March 2007

Michael Turk over at techPresident has a recommendation for Republican presidential contender John McCain, “create something online that lives beyond the moment.”

McCain is busy inviting supporters to his Online Idea Exchange tomorrow at 6:30 p.m. EST.

Writes Turk:

I like the “Exchange of Ideas” thematic, but it’s in New York. Why not have some fun with the branding and make it the New York Idea Exchange and play off the NYSE? With a little bit of work, you could actually make this a user interactive thing and create an “ideas exchange” and your users could trade futures in McCain’s ideas. It would give you feedback on which of your campaign messages play better.

Meanwhile, Jeff Jarvis has some advice for Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama. He wants to know what Obama stands for, and he wants Obama to take the time to tell him in video form.

Jarvis holds up Hillary Clintons (now embeddable!) “Hillcasts” as a great example of using video media to share views. And I would agree if only Clinton didn’t sound so scripted.

Obama does a better job of being off the cuff in his videos, even if he isn’t really saying anything yet.

Dave of The U.S.S. Mariner wrote today about Seattle Times staff baseball columnist Steve Kelley’s seeming disdain for the blogosphere.

Kelley filed a column today that imagines how the stupid bloggers must be responding to Seattle’s 1-5 Cactus League record thus far. He must think that nobody but him understands how spring training is just to get the troops warmed up and ready for regular season play.

In response, Dave writes:

It’s okay, Steve. We’re not the enemy. We’re not even that different than you. We watch the games, we write about what we see, and we use the best knowledge we know how to evaluate what goes on in front of us. We even use full paragraphs from time to time.

The term blogger doesn’t mean irrational idiot any more than staff columnist does.

I think it’s great that Edwards features links to social media sites throughout his website. He continues to lead the pack of Democratic contenders for the 2008 presidential nod in leveraging social media. Thomas Hawk pointed out that he’s joined Twitter.

Hawk also nominated Robert Scoble to be Edwards’ Internet Communications Director if he gets elected.

Jeremiah Owyang makes a very astute observation when he points out the difference between creating a flash in the pan viral video and a long-term online community:

Many marketers want to ‘make their mark’ on the world and create such a viral video but let’s be honest the successful ones are few and far in between. I would be so bold to suggest that the best viral videos are rarely corporate created either, so let’s stop trying to do something unattainable.

Think long term, build out tools and programs that let product teams have ongoing dialogues with real customers and prospects to build better products.

It’s like the difference between a passionate fling and a stable, happy 20-year marriage. The fling can feel a lot more powerful, but you have to ask yourself what matters more?

So how do you build a long-term, stable community around your brand? You blog about what your customers care about, or you hire us to do it for you.

And no, this entire post was not written just so I could plug our consulting services. Jeremiah kicks ass!

This evening, I put up a a brief post bitching and moaning about the absence of the latest Battlestar Galactica episode from the iTunes store (iTunes).

Within minutes, I had two separate (first time!) commenters complaining about how SciFi was really inconsistent with when they delivered the episodes to iTunes and On Demand.

A lot of people rely on On Demand to deliver them their favorite shows in a timely fashion. We console ourselves about not seeing the awesomeness that is our favorite television show when it airs because we know that it will await us On Demand early the next morning. That goes straight out the window when our content is delayed and the reason is never explained.

If the airing of the show on the network were somehow delayed, you can bet your sweet bippy that we’d get a n explanation. Someone would probably be fired. But people who watch content on demand don’t get the same consideration. That’s because the TV networks still look at the time slot as the natural habitat of their content. They don’t understand that people expect the content to be everywhere, and they are sorely disappointed when it is not.

I was sitting around with Steve earlier this morning and, as usual, the conversation turned to politics. He asked me if I’d seen Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama down in Selma, AL this past weekend.

Apparently, I was the only one who missed it. Both Senators were widely lambasted for adopting Southern accents during their speeches in Selma. The news even made it on to BuzzFeed.

In all fairness, when I get around folks who talk differently than I do, I start picking up their inflections. I once deeply offended someone because she thought I was making fun of her accent. That could be the case with both Senators. But both of them should know better by now.

You can’t affect an accent, no matter how unintentional, in any part of the country nowadays. Why? Two reasons:

1. The broadcast medium. Video doesn’t just stream over the airwaves and then go into a vault. It lingers in the blogosphere to be played again, and again and again.
2. The commentators. Dan Rather or Diane Sawyer might have overlooked the Southern accent issue out of propriety. It’s not in a newscaster’s job description to poke fun — unless the newscaster’s name happens to be Stewart…or Colbert.

In the past, the worst that could happen is that traditional conservative talk shows would pick up on something stupid that a liberal candidate had done. But even then, the audience would primarily be people who wouldn’t vote for that candidate under any circumstances anyway.

But we now live in the era of bloggers. And bloggers are not Dan Rather. They’re not Jon Stewart. And they’re not Sean Hannity. And when it comes to politics, the conservative blogosphere is ready to exploit any weakness on the part of liberal candidates (and vice versa!).

So keep it in mind. Don’t say anything in public if you don’t want to say it to the whole world.

We at the Blog Business Summit offer our sincere congratulations to the entire Scoble clan.

Our only question: will the baby be liveblogging from the womb?

John Battelle linked today to Peter Norvig’s comparison study of Alexa vs. actual site statistics.

We all know that Alexa ranking is a fuzzy measure of a site’s actual traffic. It is extremely vulnerable to selection bias. But I contend that it’s still a useful tool.

When we were working to determine which bloggers should get press passes to CES, we looked at Alexa ranking as one of many factors to determine whether or not the blogger had a significant enough audience to qualify as “press.” When combined with a number of other qualitative and quantitative factors, Alexa rank can be a good indicator.

Norvig’s results should serve as a useful reminder that no one statistic or qualitative assessment — especially one that is susceptible to so much bias — should be used as the definitive indicator of a site’s merit.

According to Future Majority– my new favorite blog for all things at the intersection of Web “2.0″ and politics — 69% of American women and 56% of American men ages 17-25 rate Facebook over MySpace and YouTube as their favorite social network.

I’m a big fan of Facebook because the interface is clean, the privacy controls are spectacular, the photo sharing tool is fun and the sharing feature is great for “spitting” content along to people who will find it interesting. I am in the females 17-25 demographic and I visit Facebook at least 10 times a day on the average day.

Scott Smith at BCT Tech has a great point about the relevance of blogging to organizations: “When I search, do you exist?”

Without search, we bloggers would just be a gang of crank yankers yakking away on our next-generation CB radios. The signal wouldn’t really go anywhere. But because we link to one another and update frequently, search turned up the volume.

The rise of the blogosphere was an unintended consequence that arose from the convergence of multiple emerging technologies. High speed Internet, cheaper computers and the .com bust all played a role. But search was what put it on steroids.

But as much as businesses need to be aware of the current situation, they also need to be aware of where the trends are going. Pretty soon, consumers will have even more control of search results, thanks to interactive initiatives like Wikiasari, which promises to let searchers drag and drop search results to reflect what they think is relevant. If enough people downgrade or upgrade a particular result, it gets moved. No additional inbound linking behavior needed.

This means that bloggers will have to work even harder to stay relevant to readers. Good blogs will float to the top and bad ones will sink even faster than before. It means the same thing for businesses. If you don’t pay attention to how online media is affecting your business, it’s going to be even harder to catch up when next generation search catches on. Not only will search engines see you as increasingly irrelevant to the search terms that matter, but people who are making real-time changes to search results may see you as irrelevant as well.

Just like John Battelle told us before our last conference, all companies will have to become their own publishers.

Gartner and others have been reporting for some time that blogging has hit saturation. I wonder if Gartner predicted 1995 that HTML had peaked because all most of the world’s physics professors had already put their dissertations online.

I’ll say it again. WordPress, Movable Type. Typepad, Drupal, etc. are (for most) simply a better way to build a WEB SITE. Blogs are an essential Web architecture, not just a limited platform for diaries.

As a bone to the “peak” crowd, I’ll agree–yes, most sweater ladies that are going to write about their cats have probably already done so.

The use of blog engines will continue to grow significantly, as they overtake those horrid flat HTML pages still being built like crazy.

I got a rude comment on my blog today. When I looked at the IP address of the commenter, I was surprised to see that the rude comment in question came from within the walls of a major company.

And not only is this a major company, it’s a company whose work exists at the intersection of public relations and emerging technologies. The people who work there really ought to know better.

For those of you who are lost, here’s a primer:

• When you post a comment on a blog, the blogging software logs the point at which you accessed the Web. This is called your IP address. Each and every Web connection in the world has a unique one.
• If your physical location is within the four walls of a place of business, chances are that your current IP address is associated with the company’s servers.
• Bloggers can easily look up the IP address and find out that the comment in question came from within the company.

You can see how this would be bad for a company. If an employee decides to go off half-cocked in the blogosphere, this can come back to bite the company in the hindquarters rather than just making the individual employee look like a jackass.

So what can businesses do? A couple of things:

1. Include a company blogging policy in the corporate handbook. — You know that contract that employees sign when they join up with your company? Make sure that they agree to adhere to the corporate blogging policy.
2. Make sure your blogging policy includes a section on using company time to interact with the blogosphere. — These kinds of policies can range from restricting any and all blogosphere interaction during the workday to allowing employees to pursue professional interests in a mature, responsible way during portions of the business day.
3. Periodically reinforce the corporate blogging policy with updates and reminders. Explain the reasoning behind each of the steps to your employees. It’s more likely that they’ll adhere to your guidelines if they understand why you’ve implemented them.

Steve Rubel posted on Monday about the faliure of many “Web 2.0″ sites to provide users with lists of relevant content. Why would you do this? Primarily because you want to keep your readers on your blog longer instead of sending them elsewhere on the Web.

Lorelle on Wordpress has a great rundown of plugins that will provide services like this for Wordpress users.

For Movable Type users, Adam Kalsey has a plugin that will provide related content by relying on MySQL fulltext search behavior.

I’m going to start tinkering with these plugins over the next few days to see whether or not they’ll work for our purposes. I’ll definitely be implementing a function like this on my personal blog.

What other plugins have you discovered or used that do a good job of giving your readers more interesting stuff to read?