April 2006

Ruben de la Torre is a Lieutenant with the Los Angeles Police Department. He attended our Essentials of Business Blogging event in Los Angeles. In our interview, Ruben gave us the inside scoop on LAPD’s blog, which will launch on the first of May.

Also in this podcast, we have some feedback about the seminar from some of our attendees, plus a few words of wisdom from Anil Dash. (Talk summary here, slides here).

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.

I must’ve missed a post (I missed an entire season of the blogosphere, while authoring [our book](http://blogbusinessbook.com)) or announcement earlier about this, but did notice today that the [Seattle PI](http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/) is [recruiting bloggers](http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/solicit.asp). As their Assistant Managing Editor says, “If you know a few fellow citizens/writers who would like to blog about a topic with you, we can start a group blog featuring you and a number of your friends. If you are already writing your heart out on a blog just a few hundred people are reading, talk to us about moving your blog to the Seattle P-I.”

That’s unclear if you’re giving them consumer-generated content, getting paid, or splitting revenue, but still that’s cool to take a passionate blogger(s) and put them in front of millions of eyeballs. As the NYTimes reports, [consumer-generated content](http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/04/business/media/04adco.html?ex=1301803200&en=280c20c0ba112965&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss) is hot with advertisers, even if it risks your brand.

As we’ve been saying for years now, ignore the bloggers at your peril. Now they’ll be advising people in stores as they contemplate purchases (at least in Japan.)

The Economist reports that Toshiba will soon offer a system that will allow shoppers to scan barcodes in stores and get a review of the scanned product from bloggers.

“The software, which will work in any handset equipped with a digital camera, will let users scan the barcodes of an item in a shop to call up assessments of the product on the internet. The phone connects to a central Toshiba server that can both identify the barcode from a database of 1.5m products and then sift through all 6m Japanese weblogs for any references to it. A more complex algorithm then decides whether the reference is broadly positive, broadly negative or neutral, and within about ten seconds the product’s reputation gets a numerical value on the handset.”

I wonder if this will finally convince corporate America that bloggers are worth engaging with. We are still experiencing timidity at surprisingly high levels…

If you’re launching a blog - particularly if you’re rolling your own - you’ll want to test it across multiple operating systems and browsers. This used to mean you’d have to test across mutliple machines, or use VPC which is rather lame and slow and all kinds of annoying.

But now Macintosh says, “ok hackers. You did it, now the masses can too.” Presenting Boot Camp, now you too can run Windows on any Intel Mac.

Obviously this news is relevant to the business blogging community, but Byron and I are both freaking out over here because we’re huge geeks and it’s just so darn COOL! And the blogosphere is already on fire with the news. Here are a few of the bloggers posting about the news:

• Gizmodo
• Internet-Nexus
• O’Reilly
• PC Mike

And many, many others. But still nothing from Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble. I’ve pinged him, and I’ll let you know his thoughts when I hear back.

Update 11:35 a.m. Scoble had this to say:

They [Apple] certainly are understanding how to use blogs to listen to their customers.

And, yes, I +am+ jealous.

On the other hand there are some at Microsoft who are listening too. Atlas, new developer technology that helps developers use Visual Studio to build ASP.NET applications, came straight off of feedback on blogs.

Does Apple need blogs? Not if it keeps responding to what bloggers want.

And, yes, I’m very tempted to buy a MacBook.

A few days ago Keith and the Girl (a comedy podcast that is unsafe for both work and family environments), did an episode in which they read a contract - purportedly sent to them anonymously - between a podcaster and the podcast consolidation/promotion service Podshow.

The podcast, is at base a scathing criticism of a contract that the podcasters clearly believe to be one-sided.

There are varying opinions on this in the blogosphere. Eric Rice, podcasting guru and co-founder of AudioBlog posted that he thought something smelled “not-so-fresh” at Podshow. In an instant messenger conversation, he told me that it’s not any one issue that gives him pause. “What got me the most about the Podshow thing [referring to the Keith & the Girl Podcast],” he said, “is that it was ONE more thing in a long history of events that add to my belief that something is up with them…I don’t object to the contract, but what it represents: an old dying model on a fresh new medium that was not exactly the most transparent thing in the world.”

There are a number of responses to this issue in the blogosphere:

• r3v.com had a few choice (swear) words for Adam Curry, PodShow’s founder. He referenced the Wikipedia controversy wherein Curry edited an entry on the history of podcasting - which is one of the events that Rice referenced when he talked about his mistrust of Podshow.
• Multi-Media Me thinks that the contract is surprisingly “old-school” given how Curry often rails against the “old” way of doing things.
• Ewan Spence encourages a more level-headed response, “I can’t see anything that I wouldn’t expect to read in a contract from an organization like Podshow.”
• Paul Colligan thinks that the contract - while definitely worth thinking over before signing - isn’t as one sided as the podcasters make it seem.
• Finally, Creepy Sleepy, who has a contract in place with Podshow goes to bat for Podshow, saying, “PodShow, however bit they may be, has never violated my trust.” He criticizes Keith and the Girl for taking on such a news-worthy issue in such a one sided way. “You do your medium no good when jumping to conclusions and acting immaturely and irrationally. You harm yourself and your credibility, as well as the credibility of all who are working in your medium.”

As of this posting, Podshow has not posted anything about the Keith and the Girl incident on its blog which - from a critical perspective - does look an awful lot like a medium for press releases rather than an actual blog. And therein lies the lesson for business bloggers: Deal directly with problems like this when they come up instead of trying to sidestep them with a clever skit that doesn’t really do the complexities of the issue justice. If you’re going to engage with the blogosphere, it’s unwise to avoid a direct interaction with your core constituencies when something that gets people debating so fiercely crops up.

This is not to say that a business owes bloggers or pundits anything in particular simply because they have Internet access and an opinion. But when an issue becomes this widespread and explosive, it is wise to respond directly with an intelligent defense of your actions.

Since 1997, when I first started giving presentations on XML and the Web, I’ve been waiting for the seamless business to business data exchange that would occur, and have been led scratching my head as to why it’s not arrived. All the Web services stuff that’s emerged has been so damn cryptic that it flies in the face of what was anticipated ten years ago. I’ve been following the microformats conversation over the past few weeks, and despite the helpful writings of Mary Hodder, Tantek Celik, and others, it took a lot of reading and discussion with DL Byron to get it all digested. Anyway, here is my take, and I’d be very interested in feedback.

Blogs are great at presenting information that humans can read and understand. But there’s a lot of buzz these days surrounding the possibility that blogs and Web pages could be formatted in a way that would make them easy for computers and other sites to read and understand as well.

Many geeks think that this possibility could be realized by using Microformats, which provide an easy way for businesses and people to dynamically exchange data about things like inventory, product pricing, or even wedding gift registries. For example, one could “wrap” mentions of an inventory item in a microformat, and then that data could be easily recognized by other computers on the Internet.

The acceptance of standards-based design has led to the widespread use of Web content that is structured in a clean, easy to understand way. It turns out that Web pages that are built in this logical fashion can be not only read by human eyes, but also understood by computers that are looking for data patterns. Because standards-based pages are so cleanly built, code on a page could be made to contain descriptive information - such as “this is an inventory item” - that computers could easily understand. Many geeks now believe that widespread agreement on descriptions and specifics of text structure could mean the creation of many new and useful ways to exchange data.

Imagine you own a restaurant, and you’ve posted about a new addition to your wine list on your blog. That may be great for Web surfers that chance to drop by and lay their eyes on the list. But wouldn’t it be even better if nearby wine aficionados were notified by their computer or PDA that their favorite wine has become available just down the street? This is the promise of microformats combined with RSS delivery. Your description of the new wine, “wrapped” with a little “wine list item” formatting could make it happen.

How? If each list item were each “wrapped” in an agreed-upon, widely accepted and understood “wine list item” microformat, it would be easy for customers to be alerted when a wine they like is being offered nearby. Interested customers could tell their computer, cell phone, or PDA to monitor RSS “wine list item” feeds from local restaurants and to alert them when the 2003 Pere de Famille from Betz Family Winery appears. Another option would be to ask Technorati or Google what restaurants in a specific area code offer “wine list item” formatted content containing Chilean Cabernets.

The possibilities for ecommerce and online shopping applications are enormous. A company could publish an inventory list that could be dynamically read by the computers of suppliers. These suppliers could then automatically send the company more components as they are needed.