December 2005

Ok, blogosphere. You’ve had your idiotic, ill-advised fun. It’s time to calm down now.

Yes, Alaska Airlines screwed up big time by hiring under-qualified baggage handlers and underreporting previous ramp incidents. And yes, Jeremy Hermanns has a right to blog about his incredibly frightening experience aboard the Alaska Airlines MD-80 that lost cabin pressure at 26,000 feet because an inept baggage handler put a foot long gash in the fuselage.

But the blogosphere’s response to the whole thing is beyond ridiculous. Jeremy Hermann’s allegation that one or more Alaska Airlines employees were posting comments on his blog, and the insinuation that this was done with the full blessing of the company is absurd. And the subsequent echo-chamber maelstrom in the blogosphere isn’t going to solve anything. If Alaska employees were in fact commenting on Jeremy’s blog from Alaska IP addresses, then they exercised incredibly poor judgment and should be disciplined by their company. But really - they’re allowed to have opinions, too. And their opinions don’t necessarily represent the opinions or official position of their employer.

I’m going to give Jeremy the benefit of the doubt on this one because he’s obviously traumatized and rightfully ticked off at Alaska. But the rest of you have no such excuse. You’ve run amok with a completely unsubstantiated claim and you’ve taken the hard-won credibility of the blogosphere down several dozen notches in the process. You all ought to be spanked! I won’t do you the favor of sending any Google juice your way, but will instead refer readers to Dave Taylor’s post on the subject for examples of what I’m talking about.

I agree with Dave all the way on this one. Truth still matters, and if the blogosphere hopes to be taken seriously as a new frontier of citizen journalism, then we’re going to need to set aside rampant speculation and learn to deal in facts instead of innuendoes and half-truths.

I had hoped that 2005 would end on a better note than this. Today, I am ashamed to be a blogger.

We just inserted a sidebar into the book, in the disarming detractors section, about [Alaska Airlines](http://blogbusinesssummit.com/2005/12/alaska_airlines_1.htm). I posted my take on the story on [inFlightHQ](http://inflighthq.com/archives/2005/12/the_call_for_pr.htm). When writing it, I thought about how I’d explain that to one to a group of business people. It’s mob rules at times with the bloggers.

As the calendar year turns, it’s an customary to look back over the past year and issue predictions - some modest, some wildly unlikely - for the coming one. In the interest of not being a New Year’s Scrooge, I’ve scanned the Web for blog-related predictions and aggregated them into clusters here:

Prediction Cluster #1: Blogging will reach a wider audience than ever before. Yes, I know. It’s the biggest “duh!” since the startling prediction that oil prices would skyrocket. But despite the growing understanding and acceptance of blogs, the growth in the number of blogs will level off. The blogosphere will eschew the written word and turn instead to vlogging in a Web-based reenactment of TV killing off books. Finally, people will figure out that there’s no real difference between the blogosphere and the mainstream media.

Prediction Cluster #2: RSS will grow to a new level of prominence. As it stands, RSS is most commonly known as a feature - a subsidiary to the great blogging phenomenon. But look for RSS to step out of the blogosphere’s shadow in 2006 and ascend to the level of e-mail. RSS will also be critical in companies’ efforts to improve communication with customers.

Prediction Cluster #3: Companies will use Web apps. I’m already kind of in love with Basecamp from 37 Signals, so it’s no wonder the pundits think that companies will finally recognize that work can get done on the Internet. Also, use of Skype will skyrocket.

As for my predictions, I’ve never been much of a seer. But just for the fun of it, here’s what I think is in store for 2006:

• All the new options will temporarily hinder rather than enhance people’s ability to effectively communicate on the Web. But as the proverbial wheat is separated from the chaff, look forward to increased collaboration and understanding between companies, clients, and customers.
• E-therapy services will grow in popularity. Being a shrink’s kid and a Psychology major, I can’t say I like this too terribly much. I’ve gained a healthy respect for the face-to-face dialogue that is the very basis of psychotherapy. I just can’t see the same quality of work happening exclusively on the Web. Some things belong in the meat world and this is one of them.
• As the inevitable rise in fuel prices continues and companies begin to rely more heavily on the Internet, telecommuting will finally have its oft-foretold heyday.
• And finally, Macintosh will begin to make the buzz real in the area of interactive houses. Stereo systems, telephone lines and stoves will soon all be interconnected via a G5 processor. It’s a little more farfetched than anything else I’ve come up with - but a girl can dream, right?

This concludes the predictions. We at Blog Business Summit wish you a very Happy New Year!

When I gifted Saturday Night Live’s On a Lazy Sunday Short via iTunes to a few friends, I had no idea it had been downloaded 1.2M times. I read about in the NYTimes on the flight back from Maui. In about a week, SNL is suddenly relevant again, really funny, and turned some unknowns into web superstars. It’s good to laugh out loud again at SNL, even if it’s just once a season. If you’ve wondered what a meme is, the short video a great example. While your business may not have the writing talent of Andy Samberg and Chris Parnel, think about blogging a video podcast that could engage your audience, drive traffic, and go crazy for the cupcakes cousin!

What interests me most about Biodiesel, isn’t that you car smells like french fries or the novelty, but all the DIY marketing. Biodiesel enthusiasts have created their own economy and are blogging the whole thing

* [B100 Fuel](http://www.b100fuel.com/)
* [Biodiesel Blogs](http://biodieselblogs.truffula.net/)
* [Biodiesel Blogs](http://biodieselblog.com/)
* [Seattle Biofuels](http://www.sbd.55bell.com/)
* [Veggie Van](http://www.veggievan.org/blog)

During our Maui Vacation, we saw the [BioBeetle](http://bio-beetle.com/), an environmentally friendly car rental, and coming soon to a gas station near you is [BioWillie](http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/30/business/30biowillie.html?ex=1293598800&en=43701db52fe3d1d9&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss), a type of biodiesel promoted by Willie Nelson.

Bike racers Morgan Schmitt and Adam McGrath are in Belgium preparing for the world cyclocross championships and blogging about it on their sponsor Redline’s website. Redline’s blog is another example of a business just adding a blog to their existing site. Morgan is also uploading photos to Flickr. Now, I wouldn’t recommend that you bury your blog in a framed website, but it’s still great that Redline is using blogs (here’s the blog out of the frame). Other cycling industry blogs include Time Sports International and Freewheel bike.

In my design sessions, I predict business blogging will eventually just be part of a company’s site, even for businesses that don’t get headlines for embracing blogs. BusinessWeek discussed this topic in Blog the Bikes and Shut Up and Drink the Kool-Aid! launched to discuss marketing the bicycle industry.

When President Bush announced the now defunct nomination of Harriet Miers for associate justice of the Supreme Court, he took serious political heat from both sides of the aisle. Progressives thought her positions were amorphous. Conservatives thought she wasn’t qualified. Nobody was in favor of Miers. Nobody - it seems - except for the comedians.

In the space of a few weeks - as Miers made the rounds on Capitol Hill - the pundits made the rounds on the comedy talk shows. In one very memorable moment that will endear her to me forever despite my political views, Ann Coulter called Harriet Miers “the cleaning lady” on Real Time with Bill Maher.

With all the satirizing going on, it’s no wonder that the blogosphere picked it up. Almost immediately after the nomination was announced, someone started Harriet Miers’ Blog!!!! - a witty play on people’s perceptions of Miers as less than scholarly.

It now appears that the blogosphere has struck again. This time at current Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito. Since his intellect really isn’t up for debate, The Right Honorable Samuel A. Alito, Jr. plays on the conservative reputation that has earned him the nickname “Scalito.”

Why is this important? After all, politics in the blogosphere is nothing new. Neither is satire. But if the blogosphere is a microcosm of our society at large, then these blogs represent an emerging phenomenon. We’ve rapidly seen the dissolution of boundaries between entertainment and news in the mainstream media, and the blogosphere has come to reflect that. These blogs deftly cover all the news that’s fit to print about each nominee while maintaining a bitingly sarcastic voice. If you wanted to get up to date on either nomination, they would be your hilarious one-stop shop. If anything, these sorts of blogs could be where the lines between journalism and blogging blur the most.

As arcane as it sounds, we’ve resorted to only using Word for the final editing stages of our book. Both Steve and I experience what I call Word Vertigo when attempting to write and edit the documents. What we do is break each section of a chapter into simple text files, write them, then assemble the files into Word when we send them to the Editor. At first, for a struggling few weeks, I thought it was just me, like we were missing some magnificent feature in Word that would coalesce all the editing features into something that made sense. I think the main problem is that I’m so used to working in HTML, with simple formating, that Word constantly gets in my way. And then when you use track changes, with the lines, comment boxes, colors, inserted, deleted, you end up with Word Vertigo.

Part of my daily routine is to sift through my news aggregator for new pieces about blogging. When I find one - usually I deliver a little regurgitorial followed by some analysis. But today, I’m going to do something a little bit different.

Although The Washington Post’s story about retired soldier Bill Roggio blogging from the front lines in Iraq is very interesting - what interested me most was the box in the sidebar:

After reading through the full list of 92 blogs that are currently discussing the article, I came to a few conclusions:

First of all, I know that Technorati generates the list of links automatically. But the Post is gutsy and thick-skinned to incorporate such a list into its site. Particularly when the blogger backlash on some articles -such as the Iraq blogger one - is so fierce. Many businesses would be loathe to include links from their site to the sites of their critics - but the Post enhances its own credibility by including those links.

Secondly, I’ll bet this “Who’s Blogging” thing has an added bonus for the Post. When bloggers notice that the Technorati-powered feature is driving traffic their way, they’ll be more likely to cite Post articles in future posts of their own that deal with news topics. It’s a permutation of the “you link to me, I’ll link to you” phenomenon.

And finally, spammers suck. As with everything else, they’ve found a way to hijack the system. A site for free vacations to Las Vegas (no link) was included among the sites “blogging” about the article. Lame.

I know I’m making a big deal over a few little lines of code the Post chose to imbed in its pages. But the decision to embed that code means that the Post recognizes the blogosphere and accepts our input - and not just selectively.

Here is the round up of the most blogged about Post articles.

The New York Times reported today on Amazon.com’s new Amazon Connect program, which started last month. The program gives authors with books for sale on Amazon the ability to address their readers in blog format. As yet, the author blogs offer neither RSS nor reader comments - but the beginnings of a solid blogging platform are there.

Meg Wolitzer - author of The Wife and The Position - is one of my favorite writers. Her blog addresses the importance of fiction and its underrepresentation in the modern American reading list. In one post, she says:

Reading has taken on some of the qualities of an obligation. There’s a sense out there that if you’re going to take the time out of your incredibly busy day to read, you’d better learn something in the process. Which, to many people, means you need to read non-fiction rather than fiction. After all, what is fiction good for, anyway? Novels, it can be said, are just invented stories about people who never existed and never will.

The Times reports that Amazon has invited about a dozen authors to their blogging table thus far - from Wolitzer to Mike Jeffress a Christian minister whose perspectives on the secularization of the winter holidays made me sorely wish that Amazon would implement a commenting feature sooner rather than later.

In time, I hope that Amazon will make their author blogs more bloggy. But the fact that they’re implementing them at all is a huge step in the right direction - both as a business decision and as a medium to further the great written conversation.

PS: Ever notice how I’m stuck on The New York Times and Steve’s stuck on The Wall Street Journal? What do you suppose it means?

When you Google the term “Blogging China,” you get about 9,780,000 results - including Byron’s post from May of this year talking about the New York Times article that discussed China’s reaction to the growing popularity of blogging among its people.

China’s regime is steadfastly repressive. The government jails dissidents - including members of religious groups with no purported political aims - and it has a huge firewall whose purpose is to prevent people from accessing websites that the government perceives as a threat. But as Chinese Internet companies reap enough profits to begin offering overseas IPOs, China is struggling to balance the old practice of information suppression with the highly lucrative future of the Internet.

Bokee - formerly BlogChina.com - is one such company. Amid layoffs and corporate restructuring - China’s largest blogging engine is getting ready to go public on the international stage. It is widely rumored that Bokee is preparing to purchase complimentary sites and to further monetize its content by making it accessible to wireless phones. With such an information explosion about to take place, China’s current regime may have good reason to worry. Particularly when bloggers like Li Xinde, who travels around the country exposing government corruption like a Chinese Dr. Sam Beckett - only without the time travel - are on the loose.

Forbes writer Rich Karlgaard wrote (subscription required) that blogs were a new force in the battle to keep corporations honest. If it works for a corporation, why not for a government? The central thesis of Fareed Zakaria’s The Future of Freedom is that countries cannot move toward democracy without a robust middle class. In the aforementioned New York Times article, Nicholas D. Kristof surmises that blogging - and more broadly, the Internet - will move China toward that same destination.

So where is China going? I think the Internet is hastening China along the same path that South Korea, Chile and especially Taiwan pioneered. In each place, a booming economy nurtured a middle class, rising education, increased international contact and a growing squeamishness about torturing dissidents.

Blogging may not make anyone’s life simpler - but it’s been established that it’s a powerful force for change. Harnessed appropriately, it can chip away at tyranny and corporate corruption. The question is, how will the business world harness that power?

While bodysurfing in Maui yesterday, I didn’t think once about permalinks, tags, RSS, or the blogosphere and that’s a good thing. Even us geeks need a break from the keyboard, to stretch out those skinny arms and paddle through some surf instead of banging on the keys. And being from Seattle, to escape the damp, drizzling, dreeping Winter of rain . . . though, if my stay was longer, I’d start posting like

* [MacHelp From Maui](http://www.machelpmaui.com/blog/)
* [Maui Mana Kai Webcam Blog](http://www.mauimanakai.com/webcam/blog/)
* [Marcy From Maui](http://marcyfrommaui.powerfulintentions.com/)

or the [Maui Real Estate Blog](http://www.mauirealestate.com/blog/). My topics would cover the over-developed, strip-mall culture on [Kihei](http://wikitravel.org/en/Maui), [riding upcountry](http://texturadesign.com/2005/12/eat_sleep_ride_maui.htm), and where to escape the tourists.

Whatever way you celebrate this time of year, we at the Blog Business Summit wish you the very best. And a very bloggy new year!

Bingo Bango Software’s new blog client, Elicit, is a heavy-duty blog command center.

Compatible with all the major blogging platforms from Movable Type to Blogger, the application has a calendar-based interface that makes it easy to see which posts you’ve made to which blogs on which days without site hopping. You can copy posts from one blog to another instantly by dragging and dropping.

The program incorporates Bloglines subscriptions so you can monitor other bloggers and references their posts with ease, and is compatible with Flickr, del.icio.us, and Furl. It also makes it easy to manage your advertising.

Too bad the client isn’t available for Macintosh - yet.

In After the Vampire: Knopf Learns to Sell A New Anne Rice, (subscription required) Wall Street Journal reporter Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg has written another article this month describing how blogs and bloggers can be effective in creating buzz for a new book.

Previously Trachtenberg described how Viacom Inc.’s Free Press imprint was able to generate “hype any author would kill for” using blogs. Now he writes about how formerly Vampire-centric author Anne Rice’s publisher Alfred A. Knopf is leveraging the blogosphere to market her new tome. In this instance, the publisher not only had a new book to deal with, but also a new (and somewhat skeptical) market.

“Christ the Lord” is told from the perspective of Jesus as a child. It’s in its sixth printing, with 375,000 copies in the U.S. and has been number 9 on the New York Times best-seller list. This despite the fact that several religious retailers have refused to sell it, mostly due to the fact that it isn’t based on scripture.

Knopf gave away 4,000 advance copies of the book to retailers, distributors and bloggers. They also bought ad space on blogs aimed at a Christian audience such as RelapsedCatholic.com.

Like the Free Press campaign for “The Number” by Lee Eisenberg, Knopf started promoting early:

“…the book is enjoying a good run on best-seller lists, and some of the credit goes to efforts by Knopf that date back almost a year. In addition, they had to find their way in religious publishing, which has its own infrastructure outside the secular book-retailing industry. “We started working on the book in January because the Christian media marketplace and the faith-based outlets were new to us,” says Paul Bogaards, a spokesman for Knopf. “It involved detective work on our part.”

Also note the allusion to the Cluetrain’s Markets as Conversations theme:

“In contrast with her previous books, which saw sales spike right after publication, sales of “Christ the Lord” started modestly but have been steadily building. ‘Invariably, people who read it have wanted to discuss it,’ says Bob Wietrak, chief merchant at Barnes & Noble Inc.”

In his first post, Berners-Lee reminded readers that the first web browser allowed users to edit and re-post most web content once they had been given permission to do so. He never anticipated that the Web would become a domain for publishing - and always predicted that it would become a collaborative and creative space for sharing information and discussing ideas.

The existence of blogs and wikis he says, confirms his early predictions - and wish - that the Web develop in this direction.

The quotes from a business person in the fabulous press release about Yahoo adding Wordpress to their web hosting plans reminded me of how much work us blogging evangelists have to do, especially going into 2006.

blogging seems an activity for a technically savvy person, which she (McMasters) doesn’t consider herself.

McMasters spends so much time at her computer that she doubts she would have much interest extending her PC time in order to blog.

How are we not getting the message out that you can start blogging in 5 minutes, 10 max, and there’s no technical skill required? Is it the blogosphere’s tech-based jargon, self-centeredness, or blogs like The Consumerist that scare a McMasters away? We need to prove to a busy business owner, like McMasters why RSS can increase sales and how business can prosper in the blogosphere.

And while you’d think from all the press blogs get that we’re there, mainstreamed and in business plans, but we’re apparently not. That’s what I’ll be working on next year with a book, more seminars, conferences, and speaking gigs.

A quick recap of what I’m going to call bizniking.

Dan from Biznik attends our Seminar, gets inspired by blogging, invites me to speak more about blogging, launches a Biznik blog and goes all out with the blogging thing, as do several other Bizniks.
Later, I mention the Bizniks blogging enthusiasts to Mie Yaginuma from Six Apart, who tells her husband Dav. He signs up and they promptly interview him.

As Mie said in an email about bizniking, “neato” and I said, that’s “a business networking group that works.”

Today I had the privilege of interviewing Flemming Madsen, founder of Onalytica who collaborated with Market Sentinel and Immediate Future to compose the white paper that I posted about last week.

As is often the case with research papers and the general public, some members of the blogosphere (including me - see the aforementioned post) and the mainstream media misinterpreted the results of the study. During our interview, Flemming was able to clarify many of those points - so stay tuned for that podcast.

Another interesting element of this podcast is how it was recorded. For the other podcasts I’ve been working on, we used FreeConference.com to record telephone conferences onto .mp3s. But since Flemming is located in London and would have to dial internationally to reach the conference calling number, we decided to use Skype and GarageBand to record our conversation.

The sound quality was a little patchy in places, and I’m going to have to do some serious volume boosting of Flemming’s portion of the conversation before the podcast will be ready to air - but for the practical purposes of capturing content - the conversation came through loud and clear. This may be an option for podcasters who want to record interviews with far-away subjects without taking out a second mortgage.

Skype recently launched a plugin for Wordpress that allows readers to use Skype to quickly contact the blogger through their free Internet telephone service.

I wonder if Skype will ever create a podcasting feature. Now that would be amazing.