Blogosphere

Just got back from Blogworld, and the sessions were just fine, despite the fact that Michael Arrington was not on a panel in which the materials had him listed as a presenter.

Michael is catching a lot of flack for his “surprise” non-appearance, yet he publicly posted in the Blogworld Facebook group long ago that he was unable to attend.

As a long-time conference organizer, I am sympathetic to any conference that’s managing an 80-plus speaker roster. It’s a huge logistical task. How about we all just give everyone the benefit of the doubt?

I had a great time at the show, despite us all being human.

The unfortunate truth is that search is filled with splogs. Spammers have figured out just as quickly as the rest of us have that blogs are easy to set up, free, and very good at showing up in search results.

Trying to get through a page of Google BlogSearch results can be like trying to bullseye wamprats with a T-16 (Star Wars? Anyone?). Although they seem to be getting less and less effective, there are a few tricks to searching more effectively, so here’s one of them.

Let’s say I go to BlogSearch and I put in the keywords “motorizr z6tv” (English only) Here’s what shows up on my screen:

I’m willing to bet there are some posts in there that are nabbed from other blogs or press releases or just well disguised spam.

If I run the same search but take out Blogspot blogs by adding “-blogspot” to the search string (sorry Google!), the results look like this:

Now, if I run the same search with blogspot, I get to see all those posts that we pruned with our previous search. Google is going to show me 15 of them: (click to biggie-size).

I clicked through all of those, and I only found three posts that aren’t total regurgitations (but to be fair, they don’t actually say anything, they just appear to be original). That’s a list with 80% spam, removed from your results with one swift stroke.

Not to shabby, eh?

We’ve been picking through the videos of our last conference and pulling out some interesting tidbits to share online. We’re trying to give people a sense of the conference and what to expect at the next one this coming September.

Jason Calacanis gave a memorable keynote back at our last conference in October of 2006, leaving behind him a slough of announcements, nicknames, and of course, some amazing bits of wisdom.

Here it is, folks, how to become an A-list blogger in 30 days, presented in 30 seconds by Jason Calacanis:

Look interesting? Register now for Chicago.

There’s an article in the Wall Street Journal today (free, by some miracle) noting that many people now refer to blogs when deciding on what law school to attend:

The blogs “tell you more useful information…than the percent-employed-after-graduation numbers that schools report to U.S. News,” says William Rothwell, a third-year student at the University of Chicago Law School. Mr. Rothwell, who contributed figures made available by his school to the clerkship blog, says he trusts the law-firm blog because it has been accurate about summer associates at two offices where he has worked.

I decided years ago at Law Camp that becoming a Lawyer was not at the top of my list; it turns out I don’t look very good in a suit.

But the larger point here is that many people are relying largely on bloggers to decide where they go to law school. That’s a very big, important decision.

Blogs can be very powerful, trustworthy sources for people in an increasingly crowded internet. If you make a personal connection with the writer on the other end, their opinion is going to matter more to you, and this doesn’t apply only to law school.

I have frequently found myself buying books and CDs that have been recommended on the blogs that I read. What’s more, I usually enjoy them.

Having said all that, you should register for our next conference.

If you’re interested in business technology and the internet, and you’re not reading Fred Wilson’s blog, you should add him to your reader right now.

He has a knack for understanding where technology needs to go, and a knack for agreeing with me, both of which are important.

Today he wrote a post about web ad functionality, and as usual he’s 100% correct:

The advertising industry needs to take some lessons from social media. Clicking isn’t the only engagement with media that matters on the web. Commenting, favoriting, tagging, sharing, and many more engagement actions are important.

I remember a while ago there were DICE ads that let people add their own job complaints to the flash-based ad-bar. It was way cool, and memorable because of the interaction.

Fred thinks that advertisers should look for ways other than clicking to interact with the audience, and I think that doing that will dramatically raise your impact.

Imagine if FM served ads on two sites - mine and Fred’s - and I saw an ad I liked on his page. What if I could tag that to show on my own blog? What if I could send it to a friend like a NYT article? What if anyone could vote on how cool the ad was, and the coolest ones would get more screen time?

The best ads will automatically get the most exposure. What a cool idea.

I’m currently at the excellent Future in Review Conference (FiRe) in San Diego and have been polling the attendees regarding their blogging status. I’ve asked a half dozen corporate thought leader and marketing types from various organizations “are you blogging?” and five out of six have responded that they are.

Seems to me like we’ve rapidly transitioned from “fear of blogging” to “fear of not blogging” to “of course we’re blogging!”

Just like we predicted back in 2004…

In the article Tapping Into Customers’ Online Chatter, Wall Street Journal reporter Aaron O. Patrick details a topic we’re going to focus on at our next conference — using blogs as virtual focus groups.

Blogs and other messages posted on the Internet by individuals are becoming an increasingly popular way for people to share information about products, offering companies a trove of consumer feedback they previously could get only through expensive and slow surveys. About 1.4 million Internet messages were posted each day in March, up from 600,000 a day two years previously, according to Technorati, an Internet search engine for finding blogs.

That is driving agencies that mine Internet posts for customer information and enlist blogs in marketing campaigns to develop innovative new products.

“By listening to what people are saying online, we are getting an understanding of what people really think,” says Gard Gibson, a VML partner. “The moment you ask someone for their opinion I have created a bias because of the natural human instinct to please.”

Scoble wrote today that he was rather surprised that he hasn’t yet been contacted by any companies marketing to new parents. After all, he’s announced his wife’s pregnancy to the entire world via his blog.

He also says that the advertising industry should pay attention to Twitterment. This service basically compares two terms based on the frequency with which they appear in Twitter entries. Here’s a chart comparing the frequency of mentions of Coke vs. Pepsi:

If a representative sample of consumers were using Twitter, this would be unbelievably useful. But the vast majority of people don’t even know what Twitter is, let alone pay attention to or use it. Like I mentioned before, individual tweets don’t get linked to, so they don’t have any real search engine presence.

That said, I do anticipate that one day a Twitter-like feature will be a common feature among social networks and fully integrated with people’s individual Web presences. When that happens, analyzing the data will be of immeasurable value to marketers the world over. But until then, the most relevant measures of the online conversation will continue to be analytics like the report we’re generating about CES.

Update: And speaking of Twitter as a feature rather than a service, it looks like Facebook just cloned it with RSS feeds and a dynamic page listing all friends’ status updates. I almost feel like this is more useful to me as a personal tool than Twitter is.

I read today on Scobleizer about the new Blogger and Podcaster magazine.

You can subscribe to its twelve annual issues in one of three ways:

• Online with “magazine-esque” technology.
• Via Podcast
• In print

The print edition costs $79 per year, while the “magazine-esque” online version and podcast are free.

I think this is a bold move on the part of the publishers. A magazine for bloggers and podcasters is definitely an unfulfilled niche. The question is whether or not bloggers will pay attention to a news source that only updates once a month. Of course, the magazine also has its own blog.

The big upside I can see to this is that the magazine is available in print. Why is this an upside when so many paper and ink publications are struggling? Because we bloggy types spend all day every day staring at some varity of computer monitor. I, for one, love to read information on paper sometimes. It allows me to focus on one thing at a time. Sometimes I even use a pen and hi-lighter. You can’t do that with a computer unless you want to mess up your screen bigtime.

In an interview with blogger Joe Wikert, B&P publisher Larry Genkin answered some of those concerns:

Instead of “swimming upstream” we decided to make it easier to succeed by publishing the magazine in 3 formats: Print, Digital and Podcast. I believe we are the first in magazine history to do this (and another reason why my editorial team is about ready to string me up.) Each edition is different too. The digital edition uses cool software that gives our readers a magazine-esque feel with pages flipping on the screen and also allows us to embed audio and video into it to add to the experience beyond what you can get from the printed magazine. Then our podcast edition includes some of the actual interviews we conducted in writing our stories, to give subscribers even more detailed information from the industry experts we interviewed. In addition, we’ve also started a blog, written by our editors, so we can have a more regular and intimat? dialogue with our readers.

In time, I might sign up for the print edition, but for the time being I’m signed up for the online print version. I’m looking forward to seeing what this magazine has to offer. I have a funny feeling that I’ll be linking to some of their content sooner rather than later.

” … the code is more what you’d call guidelines than actual rules. Welcome aboard the Black Pearl, Miss Turner.” - Captain Barbossa, in Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl

There’s been a lot of talk recently about creating a code of blogging conduct with Tim O’Reilly leading the charge. He’s got a great post up today that deals with a lot of the (not so nice) feedback he’s received for the idea.

One of the issues that I have with any uniform code of blogger conduct is that it gums up the works for individual bloggers who want to retain editorial control. There’s something to be said for developing a loose set of best practices that cover the same basic territory and then allow individual bloggers to work with them as they see fit.

I think the central best practice that we should be working as a community to establish is clearly stating our general attitude towards online behavior and commenting somewhere on our blogs. More generally, I think the blogging community already does a great job of rallying around people who are being treated unfairly, as it did with the recent controversy involving Kathy Sierra.

Obviously, larger cultural change is necessary, but that doesn’t come through creating hard and fast rules. Just as religiously motivated legislation does not do anything to change people’s basic moral compasses, a uniform code of conduct will not address the underlying problems of trollishness and misogyny. A loose set of guidelines and a community that is willing to police itself is probably a better solution.

The past few weeks in the blogosphere have been even more complicated than usual. In short, some hurtful things were posted about prominent female bloggers on a couple of group blogs that were owned or maintained by other prominent bloggers. In some cases, those hurtful postings crossed the line from poor taste to blatant misogyny and sexually loaded death threats. Leading blogger Robert Scoble even took the week off from blogging in solidarity with his female colleagues who had been attacked. The flurry of debate, recrimination and anger that followed these postings was so intense that it made a splash in the mainstream media, culminating in a feature on CNN.

The whole mess probably turned some businesses off from getting involved with the blogosphere. After all, who wants to engage with a community that periodically goes through firestorms like this? It’s all too hard to control! There’s too much risk! There’s too much immaturity out there for this to be a viable medium for business!

But cooler heads eventually prevailed, leading to these coordinated statements from Kathy Sierra and Chris Locke — the two major players in the uproar.

It’s this spirit of forgiveness, discourse and agreement to disagree that businesses should pay attention to. Sure, there will always be immaturity in the blogosphere. But that’s just as true of the business world. What’s interesting to note is that like all blogosphere firestorms, the whole imbroglio settled down fairly quickly once the two sides were able to engage with one another and find common ground.

That’s the takeaway for businesses. In the blogosphere, it’s best to engage quickly and maturely with all stakeholders in a debate. If you’re capable of having a mature discussion with people who don’t agree with you, then the blogosphere is for you. It might seem very scary sometimes, but there’s an overwhelming likelihood that you and your colleagues will be able to overcome any obstacles you encounter.

David All of techPresident reports that his fellow contributor Mindy Finn has been hired by the Romney campaign.

Finn is a veteran political strategist, having worked on Rick Santorum’s online campaign. But Robert Bluey “she brings experience to a campaign that is only scratching the surface on the web.”

Romney’s blogger outreach lead, Stephen Smith has been on board with the campaign since the end of last year.

One thing I like about Romney’s campaign Website is that he has a “Word on the Web” section that links to blogs talking about his campaign. I just wish he didn’t put that particular widget so far below the fold on his Website. The top half of his site look just like an old school campaign site. It’s only at the bottom that the social media elements come into play.

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?

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.

Open source is an under discussed piece of the social media revolution because you need special skills to be involved. Nevertheless, it represents a real value add in the online world for a non-trivial subset of companies. This begs the question, if your development team has been making modifications or upgrades to any open-source blogging platform and/or its plugins, is it worth sharing those upgrades with the open-source community?

Some would say that sharing work that you’ve paid good money for so that others can use it for free is an unsound business practice. Others would argue that you’ve reaped immense benefit from the open-source community and that you should give back.

I would agree with the latter statement, primarily because you have a lot more to gain in terms of goodwill than you do to to lose in terms of proprietary information. Unless the plugin that your engineers wrote is something that would be of direct and exclusive benefit to your competition, you should post it for other geeks to tinker with. Others might be able to innovate and expand in ways that could give you additional benefit down the line.

If you’re a company that provides a product or service to a geeky audience, your benefits grow further. The goodwill you will generate by participating in the open source community will probably get you a few new customers. And don’t underestimate the power of contributing to open source communities when it comes to recruiting. There are lots of smart geeks out there who want to make career moves, and if they see that your engineers know what they’re doing, they’ll be more likely to want to join your team.

David Armano has a great post that details the ways Twitter could be used commercially.

For those of you who don’t know, Twitter is a site that allows users to update friends and strangers alike on your whereabouts and activities. I’m just getting into Twitter myself. I remember using AOL Instant Messenger for the exact same thing in college. Almost everyone stayed signed on 24/7 and would always have some clever away message up if they weren’t at the computer. Twitter seems like a fun extension of that.

Armano writes that he hopes Twitter doesn’t become commercialized in the pay-per-post sense. That is, he doesn’t like the idea of a celebrity being paid to mention certain brands in their Twitter entries. He is quick to point out that specificity makes for a more compelling story, but not if it’s paid for.

I tend to disagree. As we all know, some commercials are also compelling stories. Some ad campaigns have even had cult followings. I would argue that advertising in all its ubiquity has become a medium for telling interesting stories.

On the other end of the ethical advertising spectrum, I find fake blogs and undisclosed pay-per-post troublesome. Undisclosed pay-per-Twitter presents its own unique problems. Twitter messages may be 140 characters or less, that doesn’t leave much room for disclosure.

Also, the only people who are likely to make any money from such endeavors are Hollywood stars. We already know that their time is basically for sale when it comes to product endorsements. It’s practically expected that if tabloid fodder like Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, etc. are recorded doing, wearing or saying something, they’ve probably been compensated. For any of these celebrities, joining Twitter would be just one more way for them to monetize themselves.

The great thing about a site like Twitter is that you can pay attention to Paris Hilton’s channel, or you can ignore it and only Twitter with your friends. But it would be a different story if a prominent user of Twitter decided to start taking money without disclosing it. That would be a real ethics violation.

Maybe I’m splitting hairs here. Either way, I see the commercialization of Twitter and services like it as inevitable. What do you guys think?

Via the Scobleizer.

Of India’s estimated 1.2 million bloggers, about 100,000 blog from their cellular phones some or all of the time. That number is estimated to be growing, and because of that Times of India is reaching out to the MoBloggers or m-bloggers as they call them in India.

The goal here is for them to become a blogging portal in the same way that MySpace is a “blogging portal.” Let’s hope they have cleaner code and a better UI.

Senator “Series of Tubes” Stevens (R-AK) has called for a Federal ban on Wikipedia and other interactive Web tools in schools, libraries and other places that receive Federal financial support and provide public access to the Web.

Apart from the obvious stupidity that Sen. Stevens has when it comes to all things Web, there’s another reason why this bill really scares me. It will further exacerbate the digital divide between those who can afford high-speed access at home and those who cannot.

After all, publicly funded Web access is what allows homeless bloggers like Crystal Evans to blog about their experiences and draw awareness to the problem of homelessness.

Now, everyone knows that school kids rely way too much on WikiPedia and other online sources for school projects. The plethora of searchable content on the Web makes fact-finding for any assignment unbelievably easy to do. And yes, there is the problem of online predators.

To use a Brobackian analogy, what Senator Stevens is proposing is kind of like banning airplanes because they crash once in a very great while. Yes, the Web can be a dangerous place for kids. But so can playgrounds, swimming pools and amusement parks. You don’t see Federal bans on those, do you?

I don’t normally make a practice of espousing politically related opinions on this blog. But in this case, I thought it was pertinent to our business audience as well. Why? Because your core constituencies read your company’s blog from the public library. Your customers network socially and spread information about your products within and between their groups of friends during school breaks. Shutting down public access to all parts of the Web would keep your fan base from spreading the word about you.