December 2006

Given the recent conversation in the blogosphere about information embargoes, I thought yesterday’s slip-up by the Edwards campaign was rather hilarious. Launching a presidential campaign website a day early was one heck of a way to break down the command and control barriers of a presidential campaign, even if it was an accident.

This time around, Edwards is making an effort to be a lot more authentic on the campaign trail. He wants people to see who he really is and not slip into the campaign shtick. He, his wife Elizabeth, and his daughter Cate are all blogging. In one post, Elizabeth joked about the fact that her husband isn’t handy around the house but that she’s sure her next one would be. That’s the kind of joke that American women make all the time, but you’d never expect to see a presidential candidate’s wife say. Even invoking the prospect of a less-than-perfect, real-world marriage is enough to send shivers down the collective spine of every campaign consultant in America. Good for them!

Robert Scoble is with the Edwards family in New Orleans right now and he’s been blogging away about his presence there as a journalist. It’s pretty cool that Edwards is reaching out to the blogosphere through Robert, although it’s a little funny since Robert’s not really a political blogger. This sort of reminds me of when Richard Edelman chose to reach out to the blogosphere via Robert in the aftermath of the Wal-blog scandal.

I wonder what this means for the blogosphere. As much as I like and admire Robert, he is just one (very geeky) man. His notoriety has made him a natural starting point for anyone who wants to engage the blogosphere. But I hope it won’t always be that way.

I think we’re seeing a step in the evolution of the blogosphere and its relationship to the rest of the world. As blogs, blogging and blog technologies become more widespread, perhaps we’ll see less focus on one entry point for getting the blogosphere’s attention. I think this is what Robert means when he talks about paying more attention to the z-list.

Keep in mind that I’m not criticizing Robert or Sen. Edwards on this, just making an observation.

As most of you know PRWeb is a frequent sponsor of our conferences. When I met Joe Beaulaurier at the last conference, I had to gush about just how helpful PRWeb had been.

Also joining us for the party is Monster Cable, which makes many different kinds of high quality consumer electronics. They’re just getting into home automation, which is something I used to wish for as a kid. I used to wander around the house saying, “computer: tea, earl grey, hot,” but nothing would happen. It was most depressing.

I wonder if they could make my smart house talk to me in Majel Barrett’s voice.

Update 4:52 p.m. Brad Bramy of Monster has asked me to add that they’ll be giving out tickets to their Tuesday night George Benson concert at our party. The concert will take place after the party is over…

If there’s one thing we can be accused of here at the Blog Business Summit, it’s that we’re crazy about blogs. But blog and blog marketing alone do not determine the success or failure of a product. After all, not everyone reads blogs on a regular basis. And while a growing number of people rely on search engines to get information, many people do not spend a great deal of time on the Web.

That’s why reaching out to offline constituencies the same way you’d reach out to online ones is so important. The approach is the same. You want to ask for people’s opinion about the product rather than giving them a sales pitch about why it’s so great. You want to involve groups that have been historically negative about your product–like moms and video games–and emphasize honesty over sales language.

This strategy is part of the reason the Nintendo Wii has been such a great seller. The organization has reached out to moms and families as well as the traditional video game demographic. The result is that they’re seen as combating the sometimes unhealthy video game culture, bringing families together, promoting exercise, all while expanding their market.

I’ve become pretty anal about making sure my HTML validates. So when something throws my code out of alignment, it irritates me.

As many people have mentioned before, clean code is one of the top reasons why blogs do better than traditional websites in the great race to the top of the search engine results page. When a search engine crawls your blog, it will note whether or not all your code elements were easy to understand. That counts both for search engine rankings and for the content that shows up in search results.

I recently checked the code on my personal blog, only to find 18 errors. Almost all of them were due to the three embedded YouTube videos on my blog’s front page. I don’t understand why so many cool services produce code that ticks off the W3 code validator. I don’t want to have to choose between incorporating cool elements like embedded YouTube videos and clean code.

If you’re starting a service that caters to bloggers or relies on bloggers to spread the word, pretty please with sugar on top make sure your widgets don’t mess up my code.

I know I’m late to the game on this one. There’s only so much blogging a girl can do when she’s frantically preparing for an upcoming blogger extravaganza.

But despite my tardiness to post about it, I’m pretty pleased that we’re moving toward a best practice of full disclosure. Honestly, I don’t see it hurting advertisers one bit. When we take bloggers on junkets, we’re pretty much fine with however they want to explain how they got to go wine tasting, etc. for free.

That said, there is a bit of a gap between giving a blogger something for free and asking him to write his honest opinion and paying him cash to write about something. Readers will have to make up their own minds about where the trustworthiness line gets drawn. Disclosing the motivation and origin of a post of this nature gives them the tools they need to make up their own minds.

It is with a heavy heart that I post that a true blogosphere hero has passed away. George Budabin was the father of one of my favorite bloggers, Andru Edwards of GearLive.

I met Andru at the last conference. He is a man of remarkable character and integrity, traits whose development he credits to his father. The entire blogosphere owes George a debt of gratitude for raising a son who has contributed so much to our community.

Andru is working to build a tribute to his father in the blogosphere by asking his bloggy friends to link to his remarkable post and also to the George Budabin tag on Technorati. I have done both here and would like to encourage you to do the same.

Our friends over at Broadclip have decided to sponsor the awesome party we’re throwing in Las Vegas.

Their service sounds pretty cool, so I’m looking forward to checking it out. It will record unlimited television shows and put them on your iPod. No need to download from iTunes, no need to TiVo. Obviously, the potential drawback is that you no longer have the files on your computer, but are instead storing them on your iPod. But since most people only store info on their ‘pods anyway, I suppose it’s not that much of a problem…

Kevin O’Keefe, one of the legal eagles at our last conference has posted about the new Blogger beta from Google. He says that it’s not professional enough for law firms.

I agree, and I’m prepared to go even further. Blogger is great for personal blogs. I used to use it for my personal blog long ago before I learned the joys of installing Wordpress on my own servers. But I would never, ever use it for any kind of professional blog.

Why? Because like every other hosted blogging service under the sun, the folks at blogger reserve the right to take down my blog anytime for any reason. It’s simply not worth the risk just to get a service for free.

KUOW is doing a call-in show about social media from 1:00pm to 2:00pm P.S.T. If you’re in the Seattle area, it’s 94.9 FM. or you can listen online. If you want to call in and talk to Ross, the number is 1-800-289-5869.

Ross asked whether the blogosphere and social media were just evolutionary, a so-called “CB Radio for the 21st Century.” I called in and made the argument that while many people currently use it like CB Radio, the technology of social media is revolutionary.

If you have time, jump in and listen to the conversation, or you can download the podcast (iTunes) later on.

Update: You can now listen to the whole podcast here. It is the KUOW recording, which I downloaded from their site. The only reason I’m hosting it here is so that the link won’t break if they move it or take it down. All due props and credit to KUOW, Ross Reynolds and The Conversation.

Steve is always telling me that “brand is what people say about you when you’re not around.” Of course, this begs the question, “is it still brand if you’re paying attention?”

Obviously, I’m being silly. If anything, knowing what people are saying about you when they think you’re not around empowers your brand more than anything else. Which is why zuzz monitoring is so damn helpful.

But just like there are new ways to monitor people’s perceptions of your brand, there are new ways to respond to what you find out. Some companies move right away to counter people’s perception, while other companies are quicker to look within and see if there’s a problem that goes beyond brand. Dell is one example of the latter. In the face of overwhelming criticism, they didn’t hire an advertising firm to tout the benefits of their customer service. They didn’t try to change the direction of the conversation.

Instead, they admitted that they had outgrown a system that was built for a smaller company and moved to correct the problem. Obviously, there are still some issues, but they’re working on them. They’re not trying to gloss things over with “brand.”

I’d say that your response to your brand radar is as important, if not more important, than being aware of what people are saying about you.

Via Jeremiah Owyang.

Best part: Anil dancing to thriller in the background…

I felt the need to at least pay lip service to Time’s most recent ‘person of the year’ announcement. I won’t spend a million words talking about an article that has already received a great deal of commentary from the blogosphere. I doubt I could say anything original about the article anyway.

But if you hadn’t heard about it yet, it’s definitely worth reading. So click on through and take a look.

I found Dave Winer’s post about the end of information embargoes via Robert Scoble’s blog and I think both of them have excellent points.

As we all know, information has a way of slipping out onto the Web before companies are ready to announce it publicly. That’s only going to increase, unless of course blogging peaks in 2007 and goes downhill from there. You simply can’t keep an announcement bottled up until a press conference like you used to.

Unless of course, you’re Steve Jobs. Robert Scoble points out that Jobs’ system of “shock and awe” is envied throughout the public relations sphere. There is an ingrained sense of command and control, he argues, and that’s not going away anytime soon.

I’m not ready to draw too many conclusions yet. But I’ve had enough experiences with the world of public relations to know that command and control isn’t going anywhere just yet.

BTW, I was fortunate enough to meet Dave Winer at Chris and Ponzi’s wedding. I got a little weak in the knees when I found out who he was. I hope he was amused, rather than irritated, by my starstruck-ness.

I’ve been having a very interesting conversation with Matt Ward over at Highland Marketing over the past few days. Recently, he asked a great question that I thought bore examining here.

He wants to know whether it would be useful to enable feeds for individual categories on his blog. IMHO, the answer to that question depends on two factors:

• How “2.0″-savvy is your audience? If most of your traffic comes from RSS readers, then you know that your audience is pretty familiar with the blogosphere/RSS and would probably appreciate the increased granularity. But if most people surf in from search engines or just go straight to your blog, then your audience may not get the most out of category feeds.
• How focused is your blog? Do you talk about one particular area, like we do at Big Business Jet? Or are you all over the map like my personal blog? If your editorial focus is sufficiently topical, then there shouldn’t really be a need for granular feeds. Chances are, your audience is interested in most of what you’re saying, if they’ve subscribed to you at all.

You may have noticed that we’re a little quiet today. That’s mostly because we’re completely without power. I’m currently using Steve’s generator to post this message.

Everyone at Blog Business Summit is safe and sound, although unshowered and rather cranky. We’re hoping that Puget Sound Energy can get the power back online soon, and we’re thinking about everyone else out there stranded without power. Hope y’all are safe!

Senator John McCain (R-AZ) has proposed legislation that would place a heavy–some would say undue–burden on bloggers and social networks to take responsibility for the consequences of user-generated content.

This legislation could be a major blow to the health and vitality of the blogosphere. It comes on the heels of a decision by the California Supreme Court which held that bloggers could not be held responsible for defamatory content that they did not personally create.

Andy has pointed out to me that this is a terrible move for McCain’s 2008 presidential hopes. After all, there’s no worse blogger relations move than to support legislation that would cost them as much as $300,000 if they allow a single potentially defamatory comment to be posted and potentially stifle open public communication on the Web.

Via TailRank.

One of the great things you learn in statistics is about emergent properties in large numbers. The basic idea is that as the number of things you are analyzing–be it people or neurons or stones on a beach–gets bigger and bigger, new properties emerge. These properties are not proportionate in any way to those that would emerge if the number of stones or neurons or people were cut in half. They would disappear altogether, or be diminished by more than half their size. Quite literally, emergent properties begin to happen when the whole is much greater than the sum of its parts.

This is why when your research people are trying to draw conclusions about markets, they want to have a large sample size. The more people you look at, the more likely that an observable phenomena–like the propensity to buy red clothes around the holidays–is occurring because it can be predicted by another factor rather simply occur by random chance.

The blogosphere is a perfect opportunity to leverage the power of those numbers to get a real handle on exactly what people think of your product. What better focus group than people who already have strong enough opinions on your area of expertise to blog about it? No matter what area you’re in, there’s probably a big enough sample size out there to get started.

Matt Ward of Highland Marketing e-mailed me a link to his review of our book today. As always, it’s great to hear that people are finding the book useful.

I was particularly impressed with the one caveat he offered:

The one thing I would caution readers about is Byron and Broback’s exuberant level of enthusiasm. Now don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against enthusiasm. Actually, I think that their enthusiasm is a wonderful thing. My primary concern is that, if the reader is not careful, he or she could find themselves missing the critical truth that blogging takes a lot of commitment and resources. So, while I don’t think that Byron and Brodback overstate the benefits of blogging, I do think that their book could paint a picture that makes successful blogging appear somewhat simpler than it actually is. Of course, in the end this is not a bad thing. The reader just needs to understand that the authors are writing from a particular position, and that, as always, that position will invariably colour what they have to say.

I couldn’t agree more with this assessment. As bloggy types, we tend to get mega passionate about all the great new communications technologies out there. But they do take a lot of time and commitment. I spent many many hours each day researching and writing blog posts and moderating commments.

What’s more, interacting with my RSS reader sometimes feels like I have my mouth around a fire hose when all I really want is a sip of cold water. In fact, John Battelle pointed out to me at the last BBS conference that RSS as it currently stands will never really take off as a medium for data gathering until the sheer overload is tempered in an effective way.

But for me, it’s the right way to do my job. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I recently learned how to configure a tag archive for my personal blog similar to the one we use here at Blog Business Summit using Ultimate Tag Warrior for Wordpress.

After installing the plugin, you can use its extended template tag structure to add keyword tags to your index.php file and create a page template to display the tag cloud.

In a nutshell, this plugin leverages Wordpress’ almost endlessly extensibility to the fullest. I was particularly excited to learn about customizable page templates, which can be used for practically anything imaginable, just so long as there is a template tag to represent the function.