Buzz Bruggeman sent me this info a few days ago. Collective Intellect has closed another round of financing this time worth $6.6M. Their total take so far is $11.2M. The bulk of the services they provide are social media tracking and sentiment analysis.

An interesting note from this article is that it appears their initial foray into sentiment analysis was to provide investor-related analysis services to Wall Street. That idea seems to have been eclipsed by the idea of doing brand monitoring.

Despite the fact that this arena is viewed as a highly attractive one to investors, we have purposely eschewed the notion of pursuing VC funding for Sentimine. It seems to us that the pressure to monetize quickly/prematurely and the risk of commoditization of sentiment puts those with a high level of capitalization in a less competitive position.

I often joke that we need to do a press release touting how we’ve secured $147.50 in our third round of financing for our service.

Monitoring blogger sentiment is critical to journalists according to a report cited by JakeMcKee today. Seems like Sentimine, our new platform for aggregating and tracking blogger sentiment may have a role beyond brand monitoring. It might also serve as a useful tool to serve journalistic endeavors.

I’ve been reading Actionable Web Analytics: Using Data to Make Smarter Business Decisions by Shane Atchison and Jason Burby. Shane (co-founder of ZAAZ) wrote a post for ClickZ back in March of 2007 claiming that sentiment is the “next great analytics frontier.” Seems to me that if companies and now journalists are tracking blogger sentiment, we may be onto something…

I know a lot of people who are reluctant to start blogging because they feel like they’ll have a hard time coming up with stuff to blog about. And they’re right that coming up with the right stuff to blog about is one of the more daunting tasks you face if you’re aiming to blog regularly.

The first great solution, which I recommend, you can find at Copyblogger here.

Fortunately, there’s a loophole for this problem. You can write about the same stuff more than once.

It turns out that repetition is a great tool for teaching and persuasion. If you’re trying to get an idea through people’s heads, it’s actually a good strategy to approach the issue for four hundred different angles. I can’t count the number of times that we’ve blogged about how a blog should be your business homepage.

The point is this: repetition is a teaching strategy. As long as you’re not simply re-posting something you wrote before, re-hashing the same subject is fair game.

I know that blogging can often take more time than you expect. I sat down to write this post half an hour ago, and I’m just now starting to type. Who knows what time it will be when I’m actually done writing it.

Unfortunately, successful blogging often requires a commitment to consistency that can seem daunting. Fear not - there are strategies for rolling activities that you do on a daily basis into good, useful blog posts with a minimum of effort.

Del.icio.us

If you use del.cio.us to tag interesting posts or pages on the ‘net, you can also use it to automatically generate a digest post at the end of each day.

You can find instructions on how to set up your blog by plugging your username into the following URL:

https://secure.del.icio.us/settings/USERNAME/blogging/posting

As long as you bookmark at least one item with del.icio.us each day, you’re guaranteed to have a post on your blog. Even better, if you’re bookmarking interesting things (and why wouldn’t you be?), you’ll be giving your readers a great set of recommendations.

Twitter

If you’re not on Twitter, you should be. It’s the new Facebook.

Twitter’s API is awesome, flexible, and completely malleable. It also gave birth to Twitter Tools, which is an awesome plugin for anyone using WordPress (and why wouldn’t you be?) that lets you import a digest of the day’s tweets.

So unless you go a day without tweeting OR tagging anything in del.icio.us, that makes two posts a day without even opening your posting window.

A side effect of having a plethora of cool web services built by VC-backed entrepreneurs is that they all need to find an exit.

In recent times, that’s meant that companies get acquired as opposed to IPOs.

Check out Fred Wilson’s blog post today on finding new exit strategies.

I think it’s a good point that these services tend to languish under the ownership of large companies. It would be cool to find a new way to maintain high levels of innovation and still give investors and entrepreneurs the incentives to keep building them.

Everyone knows that Web 2.0 technologies have permanently shaken up the practice of Search Engine Optimization. But when people discuss the confluence of Web 2.0 and SEO, they’re usually talking about blogging. After all, we all know that search engines love blogs because they’re dynamic, link to each other frequently and have well-structured code. Blogs usually beat metatagging and link exchanges on a static website.

But what about Facebook applications? Until recently, search engines weren’t indexing them. But according to Justin Smith of Inside Facebook:

Facebook recently enabled developers to serve XML sitemaps off the apps.facebook.com. Sitemaps are used by webmasters to notify search engines of updates to pages and page structure, and generally are a worthwhile exercise in any SEO strategy. Since apps are served from apps.facebook.com, developers get to ride on the back of Facebook’s PageRank - potentially a big leg up on regular web apps.

As of this writing, the domain www.facebook.com has a Google PageRank of 8. It’s entirely possible that a well-optimized application page could be indexed by Google as being more relevant than a company’s own website. An inbound link from an application page could also make your site more relevant.

If you’re attempting to make the case for developing a Facebook applicatio to reach your audience, don’t forget to mention the SEO benefit to your boss.

I’ve put in many hours this past week surfing for posts, articles, and papers covering the sentiment analysis space. We’re preparing to give several presentations focusing on Sentimine, our sentiment analysis service, so I’m assimilating the latest info.

One of the more interesting pages just landed in my browser.

A paper by Veljko Fotak, a doctoral student at the University of Oklahoma’s Price College of Business, shows a correlation between blog stock recommendations and equity prices. This implies that closely following financial bloggers who are bullish (or bearish) on specific equities may give investors an edge.

We are currently steering Sentimine toward brand monitoring uses at this point, but the financial applications may be a logical move down the road.

Seth Godin, as he so frequently does, has put his finger on a really important concept: the details make the difference.

The facts:
Too many choices.
Too little time.

The response:
Quick decisions based on the smallest scraps of data.

It’s amazing how the little things make such a big impact on our decisions. When a reader first lands on your site, they are going to see a lot of things that help them fit it into some kind of category.

For me, sites fall into one of these groupings:

1. Personal Blogs
2. Media Blogs
3. Company Blogs
4. News Sites
5. Forums
6. Services/Social Utilities
7. Not interested

And you’d be surprised at how quickly I decide which category a new site falls into its place.

Google ads at the top of the page? Media blog.

Forums are easy.

Custom banner image? Personal blog.

Content not obvious/above the fold? Not interested.

When you’re building your blog, pay attention to the grammar that you’re using. Make sure your site advertises itself as what it is. That will help you gather the right audience.

This big long post on Searchblog requires some chewing. I’m going to take my first bite in public.

If I were to take what Battelle is saying and massively simplify it, it would looks something like this:

Consumer brands love to advertise around media brands that generate a lot of enthusiasm and dedication from their readers. Combine this with the fact that the print advertising industry is extremely mature (there is a formula in place that more or less works), and you realize why magazines can charge a crapload for a full page spread.

And the online equivalent of those magazines are…drumroll please…blogs! Or, in many cases, media sites built on blogging technology and an ethos that more readily matches the blogger than the mainstream media outlet.

The trick to print advertising, it seems, is that it exists in a format that has a lot better chance of connecting with the reader than advertising online. And Battelle rightly reminds us that online media is still extremely young, and we’re likely to see plenty of permutations of business models in the next few years that we haven’t even thought of yet.

If Battelle is correct in predicting the rise of online media brands, and I think he probably is, then there are going to be a lot of opportunities in this space going forward. What I want to know is how much “old media” brands will catch on and run with it, and how much of the space is going to go to newer, different media outlets like BoingBoing.

Infamous celebublogger Perez Hilton posted yesterday on his blog that there’s a reason why he hasn’t written about Leona Lewis — one of his favorite artists — in a while.

It’s because he’s being sued by her label, Sony BMG and its subsidiaries Jive and Zomba for posting widely distributed songs that were being attributed to Britney Spears. It turns out that the offending .mp3s were tracks that didn’t make it onto Spears’ newest album.

In Hilton’s words:

Sony BMG, and their labels Zomba and Jive, are suing us for streaming several songs that turned out to be by Britney Spears.

When these songs first leaked, there was a lot of doubt as to whether they were Britney or a fake. Plus, we never made any music downloadable.

Every time we saw a take-down notice from the R.I.A.A., we complied immediately. By the way, no one at Sony BMG ever contacted us about Britney.

Also, every song we posted - not knowing if it was or wasn’t an authentic Spears song - had already been all over the internet and fansites, yet PerezHilton.com is the only entity being sued by Sony BMG.

He lists a number of other talented people that he no longer covers, including my all-time favorite singer Christina Aguilera. He asked himself:

Because Zomba, which is owned by Sony BMG, is suing us and we had a lightbulb go off recently: we can’t support any artist signed to Sony BMG.

Why should we help the company suing us make money???? Especially when their lawsuit is personal!

The record industry has been notoriously backward when it comes to the Web. Their behavior towards Hilton has been no exception. It doesn’t matter much whether the gang at Sony BMG has a legitimate case against Hilton, it’s not in their long-term best interests to sue him.

Hilton may be reviled by many, but his coverage has helped to rocket some musicians from obscurity into the national spotlight. Musicians crave coverage on his site. A rave from him drives countless iTunes downloads.

If Hilton refuses to cover any artist signed to Sony BMG, you can expect that other artists will get the spotlight. That means lost revenues and lost opportunities. It would have been better to just send him a takedown notice and let the whole thing go away quietly.

Everyone knows what the holy grail of blogging is. You get 100,000 daily pageviews for writing three quick posts, and then you have your chauffeur drive you to the bank to deposit your ad revenue.

Everyone is also slowly realizing that this will only ever happen to Cory Doctorow.

The real question is this: for the average blogger, what are the revenue systems available, and how well do they work?

I recently had a chance to talk with Jeff Sable from Chitika, a blogger-centric ad network, and with Gail Bjork, owner of Digital Camera Help, which serves both Adsense and Chitika ads.

Here’s what they had to say about Chitika’s ad offerings, and how effective they were in comparison to other options.

With Jeff Sable from Chitika

BBS: According to your site, Chitika ads are “designed exclusively” for bloggers. How are they different from other CPC solutions?

Jeff: There are a couple of aspects of our ads that have allowed bloggers, as well as other types of publishers, to improve the content of their web sites while making great money. First, our ads feature targeted products. This means the blogger or publisher can focus on writing great and interesting content and Chitika’s technology will automatically serve a relevant product-centric ad to the end user who is reading the content. Second, our ads are designed to complement a web site and “fit” into the site without adversely affecting the relationship with the reader. Because of the combination of these particular attributes and other features of Chitika ads, bloggers in particular have found Chitika ads to excellent and Chitika to be a great partner as they build their businesses.


 [click to continue...]

One of the things about advertising on the internet is that it seems to blend more and more with marketing and with content.

Good, relevant advertising is content.

I was reading I forget what earlier today and I ran across an AmEx ad that was so awesome I took a screenshot of it, not that a screenshot will really convey the value:

What are you looking at? This is a screenshot of an interactive video display. If I clicked on any of the thumbnails I got about a minute and a half of video with Seth Godin moderating a discussion between Jimmy Wales and Sean Parker.

Awesome. I watched each video, and they were all interesting.

The point is this: AmEx might as well have written a blog post with some YouTube videos in it. I got the same value, and that was clearly an advertisement.

Good for AmEx, for using ad space well.

Good for you for blogging about your business, because blogging is a lot cheaper.

The team over at 24/7 Wall Street have come up with a list of the 25 most valuable blogs (although they don’t tack a number on all of them), and topping the list is Gawker Media, meaning the complete blog network.

How does the valuation break down? Here’s the blurb:

If the [Gawker] sites generate one-and a-half page views per unique visitor and the total CPM value of the multiple advertisers on each page is $20, Gawker is an $11 million business which is still growing quickly. The company does not appear to be staff-heavy, so it is imaginable that the margins on the business are 50%. Would the business be worth 15x revenue or 30x operating profits? Could be.

As far as the math goes, I’ve seen worse attempts at breaking it down. The list tails off at just under a million dollars for Talking Points Memo.

I’m sure they missed several big blogs, and I’m sure they’ve got many of them pegged pretty far from what price they’d actually fetch, but it does underline the fact that blogs are still working as media properties, even if they’re out of the spotlight at the moment. They’re drawing revenue, and if they were for sale, they’d probably be fetching good prices.

Many of you probably spotted this post on Gawker last week about the hypocritical “pay-me” blogosphere. A survey recently conducted by APCO on the “state of blog relations,” apparently suggested that bloggers are asking for a little palm grease from the PR industry.

I wonder if that was intentional.

This survey was distributed to bloggers and PR people in order to compare the responses from each group. Let’s look at the question that evokes that response. According to Gawker:

And the biggest disconnect of all didn’t really make the bloggers look like the righteous bunch. 96% of flacks disagreed with this statement: “It is okay to compensate bloggers for writing about my clients, but it is not up to me to tell them to disclose the payment.”

But almost half of bloggers agreed. They want to get paid, yo!

That suggests to me that the question on the survey looked something like this:

Do you agree or disagree with the following statement:

It is okay to compensate bloggers for writing about my clients, but it is not up to me to tell them to disclose the payment.

I smell confounding variables. That is a two-part statement, and I could choose to agree or disagree to either part, neither part, both parts, who knows. A better survey would have broken them out:

Do you agree or disagree with the following statments:

1. It is okay to compensate bloggers for writing about my clients

2. It is not up to me to tell bloggers to disclose the payment

I suspect that most PR people thought to themselves “well, I’m OK with paying bloggers, I guess, but if I pay them I’d better tell them to disclose the payment.” So they marked disagree.

Similarly, most bloggers probably thought to themselves “I don’t mind getting paid every now and then, but damnit it’s on my terms, it’s my blog, and I’ll decide when, where, and how to make a full disclosure.” So they marked agree.

Are there some bloggers who are out there to make some cash by being dishonest? Of course. Does this survey prove that “some bloggers” is 50% of the blogosphere? Hardly.

As Mark Twain once said, “facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable.”

1. Your tagline is “just another wordpress weblog”

2. You’re on Blogspot

3. Your About page says “This is an example page”

4. You’re using the default template

5. You’re using a theme with the word “AdSense” in its name

6. Your permalinks end in numbers, like “?p=847″

7. Your posts end with “[souce: Engadget ]” or “Read original article”

8. Your readers get Carpal Tunnel from trying to scroll past the ads

9. Your posts are authored by “x9872ldy7d0-3″

10. You’re using a domain that ends with .info

Feel free to add yours in the comments…

Last week our friend Buzz Bruggeman pointed us to the New York Times article about being a “blogging star,” including a run-down of advice from popular bloggers like Mark Cuban and Xeni Jardin.

It reminds me of Calacanis‘ training video on how to become an A-list blogger in 30 days.

The Times articles is well worth a read even if blogging stardom isn’t what you’re after. There’s good, solid advice for everyone:

The hurdle that stops many would-be bloggers is fear of clicking the “Publish” button. Xeni Jardin, who juggles blogging at the quirky alternative-news site BoingBoing.net with a career as a freelance journalist for NPR, Wired magazine and others, resists the urge to polish her blog prose the way she would a radio script.

If you glanced at Techmeme this afternoon, you’ve probably noticed that fully half of the screen is devoted to Arrington’s rant about the VC money pouring into the blogosphere.

Most of the discussion is about who would make the dream team?, or, is Arrington just trying to rattle the boat?, or even making a bid for inclusion.

But what does this mean for business bloggers?

Money pouring into the blogosphere

This is going to sound similar to my answer to the next part, but here goes: 90% of all business bloggers will not be significantly affected. VC money is for media companies who aim to make their money by producing blog content.

You are blogging to create a connection with your customers, and to build a relationship that leads to trust, friendship, and hopefully, patronage.

The number of venture-backed, advertising-based media properties on the internet is not going to make much of a difference in your blogging. The same was that, if you’ll buy the analogy, a few new newspapers wouldn’t affect the way you go about conducting a monthly luncheon.

Should you network multiple blogs?

Again, wrong field. Don’t let Arrington’s call for uber-networkness tempt you to explore dividing your blogs.

Mike’s concept is interesting in itself: do blogs really offer the same product that the standard news media offers? I think the answer is a resounding no. I’ll let Paid Content speak to issues of factual accuracy.

The media-producing blogs will probably roll up in some way or another. Blog networks invariably seem to do better as a business than single blogs do. But again: don’t be tempted to follow that model if you’re blogging for a business.

Why would your customers want to see multiple blogs? The advantages of a network apply to companies trying to develop a media property: larger footprint, more ad inventory, diverse but niche topicality.

For the typical business blogger, these do not fall high on the list.

As always, Darren Rowse at ProBlogger has great advice for people who struggle with regularly finding interesting things to blog about.

All too often, a potential blogger will raise the very valid concern: “I’m worried that I’ll run out of things to blog about,” and some new media maven who has a literal hardline between their frontal lobe and the Comcast pipes running to their house will casually dismiss it: “There’s always something to write about. You’ll see.”

That’s not necessarily the case. It can be very helpful to schedule your editorial, and if you’re a blogger (or a potential blogger) who is worried about being regularly inspired, Darren’s post is well worth a read:

The first step in a journalistic system for blogging is having a plan for each month. Set up a spreadsheet, a table in a word processor, or a calendar on your desk - it doesn’t matter how you do this, but you need a monthly plan. On that plan you need to mark out the days you will definitely blog. This might be every day, just the weekdays, the weekends, every Wednesday - whatever works for you and your audience. Now you have a visual plan of what’s needed you can start filling in the blanks.

Essentially, he advocates mapping out, by month, the days you will blog and the topics that you will blog about.

If that sounds like too much work for you (it sounds like a lot of work to me, and as a blogger I am both inherently lazy and constantly wearing a bathrobe), you might try a more “intermediate” system like the one I like to use. It works especially well if you have a blog that covers a particular beat or topic:

1. Create a folder on your hard drive.
2. Whenever you run across a link that fits your topic, ask one question: do you need to blog about it immediately for it to be relevant?
3. If the answer is yes, blog about it.
4. If the answer is no, add it to the folder.
5. If you think of an idea not tied to a link, create a text file, put in the headline, and save it to the folder.
6. Whenever you do not know what to blog about, refer to your folder.

I have more data points relevant to yesterday’s post. Bottom line: Yes, you need non-trivial human involvement to go beyond 80 percent accuracy with unstructured content like blogs. Text-mining vendors claim that for many projects 80 percent is perfectly adequate though. Based on what I’m reading, I think there is likely a market for a process like ours that can automate the tagging and extraction/compilation of relevant content at high (90 percent plus) accuracy levels.

After drafting yesterday’s post about mining blog sentiment I discovered a Feb 27 post on the SentimentMetrics blog which reinforced what I’d heard from other gurus in the space. The SentimentMetrics blogger, (Leon? — posts don’t list the name of the author) says:

In addition, Mark Anderson responded to my post yesterday with a comment on his own blog. Anderson clarified:

“If you are working with longitudinal data, comparing month to month for instance, or comparing different products and brands then extremely accurate sentiment reading isn’t necessary as you are really looking for differences between groups. Additionally by considering the relationship between positive and negative sentiment in trended data (they tend to be positively correlated) when the correlation changes, in other words in one month for one brand you might see that negative sentiment increases while positive decreases, this signals a possible ‘event’ is occurring which needs to be drilled down into for further investigation.

However, for some of our clients in the past (such as Unilever), an extremely accurate level of sentiment was desired. Our methodology (AA-TextSM) relies on triangulation for validation, and we have sentiment accuracy in high nineties in most cases when applying this technique. Because most of our projects are ad-hoc in nature, the human factor is very important, so Anderson Analytics, more so than those companies focusing solely on a large volume of blog posts usually invest the time in perfecting custom dictionaries and understanding the special relationships between words in each project.

As you mention, many survey open ends are rather structured. On the other hand many are not. For instance if you ask a hotel guest to rate their overall satisfaction on a 10 point scale, then ask, why did you give this rating in an open ended question, you will get anything but structured answers. Our methodology has been used on other types of data as well though (call center logs, emails etc.).”

It sounds like the AA-TextSM system requires human involvement to customize the algorithmic process. In that last paragraph, Anderson attests that surveys can contain unstructured data. It seems to me that without getting humans involved (like to create custom dictionaries) you fade back to 80 percent accuracy when analyzing those unstructured portions.