February 2006

It appears that the International Olympic Committee has banned athletes and coaches from blogging about their experience at the Olympics. The penalty for disobeying? Disqualification.

The IOC’s rationale for the ban is that “that athletes and their coaches should not serve as journalists — and that the interests of broadcast rightsholders and accredited media come first.”

Neville Hobson points out that many blogs have cropped up in violation of the ban. And Network World points out that the ban is motivated mostly by the desire to protect the traditional media organizations that have paid handsomely to cover the Games.

I absolutely understand and respect the IOC’s right to keep athletes and their coaches from blogging, but I think the decision was a bad business move. In a world where people are becoming accustomed to the free flow of information, restricting it to a few traditional sources may translate to decreased interest. The IOC needs to figure out a way to accommodate the traditional media while adapting to the changes the Web has wrought.

One way to do this would be to allow athletes to enter into agreements with the journalistic organizations covering the Games. The organizations could host the athlete’s blogs on their websites. Obviously, no money could change hands. But perhaps proceeds could be donated to charity.

A topic in [our blog book](/blog_book/) is finding a niche and we use [TDFBlog](http://www.tdfblog.com/) as the example. TDFBlog aggregate cycling news with a human touch (not zombie style), adding commentary, and most importantly an RSS feed. At the time of Lance’s last tour, no other cycling site had feeds and TDFBlog’s resulting traffic and ad revenue proved there’s a audience for RSS — a big audience. Fast forward to the start of the 2006 racing season and other cycling news sites are figuring it out including [PezCycling](http://www.pezcyclingnews.com/) and [Velonews](http://velonews.com/).

When we talk and evangelize blogging in Colorado next week, during [Bloggy Mountain High](), I’ll note those examples. Even if a resort like [Cooper Mountain](coppercolorado.com) or [Keystone](keystone.snow.com) may think they have no need to blog, they could certainly offer an RSS feed of their deals, specials, and club incentives like [Club Colorado](http://www.coloradoski.com/clubcolorado/) does. Businesses should use RSS, at a minimum, to replace or complement an email newsletter.

Thanks to everyone for their tremendous patience. RegOnline is functional once again.

Register now for what promises to be a fantastic seminar in Los Angeles on March 16, 2006.

We’ve just gotten word that RegOnline- our registration service for our upcoming seminar in LA - is down. The kind people there say they expect it to be up by 8pm tonight.

But if - like me - you are so swamped that if you don’t register right this second, it’s liable to be buried under your mountains of work, then allow me to remind you. E-mail me and I will let you know when RegOnline is back up and functioning. I will even give you a handy link that will take you right to the registration page.

Sorry for the technical difficulties, folks!

David Lake has posted over at inflightHQ about a Spanish WiFi company called Fon that is working to create a shared worldwide WiFi network.

According to Internet News, heavy hitters Google and Skype recently invested $21 million dollars in the company.

According to Technorati Founder and CEO Dave Sifry’s State of the Blogosphere, the blogosphere is 60 times bigger than it was only three years ago, and it continues to double in size every 5.5 months.

One of Sifry’s main points was about blog spam and ping spam, which is a continued scourge. He mentioned the upcoming Web Spam Squashing Summit, which is sure to be a very interesting discussion.

One of my favorite analyses was the chart that showed spikes in blog activity to correspond with various major news events, from the Kryptonite Lock controversy through Hurricane Katrina.

Silicon.com’s Spam Report offers some excellent analysis of paid-for e-mail and what it means.

My personal opinion is that there are too many different variables for this paid-for feature to become a success. After all, some people use the spam filtering software on their mail clients to sort out junk, and paid-for status isn’t going to change that. Also, like everything else, spammers will find a way to take advantage of this service despite all the protocols put in place to prevent them from doing so.

Our friends at Colorado Ski Country USA have posted about Bloggy Mountain High and the open meetup on February 15th at the Great Northern Tavern.

Another Blog Business Summit Evangelism event is happening next week, Feb 14 — 17, and it’s called Bloggy Mountain High. With our fellow bloggers, we’ll evangelize business blogging to Colorado Ski Country, resort owners, and CEOs. We’ll also meetup with local bloggers to have beers, appetizers, discussion, and a whole lot of blogging (we’ll announce where as soon as the location is finalized). Check our Evangelism blog for more details about this unique event and we hope to see you there!

Related Tags

• Blog Business Summit
• Bloggy Mountain High
• Colorado Ski Country
• Evangelism

And a lovely Tag Cloud

Dori Smith is a long-time author, blogger and co-conspirator of ours. A few weeks back Dori and I had a chance to reminisce a bit about several projects we have worked together on over the years (inlcuding the world’s first JavaScript Conference back in 1997), and I was reminded that she had proposed several sessions on blogging for the 2000 Web Builder conference Robert Scoble and I were organizing.

It was at that event that Scoble demoed blogging to me for the first time, and as Robert says, it was Dori’s session submissions that introduced him to the blogging phenopmenon.

Don’t miss the next big thing. Read Dori’s blog backupbrain.

I was very excited to read on GM exec Bob Lutz’s FastLane Blog that the sheer volume of comments about resurrecting the Camaro have prompted the company to design an updated version of the ever-popular muscle car.

In the blog, Lutz writes, “If I had a dime for every time I’ve read the word ‘Camaro’ in your comments on this blog in the past year, I could have financed the concept car out of my own pocket! And I would have… I like it that much.”

Unfortunately, GM won’t commit to building the Camaro at this time. But Lutz remains open to commentary from his readers. And he’s sure getting a lot of it - 524 comments since he posted the concept almost a month ago.

In general, commenters are overwhelmingly positive when it comes to the design, though a few can’t decide if the car is “too retro or not retro enough.” But Lutz’s readers are also clamoring to point out that they’ve been waiting for years and that GM needs to put the car into production already.

This is an excellent example of the tremendous power that the blogosphere offers companies. GM has shown consumers that it is capable of listening and responding. But it has done so - and will continue to do so - at its own pace.

That said, I tend to agree with Lutz’s readers that GM needs to follow through on making the concept a reality. Why? Because they have two very valuable assets. One, after all these years the word “Camaro” still carries serious cachet. And two, they have a web-savvy audience of aficionados that not only read Lutz’s blog, but have blogs of their own. The buzz on and off the Web over this car will be so tremendous that advertising may be almost moot. (Although product placement on hip, edgy shows wouldn’t hurt.)

If GM markets the new Camaro as “back by popular demand,” and uses its blog to ensure that the public voice is heard during the development phase, it can’t go wrong. Bloggers will go nuts for it. The Camaro afficionados will love it. And future generations will embrace it.

Hell, I love it. If this car were real, I’d go out and buy one right now.

Technorati has nearly 80K posts and counting on the Superbowl and a chart showing all the activity.

Of interest to me is the HD broadcast, as I posted about earlier, Fox brought their A-Team to Seahawks Stadium and that was the most impressive HD production I’ve seen. ABC is promising even more impressive coverage. Related posts

• HDTV and Football
• Super Bowl XL in HD
• ABC Prepares for Super Bowl HD Extravaganza

Ah yes … another iPod killer dies and this time it’s Dell’s Digital Jukebox. While Microsofts iPod Killer is still in development (since April of 2004, according to cNET), Jason Cross of ExtremeTech switches teams, Gartnenberg posts about the iPod economy, and the Seattle Weekly is publishing a Dining Guide for iPod.

Considering the amount of time I spent geeking around on the Web in college, I’m astonished that I didn’t become a Facebook addict until just a month ago.

For those of you who don’t know - Facebook is a huge freakin’ deal in the college world. It’s a walled garden that requires a .edu e-mail address to get inside and set up a profile - which you then link to other people’s profiles in a vast friendship network. It’s a lot like MySpace, but it targets a very specific demographic - which makes it a great place to buy ad space.

But I’ve always thought that organizations had more to gain from Facebook than advertising. After all, most people my age have trained ourselves to block out a lot of it. Personally, I know that the best way to reach me as a consumer is through product placement - particularly when it comes to shoes.

But I digress. The point is that I can think of other ways for savvy business people to make use of Facebook without ticking off its users or spending tons of money:

• Use it as recruitment territory. It may be a little unconventional, and you’ll see sides of their personalities that you’ll never see in the workplace. But the fact is that Facebook is a huge bank of information about educated, web-savvy people about to step into the workforce.
• Find out who’s blogging. Facebook profiles give users the option of creating an outbound link to their website, which is a blog more often than not. This can be a great way to target influential bloggers within a geographic area, or even on a particular campus.
• Product Placement. If all else fails, find the people with the most Facebook friends and offer to pay them to promote your company’s product in their profile photo or photo albums. You can be very creative with this. It can be anything from asking them to use a photo of themselves drinking your company’s soda on their profile pic to giving them and their friends discounts at your Spring Break resort and asking them to document it in a photo album.

But remember how I said that Facebook is a walled garden that requires a .edu e-mail address? That could throw a monkey wrench in things, except that if you ever went to college, you likely have a .edu e-mail address. All you need to do is call up your alumni association and ask how to get it set up. Most likely, they’ll forward all your e-mails to another address so as not to take up space on their servers, but that’s all you need.

Jason and I were discussing blog design (we’re working on a new blog for [Colorado Ski Country](http://www.coloradoski.com/)) and observed that somehow, when newspapers blog, they manage to make it feel totally unbloggy. As Jason noted, “It’s like, they make the blog just an advertising delivery device — like how rice cakes are just a peanut butter delivery device.” And they don’t even add the honey to the peanut butter on the rice cake!

An example is the Ski + Ride blog. Besides the rice-cake problem, the confusion on this site is largely because it’s [Explore New England](http://www.explorenewengland.com) a joint adventure from the [Boston Globe](http://www.boston.com/news/globe), and [boston.com](http://www.boston.com/) and is copyright [The New York Times](http://www.nytimes.com/). In the 90s, we called that synergy and it didn’t work then and it’s no better now, even with Web 2.0. The site is all over the place.

Offering a blog and RSS to your readers is enormously beneficial. We talk about that all-day long to our readers, attendees, and clients. Props to Explore New England for doing so, for blogging, but in the next rev they should consider starting a separate blog that sits on its own and isn’t like a rice cake.

[Valleywag](http://www.valleywag.com/) launches and I asked Nick Douglas, the editor, why he thought it was hot . . .

>> I personally enjoy because, well, these people are like bloggers with even bigger egos.

Bloggers with even bigger egos? What about Web 2.0 startups and their egos! Or maybe spy photos from behind-the-scenes of a company like SpikeSource that’s ran by [Kim Polese](http://www.girlgeeks.org/innergeek/inspiringwomen/polese.shtml).

And speaking of television networks moving out into the blogosphere, who could forget the writers of ABC’s hit show Grey’s Anatomy?

On their blog Grey Matter, the series’ writers obsess about making each script perfect, how much they love the on-set medical advisors and cast, and the general frenzy of making a widely-followed television series run smoothly.

Back when I was an ardent follower of Star Trek: Voyager, one of the things that frustrated me most as a fan was that I didn’t have any access to the show’s writers. Now, I’m not so arrogant as to think that my commentary would have really affected the direction the show took. But I still think it’s a great idea to give writers the opportunity to discuss their work with fans of the show - and defend their decisions about the characters that so many people feel connected to.

One writer, Joan Rater says that “writing this blog kind of terrifies me,” since some fans have offered criticism over the love triangle between three of the show’s main characters. Another worries that the cast will, “chase me with torches and stone me to death with rage at my idiocy” after a horrible flu shortened her script-writing time by a week. (They wound up loving the script.)

ABC earns points here for giving its passionate fans another way to engage with the show, and to feel that they have a stake in the unfolding drama.

We’re admittedly late to the party on this one, but Microsoft, our Seminar Series sponsor, has released the Vista beta (everything is a beta in the blogosphere, except Web 2.0, which is now point releasing up to 3.0 with even bigger fonts and zoomier dialog boxes). Included in the beta and much of the talk in the blogosphere is Internet Explorer 7. The IE Blog discusses the new features at length. And to us, especially in the book, the inclusion of RSS is the most important. When Keynoter Dean Hachamovitch first showed IE 7 at our San Francisco conference, the audience was most interested in the syndication features. Those features are going to do much to explain the benefits of blogging to a broader business audience.

Badges of Courage

My issue (again) is with the icons, or badges of courage as I call them. Now we’ve got another orange one about to be released to millions of users. Great that it’s the icon from Firefox, but it’s all broadcast looking and orange (not green, which is the new gray). It looks like there’s a WiFi hot spot near me instead of an available RSS feed.

Tabalicious

It wasn’t that long ago, when MS was dismissive of tabs and updating IE — they were heads down fixing security holes in Windows XP. A close second to RSS in the “life-changing” application department is tabbed browsing. I’ve been in client demos and seen the eyes pop when I open 9 tabs in one browser. Those eyes pop even more, when they get how RSS works.

Props

Even though I’m mostly a militant mac user, props for all the hard work. I know a few of the people that worked on the IE Beta and they’re not just embracing and extending any longer. They lived IE just like the rest of us that code websites for a living and talked with me and my fellow WaSPs at length about how to make a better browser. Soon enough, as the blogosphere loads the beta, we’ll know how well they did.

A reader tipped us to [specially-equipped pigeons](http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060201/od_uk_nm/oukoe_uk_science_pigeons) that will blog about air conditions in San Jose. Broback and I were just talking about staffing and who needs outsourcing to India, when you can convince pigeons to blog!

It seems that the Web is simultaneously Showtime’s best friend and its worst enemy. Every week its most popular shows are recorded, converted and shared over the Internet via Bittorrent, LimeWire, and other P2P file-sharing programs.

But Showtime has figured out how to make use of its unauththorized Web presence when it comes to one of its most downloaded shows: The L Word.

Showtime consistently dresses L Word characters in fashions from labels like BCBG and 7 For All Mankind. Then it teams of with StarBrand e-magazine to feature those products on Sho.com. Fans of the lesbian drama log on regularly to find out which bag classic-chic Helena was carrying, or which top ultra-gorgeous Carmen had draped over her caderas in each episode.

And now the network has added a blogging and RSS component to its Web campaign with Blogger’s Corner, where it features brand-expanding avatars for blog platforms, RSS feeds with upcoming episode clips, podcasts, and a bank of commonly used “interest” tags that link users of platforms from Blogger to Facebook through their common love of all things L Word.

This would be a smart move whether or not The L Word were pirated regularly. But the presence of such rampant Internet piracy is exactly what powers this Web machine. Showtime executives can’t be unaware of the overlap between the technologically savvy youngsters who see anything available on the Web as fair game, the fashionistas who use their website to guide their purchasing decisions, and the bloggers they are now targeting as a word-of-mouth sales force.

Obviously, Showtime still abhors Internet piracy. But, by treating piracy as a resource rather than a parasitic problem, they’ve found a viable way to more than make up for lost revenue.