January 2006

We launched a new podcast at inFlightHQ. The first Flightcast is an interview with Fly Girl, a flight attendant and anonymous blogger. Fly Girl shares her experiences in the airline industry, tips for ingratiating yourself to the flight crew, and some comforting words of wisdom for nervous fliers.

The Flightcast brings us to 3 podcasts

Blog Business Report

The Blog Business Summit Report is a podcast series featuring interviews with thought leaders in the business blogosphere. RSS & iTunes

inFlightHQ Flightcast.

The inflightHQ.com Flightcast is a podcast for frequent flyers RSS iTunes

Pug Blog Pugcast.

The Pug Blog Pugcast is a podcast for pugs RSS & iTunes

Shel Israel is a communications expert and Robert Scoble’s co-author on the much buzzed-about book Naked Conversations. I chatted with him about the book, what blogging means for public relations and the mainstream media, and questions from our readers. Included in the podcast is the best analysis of public relations and the blogosphere that I have heard to date.

Click here to listen to the file or here to listen to the file and subscribe to the feed. This podcast is also available via the iTunes Podcasts Directory.

CNET’s News.com picked up the [NYTimes story](http://news.com.com/2100-1032-6027492.html) on [business travel blogs](/2006/01/new_york_times_2.htm), which is great because it’s not behind the “double-secret probation” registration system the NYTimes uses (editor note: we love the NYTimes, but don’t love their registration so much). Note the comments to the article, where Earl says blogging is a gross waste of time and MJ says that bloggers are fools. Maybe so, but I agree with [Professor Halavais](http://www.alex.halavais.net/) who is quoted in the article that “the travel industry will need to adjust” to the blogosphere. At the least, for a business considering blogging, the article proves that you should monitor the conversations in the blogosphere. For the travel industry, there’s insight into their best customers . . . the business traveler.

Both the Blog Business Summit and our travel blog inflighthq are featured today in the New York Times business section. See the article On Business, and Blogging on the Road. In the piece, reporter Christopher Elliott describes several blogs that cover the business travel beat and claims that their influence is growing. Here’s one snippet from the article:

Perhaps the group is not large, at least in comparison to the overall travel industry. But to the hotels, airlines and car rental companies, business travelers who are likely to read blogs such as Mr. Leff’s are their best customers. And blogs have become the latest way to reach them. For example, Extended Stay Hotels, a Spartanburg, S.C., hotel chain, recently set up a blog called Road Warrior Tips (www.roadwarriortips.com). Several newspapers, including USA Today and The Los Angeles Times, now publish regular blogs about business travel on their Web sites.

It was a [big day on Friday](http://texturadesign.com/2006/01/on_this_day_1.htm) — my birthday, parent’s anniversary, Friday the 13th, and Naked Conversations went on sale. [Shel and I talked](http://redcouch.typepad.com/weblog/2006/01/tim_brays_quali.html) about the book, writing, struggles, and finding a book voice — as I learned the hard way, posting to a blog isn’t the same as writing a lucid paragraph for your readers and those [two author voices](/book/about_the_authors/) need to become one narrator.

I haven’t read much of Naked Conversations yet, just the chapter about [Clip-n-Seal](http://redcouch.typepad.com/weblog/2005/05/chapter_5_littl.html), but I’ll get a copy at the release party this weekend. As the [reviews come in](http://redcouch.typepad.com/weblog/2006/01/thanks_to_our_a.html), I’m sure the book is going to do well and I think [our book](/book/), taking a very practical “how-to” approach will be a great compliment: learn the why and then the how.

Last week Teresa interviewed Shel about the book and we’ll have that [podcast](/podcast/) up soon.

PostSecret is an interactive art project coordinated by Frank Warren, an artist in Maryland. He asks people to send in their secrets on homemade postcards. Each week, he scans some and posts them to his blog.

I first learned about the project when I heard a story about it on NPR almost a year ago. I’ve had the blog in my RSS reader ever since, and every Sunday without fail, new secrets are posted.

Since the blog became big news, Warren has published a book and received much critical acclaim. I’m not saying he’s in it for the money - but he made a great business decision by using a blog to house his secrets because of Google and RSS feeds, and a great artistic decision because the format was so perfect for the interactive nature of his work.

Warren has started an entirely new kind of conversation with his blog, and his project. One that incorporates the old (snail mail) with the new (blogosphere) and the private with the public. It’s absolutely worth a look, and an add to your RSS reader.

You can also pick up the book at Amazon.com.

Happy Friday!

For this podcast, I interviewed Greg Schwartz - an associate at the Seattle law firm, McNaul, Ebel, Nawrott & Helgren - about the concept of respondeat superior and its application to the case of Jeremy Hermanns and the Alaska Airlines employees that allegedly commented on his blog.

Respondeat superior has been cited by some bloggers to explain why they think Alaska Airlines might be civilly liable to Hermanns. For a short definition of the concept, look at Wikipedia. It appears simple enough, but Schwartz warned me that there was a lot more to the concept than meets the eye.

After our conversation, I can safely tell you that “deceptively simple” doesn’t begin to describe it. There are a huge number of facts that must be established before any sort of legal claim could exist in this particular case. It took 45 minutes to go over all of them in even the barest detail. I have reduced the recording of our conversation to the most applicable segments. If anyone is interested in having the full 45 minute .mp3, please leave a comment here and I will make it available.

Click here to listen to the file. Or click here to listen to the file and subscribe to the podcast.

The Blog Business Summit Reports (requires iTunes) are now available in the iTunes Podcasts directory and via our podcast feed.

Most net-savvy political progressives in the US subscribe to a blog called The Daily Kos. It’s more than just a political pundit on the Internet, it’s a community of pundits - a progressive blogosphere-within-a-blogosphere. The Kos runs on incredibly powerful and complicated software, called Scoop that allows users to set up their own diaries within the larger site.

Now, WashBlog blogger Brian has used Scoop to turn his blog into a local progressive blogosphere of his own, and it’s taking off. WashBlog has long been a highly respected hub of progressive political thought in the Northwest, so it’s no surprise that Web-savvy progressives from all over the Northwest are joining the site. They have a lot to talk about with elections coming up in November and a number of controversial issues on the table for the state legislature in the coming weeks.

Those of you who were surprised by the recent buzz in the blogosphere about corporate executives who use ghost-bloggers must also think that President Bush writes his own speeches and delivers them without having his lines fed to him. But according to an international poll, 83% of senior corporate executives said that they did not write their own blogs without help.

Neville Hobson, Josh Hallett, and professional ghost blogger Steve Warren all blogged about it, asking “what’s wrong with ghost writing a blog?” The answer: nothing is really wrong with it - so long as you’re not outed. The blogosphere may then decide to eat you alive.

But just because 83% of corporate execs say they don’t write their blogs without help doesn’t mean that they’ve all got ghost bloggers cranking away. It just means that they’ve got silent collaborators. And really, what corporate effort doesn’t have silent collaborators? Steve Jobs onstage at MacWorld didn’t just come up with that wonderful Keynote presentation without any backup from his company’s communications team. Someone probably put together those speaking points for him. That presentation didn’t begin and end with Steve Jobs any more than Boeing’s commercial airplane division begins and ends with Randy Baseler. For everyone who gets the credit, there are people behind the scenes making the whole operation tick.

I’m not sure you can expect bloggers to understand that, though. But this is the real divide between the pundits and the business owners. There are a lot of pundits - who have never run a business - who think that blogging is somehow sacred in its supreme authenticity. And yes, authenticity is critical in the blogosphere. But I’m not sure it’s inauthentic to have help in writing a blog, particularly a corporate one. Just don’t let the pundits find out.

According to Brandweek, blogs are one of the 25 worst marketing ideas of 2005. We had to laugh at that. It’s almost as absurd as “Attack of the Blogs.”

Just because blogs are, as they put it, “frequently inaccurate” doesn’t mean you can ignore them or dismiss them. And the fact that they’re too unpredictable to fit the command and control mentaility of traditional marketers doesn’t make them a bad marketing idea - it makes them a revolutionary one.

If anything, the unreliability and unpredictability of the blogosphere means you have to pay more attention - not less. And you can’t count on the end of this “trend” anytime soon. Blogs aren’t exactly going anywhere. As Forbes Blogger Rich Karlgaard so aptly put it, “When a communications medium is both riding the Moore’s Law cost-capability curve and tapping into a deep need, it’s no fad.”

The blogosphere is mistaken if they think businesses owe them something. But on the other side of the coin, businesses - particularly those that rely heavily on buzz marketing and word of mouth - ignore the blogosphere at their extreme peril. BrandWeek may not remain relevant to the conversation if it doesn’t figure that out.

[Sandvox](http://www.karelia.com/?refid=275502) is a very promising new web website creation tool for Mac OS X developed by Karelia, the company that created [Watson](http://www.karelia.com/watson/). Anticipating the rumors that Apple is going to announce iWeb, an improved web app for it’s [.Mac service](http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=4c2Gw5onEF8&offerid=80901.10000018&type=4&subid=0) and iLife Suite, Karelia released their beta early. They also posted a fascinating recap of [their history with Apple](http://www.karelia.com/sandvox/small_and_nimble_the_long_s.html), a phone call with Steve Jobs, and how to be nimble and quick around an industry giant.

In the Sandvox FAQs, I read that the application produces accessible, [Standards-based code](http://www.webstandards.org/) and of course has a blogging component. I downloaded it and

* It’s great to have a beta actually be a beta and this is definitely a beta — slow, crashes a lot, hangs

* If Sandvox does what it says it does (and I hope it does), it’ll be an excellent app. It can potentially take the place of [Dreamweaver](http://www.macromedia.com/go/gnavtray_dwmx_home) that I find too bloated to actually use.

* Seeing native standards-compliant code from a web app that isn’t all whack just rocks.

I thought Sandvox was like [Keynote](http://www.apple.com/iwork/keynote/) with live editing, templates, inspectors, an intuitive Mac application.

Finally, on the iWeb rumor and .Mac, my family uses .Mac so they can easily create websites, photo albums, movies and whatever else they want to do. The subscription price is well worth it for the ease of use. If Apple does indeed announce some new whiz-bang web app for .Mac, I’d expect Karelia would still have a market for the advanced user. Considering web markets and all the Web 2.0, what the world needs now, especially small business, is a web app like Karelia for e-commerce.

[Steve Rubel](http://www.micropersuasion.com/), writing for iMedia Connection explains how [marketers can use tags and folksonomies](http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/5467.asp) to reach loyal customers. Amazon.com [introduced tagging](http://news.com.com/2061-10802_3-5953622.html) a few months ago. As Amazon described it, “Tags provide an easy way for you to ‘remember’ and classify any item on the Amazon site for later recall.”

We’ve been trying out tags here in our posts and [archive page](/archives.htm) and in the near future will roll out a Tim Appnel’s [TagSuggest](http://code.appnel.com/changelog/2005/12/000018.html) a tool to search tags. It’s still unclear if Tags are a great usability addition to a blog or a confusing tool for the readers.

New for the Mac, is a desktop blog search tool. [Bloglight](http://bloglight.com/) searches the most popular blog search engines and returns the results in a consolidated display.

Considering RSS apps for Mac, I had tried a demo of [NetNewsWire](http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/) way back and found it too slow to use. Not anymore! The latest rev is incredibly fast. I still appreciate the way [Safari](http://www.apple.com/safari/) works, with their live bookmark metaphor, but I appreciate the industrial strength uses for NetNewsWire. I also use [NewsFire](http://www.newsfirerss.com/), which follows a less is more in software approach without all the whiz-bang features of NetNewsWire.

Scoble’s recent post about Tony Bove’s anti Microsoft tome, Just Say No to Microsoft, is an excellent example of what a blog can do for a company. Scoble hasn’t neutralized the book’s impact, but he has shown that Microsoft isn’t afraid of the anti-Windows clamor.

Transparency, candor and grit. That’s what it’s about, folks.

It’s a very exciting time to be a geek. With CES drawing to a close and MacWorld just around the corner, all the new gadgets and exciting ideas are popping up. Here are just a few of the interesting things going on in the (gag) “Web 2.0″ world:

• Google develops a “Google Pack” for Windows that includes Google Earth, Google Desktop, Picasa, Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer and a new screensaver application.
• Google also announces a video download service that will compete with Apple’s iTunes Store (iTunes) video downloads.
• At Macworld, Steve Jobs is expected to announce more Apple miracles. The speculation is that Apple will introduce new laptops that are based on faster Intel processors, and possibly even move into licensing its OS to third parties.
• Meanwhile, Bill Gates revealed all kinds of cool new gadgets in his keynote speech at CES, but Microsoft has been caught wrong-footed on Vista, its new OS. Some pundits speculate that it’s just a poor man’s OSX and that Microsoft’s era of dominance in the OS game is over.

It’s such a great time to be a geek.

Steve is at CES and then MacWorld for a lecture on [Blogging and Site Syndication](http://www.macworldexpo.com/live/20/events/20SFO05A/conference/tracksessions/Best+of+the+Mac/QMONYA04MYOD). I’m staying home this week, holding down the fort, blogging away and working on the book.

Shel Israel is Robert Scoble’s partner in the writing of Naked Conversations has consented to an interview with me for our weekly podcast: The Blog Business Summit Report.

Do you have questions for Shel about blogging or about the upcoming book? Leave them in the comments section and I’ll ask him during our interview.

Making lots of mo-oney!

According to Playfuls.com - Motorola will create a special button on many of their internet-optimized phones that will connect users directly to Google content.

No word yet on whether users will be able to post to Blogger - Google’s popular free blogging service - through their Motorola phones.

With uproar raging about Microsoft censoring a Chinese blogger, I’m sure that people will find this very interesting: Reporters Without Borders has published a guide for dissident bloggers in nations - like China - where the government controls the press.

The guide goes over some blogging basics, then goes on to discuss ethics, search engine optimization, and the what really makes a blog shine. It has an entire section devoted to personal accounts of bloggers from such places as Hong Kong, Bahrain, and Iran. Finally, the guide explains technical methodologies for remaining anonymous, getting around censorship, and maintaining the privacy of an e-mail account.

I recommend the chapter entitled, “What Really Makes a Blog Shine” for everyone, no matter where you’re blogging from or what your topic. I also found the information about anonymous proxy servers to be very interesting. I’ve sent e-mails to some of my friends in China to find out if the Chinese censors have cracked down on this particular site yet. I will report back when they respond.

[UPDATE: 1/8/06 2:45pm] My friend in China who prefers not to be identified because - as she put it - “the government lurks everywhere,” said that she was unable to access the reporters without borders site. Not a surprise.