March 2006

Byron has posted over at the blog book blog about the incredible effort and amount of time that went into this book and the many people who have made contributions to it.

I’ve spent a lot of time on this project over the past few month, making Steve’s subjects agree with Byron’s verbs and convincing the two authors of the difference between dashes and parentheses. And I can tell you without any shade of loyalty or bias that this is one amazing book.

In the course of working on this project, I have become a better business blogger. Just being around Steve and Byron while they throw their expertise around has given me an astonishing level of insight into the blogosphere and the myriad ways that businesses can become involved, now and in the future.

Ok, I’m going to stop my gushing now because coming from me it’s just going to be perceived as so much feather-fluffing. But just wait until you read it, then you’ll see.
Anyway - thank you to Steve and Byron for allowing me to be part of this experience. Wow, what a ride!

Ask and ye shall receive, eh? Just the other day I blogged that HBO was making the wrong move by blogging from a character’s perspective instead of giving the actor who plays her a voice.

Well, HBO hasn’t exactly heard my call yet, but Daniela Sea from Showtime’s The L Word - which is one of my favorites - is now blogging about her experiences playing transgendered Moira/Max in the third season that just wrapped up. Showtime is also podcasting about the show, with actor and director interviews.

There still are some ways that they could improve their blog presence. For one, the blog is a MySpace blog, and the entries aren’t exactly real time. They were written during the shooting, but not published until the season was airing. Still, given that they have an actress blogging rather than a character, I’d still say that Showtime doing pretty good in the blogosphere.

My constructive criticisms to them are:

• Move the actor blog over to their real site and host it with Movable Type. Having a presence on MySpace is fine, but don’t use their blogging software, as it’s lame.
• Have other actors jump onboard to start blogging about their experiences during the off season and the shooting of season four.
• Get Erin Daniels to do a post about her decision to leave and about the breast cancer storyline. That will drive some serious traffic.
• If you haven’t already, thank the fans who started a podcast (iTunes).
• Pay more attention to the blogosphere. If you’re going to be engaging bloggers on your own site, and starting your own blog, then you need to be commenting on other people’s blogs, or at the very least responding to their blog posts on your blog. A good way to start would be to pay attention to posts that are tagged l_word on Technorati, to get a sense of what the blogosphere is saying about the show.

Any more recommendations for Showtime, dear readers?

John Jantsch has written an excellent artcle for WebProNews demystifying the basics of small business podcasting - which is an incredibly effective way for small businesses to get the word out.

Being a yoga person, one of my favorite small business podcasts is done by a small yoga studio in Louisville, KY. It’s a series of instructional videos (iTunes) that take you through poses that relieve tension or depression. There are also poses for practitioners of different sports. Byron will be pleased to see that there’s a yoga for cyclists video, while I’m still waiting for yoga for rock climbers.

Apart from the fact that I love yoga, what I really love about these podcasts is that they showcase both the studio and the personality of their host Chaz. This is a good way for the studio to bring potential new local yogis in the door, and for Chaz to sell his longer instructional videos - which he should make available for a fee on the iTunes store.

Business Week reported today that Facebook - my personal favorite social networking site - is on the auction block. The owners of the privately held company have reportedly turned down one offer for $750 million and are valuing the company at $2 billion (!). At the same time, Yahoo! news reports that Google has just released $2 billion more in stock. When I saw that, I had the exact same thought as Rob Hoff who thinks it’s a no brainer that the 100 lb. Gorilla on the Web is going after the 100 lb. Gorilla in the world of social networking.

The question is, what will Google do with the app once it’s got it? Obviously Facebook is a great place to sell targeted ad space - but if it remains in its current form, you can’t count on it to continue at this level of popularity. For people to stay engaged with it, Facebook is going to have to keep getting cooler. Google’s a pretty innovative company, it will be exciting to see what it does to build the service up.

Let’s just hope they don’t accidentally delete all my friends and photos.

Character blogs have never gone over very well in the blogosphere, and I’m not sure that HBO’s new character blog ought to be any exception. The blog is supposed to be written by Margene Heffman, the fictional youngest wife of fictional polygamist Bill Paxton Hendrickson (Paxton is the actor’s last name) on HBO’s new series, Big Love.

I’ve always had mixed views on the subject of character blogs. Last year I wrote on this blog that I disagreed with the blogosphere’s derision of GourmetStation’s fictional blog host T. Alexander. And just recently I wrote on my personal blog that Barbie needs a blog. But to tell you the truth, I understand why people find them much less compelling than blogs written by human beings.

Margene is a very interesting character on camera, but I already know all about her life by watching the show itself. If I’m going to read a blog about the show in addition to watching it, I’d much rather hear from real-life actress Ginnifer Goodwin about her opinions on polygamy, the latest episode and what she thinks of her character.

A few months ago, I attended a seminar on Jungian psychological archetypes in the films of Alfred Hitchcock. The presenter, Dr. John Beebe told the assembled crowd that the characters in films could never possibly approach the level of complexity of a real human being. Instead, each character represented an archetype, and when they interacted it gave the film a kind of complexity that approached humanity. I tend to agree with him.

That’s why character blogs will never really work. No fictional character - no matter how carefully crafted - can ever approach the complexity of a real human being. And when compared to human bloggers with changing opinions and real lives, blogs “written” by fictional characters will always fall a bit flat.

While I agree with Anil that business blogging should be [more boring](http://blogbusinesssummit.com/2006/03/slides_from_ani.htm), the blogosphere always has much entertainment to offer

* [SpaceX blog](http://kwajrockets.blogspot.com/) — live lift-off, explosion, and crash!
* [The Book LA Fashion Week](http://www.bookla.com/spevnt2.html) — Agent Provocateur also lifting off, exploding, but no crashing
* [Snakes on a Plane Quote Tracker](http://snakesonaplane.ning.com/index.php) — add your favorite line
* [Ten-sided](http://turbulence.org/Works/ten-sided/) — a collaborative art blog

I was checking on our blog book page on Amazon.com (similar to googling yourself, I’ve been amazoning my self, including Clip-n-Seal) and noticed that Amazon thinks we’re “better together.” How nice and agreed! As we’ve been saying, Scoble and Shel wrote the why in Naked Conversations and we’re just about to publish the how with Publish & Prosper: blogging for your business.

For more on Publish & Prosper, see our blog book blog. We’re in pre-sale mode now and in stores this May!

Our favorite news reader, NetNewsWire is on sale for 19.95. That’s a good deal and there are other bundles [announced here](http://ranchero.com/?comments=1&postid=1327).

The MIT Advertising Lab has posted on how Jacob Nielsen’s Eyetracking Study Considers AdSense Blindness.

Nielsen has a workshop coming up that discusses how eyetracking can reveal usability insights. Relevant to bloggers is the conclusion that Is “text-box blindness” may be getting to be as bad as “banner blindness.” This may explain why some are experiencing diminishing click-through rates.

Back in the days when I worked on Howard Dean’s campaign, blogging was a new thing in politics. Governor Dean was revolutionizing the way the Web was used to raise money, communicate with voters, and generate goodwill for political candidates. It was pretty exciting to be a part of the whole thing.

Now it appears that the FEC and Congress are catching up with what the Dean campaign started, raising questions about what constitutes official involvement with a campaign and just when bloggers cross that line on the Web.

What really bothers me about this is that it might put some of the conversational aspects that make blogs so powerful out of reach for political candidates who want to have conversations with voters in the blogosphere.

In an ideal world, a candidate could check the RSS reader, see something he disagreed with and leave a comment on someone’s blog - following up later on with a post on his own blog about the issue and why he disagreed. That conversation would help the candidate to clarify his position on the issue to the public and possibly generate some goodwill with the blogger in question - even if the disagreement persisted. But it’s possible if the FEC decides to regulate blogs that this exchange could get the blogger and the candidate in hot water. These kinds of exchanges are essentially what makes business blogs powerful, so why muddy the waters for politics?

Like the Paradise Post said, the only situation in which a blogger should be considered part of a campaign is when he or she is paid to blog favorably about one candidate or unfavorably about another. Anything else is a violation of free speech.

The Blog Herald reports that President Bush recently encouraged citizens to blog.

Be aware that this video is of Bush talking to his base. It may inspire extreme feelings of partisanship in some viewers. Blog Business Summit takes no official position on political matters of this nature. However, we do think it’s wonderful that the president is aware of blogs and believes that they can contribute to the national conversation.

When I used to walk the halls of Microsoft, going to my desk to work on intranet sites, I’d see the “no randomization” signs and it meant, “keep on message, don’t be random, don’t screw up.”

Some of us old schoolers remember an event, back in the day in 1997, that was called the Site Builder Conference with the express purpose of whipping up developers into a froth to run out and starting coding for Internet Explorer right away. That didn’t work then and it appeared to be almost working at Mix 06, until well, during the event that was going along just fine, Microsoft announces another Vista slip. And that’s a big-ass slip! It’s now Vista 07.

How random is that and now the blogosphere is ablaze with talk about the slip and I can just imagine seeing all those no randomization signs again in the halls of a company in turmoil. More

• Digged
• Off with their heads!
• Window’s Delayed
• Channel 9
• BusinessWeek Poll

I suggest marketing add a 7th version of the OS to commemorate the launch in 2007.

One of the main points of Anil Dash’s talk at last Thursday’s seminar (recap here, slides here) was that social networking sites will become more and more integrated into the blogosphere. I think that the integration of social networking and the blogosphere jibes particularly well with Anil’s prediction that RSS feeds will eventually allow you to share information and insights with others. Perhaps social networking will be one possible conduit for such interactions.

There’s been some major conversation over at Scobleizer about an article written by Danah Boyd. You can also track the conversation over at Memeorandum.

The basic gyst of Boyd’s paper is that MySpace has some key features that separate it from the social networking site Friendster. But despite its success, there is a great deal of moral outrage over MySpace that mostly centers on the danger it represents to adolescents, particularly teenage girls. The site makes it easier than ever for predators to target and stalk teenagers who have not yet developed the mature judgment to use such sites intelligently.

In the end, Boyd posits that social networking sites based in the US will soon be required by law to demand some kind of real-world identification from each person that develops a profile on the site. (Which, incidentally, was also one of Anil’s predictions.) Unfortunately, that may alienate users and give a distinct advantage to companies based overseas.

In the end, I think the Facebook model will win out. Facebook allows users to browse other profiles at their school, and to request that people at other schools become friends with them. There is no option that allows you to open your profile to every user. It also has much more advanced privacy features than MySpace. This makes Facebook a much safer community - and therefore more parent friendly, which is critical when you’re catering to tweens and teens.

Note: Sorry for the incomplete version of this post a little while ago. I accidentally hit “publish” before the darn thing was done. ::blush::

Business Week reports that Nike and Google have joined forces to create Joga.com an invitation-only social networking site for soccer fans worldwide.

I concur with Business Week’s analysis that it will take some convincing for users to feel that the site is open and authentic, rather than driven by the marketing arm of the shoe giant.

There’s an interesting conversation going on over in the comments section of the Blog Herald’s post about the Google vs. Kinderstart lawsuit.

UPDATE 5:43 p.m. - Some good talk over at Gapingvoid as well.

• Moving to China. According to The Blog Herald, Six Apart will partner with Chinese blogging company Bokee to provide blogging services to Chinese buisnesses.
• Spammers Suck. Our frequent readers know that we’ve been under heavy attack from comment spammers. Now insiders are speculating that Six Apart will be pushing anti-spam legislation. CEO Barak Berkowitz has confirmed that spamming is a huge problem, and he wants his company to become an advocate for bloggers on this front.
• That’s some serious cash. It was also mentioned in the interview with Berkowitz that Six Apart has raised $12 million in venture capital from Intel, Focus Ventures and existing investor August Capital.

Byron has posted it over at the Publish and Prosper blog.

They’re here, folks. Get ‘em while they’re hot.

I flew from Austin to Seattle for the night and then to LA for our seminar. I didn’t get to write my normal round up of the event, but thanks to [Zeldman](http://www.zeldman.com/2006/03/16/things-said/), [Inman](http://www.shauninman.com/plete/2006/03/sxsw-breakfast-with-the-blogroll) and [Mike D](http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2006/03/march-randoms) I don’t need to! Besides, it was a different event for me this year, I didn’t drink, slept more, and rode my bike all over Austin. See my Byron had [a little lamb](http://texturadesign.com/2006/03/another_fine_day_for_riding.htm) story for more.

• Subpoena limited. Yesterday, a Federal judge limited the amount of information the U.S. Department of Justice was able to subpoena from Google. The judge ruled that the DOJ has a compelling reason to request information about certain URLs from Google, it does not have sufficiently compelling reasons to ask for information about users’ search terms. Especially considering that the release of such terms would harm the confidence of the search engine’s many, many users.
• Lawsuit filed. A suit has been filed against the search engine by a site that claims it was wrongfully “sandboxed” by the Web giant. The site, Kinderstart has asked that Google be required to notify owners of websites before dropping them from it’s database. Google has defended the mysterious formula it uses to determine the relevance of websites as an opinion protected by the First Amendment. Whatever the verdict in such cases, it’s clear that people have come to rely on Google so much that they see it almost as a utility - like hot and cold running water. At some point, that may mean that the search engine industry will become a regulated one.