2.0 got good play in the [Chronicle](http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/10/07/BUG5FF3HRK14.DTL) and the Bubble 2.0 quote from [Don MacAskill of SmugMug](http://blogs.smugmug.com/onethumb/)

We’re writing Chapter 4 of our [book](/book/) with [Writeboard](http://www.writeboard.com/). Writeboard is a 37signalized wiki, with a mo’ betta user interface and it should work well to collect draft passages and centralize review comments. We’ve already been using [Basecamp](http://www.37signals.com/) to manage the book as a project, uploading and downloading files, posting on our progress, and adopting a simple RSS workflow.

We decided to give Writeboard a try after if popped up as a tab in Basecamp (I blurted out, “what tab is dat?”) and out of total frustration with Word. Word is not working for us. It should work, we want it to work, but when I can’t figure out how to view comments only from Broback, I get unhappy and frustrated. So does the rest of the team. Word is very difficult to look at when tracking changes, it causes vertigo, with all those balloons, lines, and who knows what else is going on.

Dealing with blog spam is becoming a big issue says Wall Street Journal, and the ease which with they are created (and how much search engines weigh them) is at the core of the problem.

In the article ‘Splogs’ Roil Web, and Some Blame Google, reporter David Kesmodel describes how spam is infecting the blogosphere. Phony blogs are being set up primarily to contain outbound links to sites that can benefit from the additional “google juice”. Many of these sites also host ads in order to garner a few cents of additional revenue. No doubt people are so eager to leave that an ad provides a quick escape.

Blogger, was targeted last weekend by a group who created 13,000 plus splogs, Google reported. There were numerous complaints that these pages “were gumming up searches for legitimate sites.”

* Technorati estimates that 2% to 8% of the 70,000 blogs created daily are phony blogs or splogs

* Mark Cuban of IceRocket says “It’s the biggest problem on the Net right now after identity theft. We have to kill millions of the splogs per month”

Some fingers are pointed at BlogBurner which automates the creation of multiple blogs. For as little as $47 a month you can create “a unique blog for your Web site in less than one minute — even if you know nothing about computers”.

There is some light at the end of the tunnel. There’s a new service that lets you report a spam blog: SplogReporter.com. It has an index rating how “spammy” a blog is.

Over the weekend, I had to unexpectedly move Textura Design’s blog to a new server and decided to start publishing the entire site as a blog, using Movable Type as a content management system. That means that each page, all the content, is being served by Movable Type. We’ve been publishing this site, our small network of blogs, and all new client sites as CMS blogs.

Textura Design has been online for 8 years, going on 9, and I used to roll my own blog (before it was called a blog), even hand-coded RSS feeds. I reflected on that in my happy birthday to Six Apart post last week. While watching Movable Type build the new Textura Design site, I realized how far we come with blogs. Besides the business, the marketing, and all the buzz, blogging is a publishing revolution. We finally have a CMS that anyone can use.

In the latest Demoletter piece Staggering Stats on Blog Adoption, Chris Shipley provides a ton of interesting survey data about how corporate blogs are taking off.

One of many interesting tidbits is how one in three companies are replacing e-mail-based processes with blogs.

The folks at Marqui Inc. have been supporters of the Blog Business Summit since our first event, and will be at our upcoming Business Blogging 101 Seattle seminar. Word has it they are poised to announce a new module for their software-as-a-service content management system that enables robust corporate blogging capabilities. Features will apparently include enhanced trackback management, approval-based workflow and integrated reader surveys. More info to come…

Using a combination of plugins we’re now automatically and immediately publishing comments from commenters we trust. New commenters and suspected spam will still be moderated. A note on giving us “fake, nospam” emails for your comments is that we don’t spam and if you use a fake email, we’ll consider you to be, well, fake. Movable Type 3.2 has significantly improved spam blocking features, but much of it is based on their
service that hasn’t caught on. With TypeKey, you can immediately publish authenticated users, but if you’re not using TypeKey then every comment is moderated, including your own. You can’t event trust yourself.

Can I Trust Myself?

Arvind Satyanarayan at Movalog heard the complaints about not being able to, at the least, trust yourself in Movable Types and released Email Whitelister that allows you to whitelist emails, thereby authenticating them, without relying on TypeKey. Thanks Arvind! That’s another example of a rich developer and plugin community.

Plugins we use

• SpamLookup (Bundled with MT 3.2)
• Email Whitelister
• MTSQL

Whitelisting emails

1. Used MTSQL to query for all the emails in our database
2. Installed Email Whitelist and added the emails
3. In the Feedback Setting screen, switched Immediately publish comments from no one to any authenticated commenters
4. Instantly approved comments!

As I discussed in my post earlier this week, comment management is a concern for business. We’ll add this technique and a few more to our blog book. Next up is getting to not moderating any comments…

We get asked constantly about which platform is best, and have had at all of our events (including our upcoming Seattle seminar) at least one session on choosing a blog engine. Naturally, we’re always on the lookout for good reference material.

Blog guru Dori Smith has written The best blogging tools for the Mac, an article comparing the feature sets of the various blogging engines for Macworld magazine. It’s not just for Mac users though, there’s a lot of advice relevant to PC-centric businesses here as well. Dori has been covering this space for years, and is extremely knowledgeable. Worth a read.

Only a minority percentage of people read feeds, so most people find you through Google. That means they actually come to your site. Since it’s likely a permalink they are viewing, they will just see the one post and the static “framing material” (as I like to call it).

For most business entities, they have a clear agenda regarding what they’d really like a visitor to do when they drop in. Maybe it’s click an ad, maybe it’s check out the products for sale, whatever. Links to all those “favored” destinations and other less important destinations will be on that framing material (in addition, maybe a main desired destination link is also embedded directly in the post…)

We know positioning is absolutely critical to clickthrough. If it wasn’t, you’d put google ads at the bottom of the page because they’re not the prettiest things in the world. We all know what would happen to ad revenues if you tried it. As far as viewing goes, we know ad viewing can drops by as much as 80% if you position them there.

The key to clicking is noticing. Noticing has been researched to a non-trivial degree by the eyetrack people. Everything else being equal, it seems you should put the important stuff in the upper left. Colored areas below indicate “hot” and “cool” areas on a home page based on eyetrack data.

Dave Taylor has posted about a “Google heat map”, in other words where people look when they have done a search.

My question is where does Google “look” when it scans a page? I believe Google ranks outbound link importance by position. You might have items you want Google to particularly notice when it scans the page, where should they go?

Just when I was about to turn off comment moderation and open live commenting up, a new wave of comment spam hits the blogosphere. We moderate comments to stop spam, it’s a pain, but works (and how exactly is nofollow stopping spam?). Movable Type 3.2 has significantly improved spam blocking, but those minions of the evil spam lords are hard at work and figured out how to flood sites again. Comment spam is where the Kum-by-yah of blogging is abruptly stopped by the practicality of running a business. I’ve been quoted about not running comments on some blogs and this is the exact reason why. If you’re running a high-volume site, with lots of comments, you’ve going to have to allocate a resource to manage the blog conversation. Unless, you want to promote a $150.00 rolex, penis pills, something indecipherable in Russian, and girls gone wild.