... described as the companion blog to Flickr, almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world.

Media Guerilla points out:

The Flickr blog looks like the company's primary marketing tool, which is interesting. With a sound blogging strategy in place, young companies can achieve so much more exposure than previously possible.

You don't say. :-)

And no, I am not talking blogs like the one maintained by tBBC's friend Brian Micklethwait. I mean teachers using blogs to get students writing and asking questions.

For teachers, blogs are attractive because they require little effort to maintain, unlike more elaborate classroom websites, which were once heralded as a boon for teaching. Helped by templates found at sites like tblog.com and movabletype.org, teachers can build a blog or start a new topic in an existing blog by simply typing text into a box and clicking a button.

Such ease of use is the primary reason that Peter Grunwald, an education consultant, predicts that blogs will eventually become a more successful teaching tool than websites.

I remember the huge amount of money that my school district spent on a fibre optics lab when I was a senior in high school, primarily because it would allow for real-time conferencing via video link with people on the other side of the county. County, not country. County, not world. That was revolutionary in 1995 - with the price tag that went with it. Meanwhile:

Some social studies classes at Hunterdon Central Regional High School in Flemington, for instance, are using a blog to study the Holocaust with high school students in Krakow, Poland.

...And they ripped down my high school, including that expensive fibre optics lab, last summer.

Yes, I was definitely born too early. But it's nice to see that a school district from my home state is very much hip to blogs:

The Little Miami School District near Cincinnati plans to require teachers to maintain blogs for their classes once they are trained on the technology, which should be completed some time in the 2005-6 school year.

I often think of how school - especially report-writing - would have been different if we had had Google when I was a kid. Sod Google: What would it have been like if we had had blogs?

It's all about our hungry customers, says the mastermind behind Cracked Cauldron Spillings, a bakery that a mother-daughter team is breaking their backs to open in Oklahoma in five weeks. And they are using a blog to tell the story of where they are, how they got there, and where they are going.

It makes for fascinating, affinity-building reading. Stuffed full of great content, with stories of sourcing cheese from a local dairy farmer, naming their sourdough starters and the difficulties of funding a new business, the CCS blog is an addictive read. In fact, these two are canny enough to understand precisely the importance of storytelling.

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I spoke to Andrew Heavens from The Times (London) last week about corporate blogging and CEO blogs in particular. The resulting article is here - unfortunately, The Times restricts access when it comes to foreign web users (how annoying!), so here is an excerpt and what I had to say to Andrew.

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A warning to advertisers and marketers was issued by Intelliseek CMO Pete Blackshaw who points out that marketers cannot afford to ignore weblogs that have become a powerful influence on the brands.If a marketer makes a claim, they had better well be able to back it up one hundred percent otherwise it will be shredded to pieces by "copy-cops at your doorstep".

Can a wireless provider spending millions to tout customer service escape scrutiny when bloggers can readily provide links to thousands of disgruntled consumers providing evidence to the contrary? Can a pharma company afford to gloss over the fine print in advertisement when bloggers elect to super-size the untold message? Can an auto manufacturer pushing a "safety" message on TV risk having consumers type their brand into Google and have it punch back a loaded shelf space of contradictory messages by consumers?

Bloggers are now serving as fact-checking, credibility-screening, gap-filling counterweights to traditional media.

Well, yes, it's fact-checking-your-ass time!

Hm, Mr Blackshaw, for a man who seems to get the power of the blogs, he sure uses some very out-dated terms, such as consumer.

Adrants concludes:

Marketing has forever become a conversation - a dialog between marketer and consumer. With weblogs, it's been proven consumers are ready to have that dialog. It's not so clear whether marketers are ready to join that conversation.

I don't think so, but come on, prove me wrong...

Thanks to Steve Rubel, here are the highlights from iBreakfast on the Business of Blogging that took place on Wednesday 22nd September. There is so much good blog stuff and I will attempt to select only those bits that made me go 'yes' and punch the air. Brace yerselves.

Henry Copeland:

• Big advantages over traditional media (not corporations, not generalists, highly networked) - networked nature of medium means Bloggers are 10 times more productive per keystroke than traditional journalists

Stowe Boyd:

• Saw an ad on a bus shelter this morning saying “The rules have changed but the game is the same” - but now, he feels the rules are changing so much the game itself is changing too


• Blogging is so profoundly different – we will see it drive a revolution - a revolution that will upset an array of applecarts (traditional media; the core principles of marketing; how governments and other entities interact with constituencies; etc.)


• Blogging works bottom-up; as a result, organizations that want to adopt it must shift to a bottom up mode as well (important warning to those who go into blogging thinking corporate business as usual (e.g., hiring someone to ghost-blog for CEO); stories abound of people/companies being called out for mis-using blogs - 2These attempts will fail profoundly")


• "The world is made up of small markets"


• How can business apply blogging?
  
  • Use blogs to open authentic dialogues with customers (look at MS or Macromedia as great examples)
  
  
  • Burn all brochureware and let the service/product people converse directly with constituents re: plans and goals
  
  
  • Develop a community of those who use products
  
  
  • Build blog networks inside organizations to make communication more efficient (forget the org charts; let teams build from bottom up)


• The ‘old saw’ that a 'brand is a promise' is changing – now it should read: 'a brand is an invitation to become involved'

Bob Wyman:

• We are going through a fundamental shift in the way we relate to the network and the way we communicate


• This change is not blogs per se – blogs are both growing out of this shift and being driven by it


• Today the market is moving toward new patterns of accessing information: PubSub addressing "the other half of the search problem"


• He outlined retrospective vs. prospective - Need to bring prospective approach into overall toolkit of search capabilities

Ishwari Singh:

• Talked about how to use blogs to promote person or company, as well as how his organization uses blogs internally for project management / collaboraton


• Noted that blogs can draw high ranks of search engines


• Noted that instant publishing, cheap and easy software, no need for programming knowledge makes barriers to entry low


• Internally, blogs make managing communications easier for his teams
  Anecdote: his programmers need to submit daily status reports. Instead of reading them all in email, they publish internally via RSS which he reviews and can search via his RSS reader.

Told you. Marvellous stuff. We have got to start doing something like this in London. Watch this space...

I have been talking to a Big Media journalist about blogs over the last few days, and some interesting viewpoints have emerged from the conversation. We started out talking about how blogs and journalism differ from and complement one another, and ended up talking about why that is relevant to corporations and other organisations.

In journalism, you have a large number of generalists trying to produce authoritative, extremely reliable content about subjects that may be incredibly complicated. Some of them can manage it; many of them cannot. If our interests are in an educated public as a result of journalists producing the most informative and accurate reporting possible, then the tendency of many journalists to misinform - despite what may be the purest of intentions - cannot be ignored as simply "how journalism is".

This is why blogs as a PR/crisis PR tool can be so crucial to so many organisations and businesses: There are a large selection who know that they rarely, if ever, get a fair hearing in the soundbite culture. If your argument is more complicated than "4 legs good, 2 legs bad," forget it. Companies that deal in serious and complex issues - especially scientific or economic ones - usually do not fare well in mainstream media representation. If the argument cannot be summed up in simplistic terms that require only scant knowledge of the industry, then regardless of the fact that your organisation is right and the other side is shamefully misinformed (and possibly actively seeking to misinform people), you lose the debate in the public's eyes.

This is what happens when you rely on other peoples' media to disseminate your message. Especially when your message is not simplistic enough for supposedly informed journalists to grasp, let alone the audience, you do not get a proper hearing. The business case for using your own medium - a blog - that allows for rapid and widespread distribution of your message, to say what you need to say, how you need to say it, is hugely compelling. The fact that blogs allow you to work inside the news cycle makes it even better.

By the way, I can think of one example of this off the top of my head: British Gas has been raked over the coals recently for increasing prices, but I know for a fact (a trusted business associate of mine is quite close to one of the higher ups) that British Gas has been doing everything it could for the last two years to keep prices down for its customers, and have their backs against the wall on this one. But hey, that angle might take a bit more knowledge and understanding than the usual "Big company hates its customers, eats babies at shareholders' meetings" reporting, so it doesn't get told. That's not the kind of journalism we need.

And it's not the kind of journalism these corporations need. But they cannot just wait for journalism to reform itself. They need to employ their own medium, their own blog, to explain themselves and foster an understanding of where they are coming from, how they got there, and where they are going next. Relying on traditional media to act as an intermediary between your organisation and the public has never worked as companies have hoped it would - the control has always resided with one party (hint: not the party that had to do four years of j-school just to learn how to report). Companies now have a new way of circumventing that process to spread their message much more effectively than ever. As Sun Microsystems' COO Jonathan Schwartz has said:

There's no fundamental difference between giving a keynote speech in Shanghai in front of 30,000 people and doing a blog read by several million people.

There is a fundamental difference between sending out hundreds of press releases and doing a blog: People will actually read your blog. They will then most likely pass the link on to others, getting more people to read your blog.

As crisis PR firm Sitrick & Company's strapline says: If you don't tell your story, someone else will tell it for you. Instead of only having your say in media that belong to other people - and other interests - take your message to the people.

Make the most of a cutting-edge technology that allows you to reach a network that cannot be ignored.

Let the members of that network spread your message for you.

Make it easy for them.

Blog.

That is what I have written about, appropriately enough, over at the CEO Bloggers' Club.

tBBC is pleased to announce the launch of the Ideal Government blog for our clients at Kable, Europe's leading provider of publishing, research and events in the public sector. As the blurb says:

You're a web user. What do you think ideal e-enabled public services should look like?

The UK is spending a lot of money and effort computerising government. Let's get a clear idea what we want it to look like when it's done. Dream a little, and help set out the wish list. Otherwise we might end up with something we do not want.

Ideal Government will be a four-week online brainstorming session via blog, with thousands of civil servants invited to participate. Members of the public are also welcome to have their say - as commenters and, with the agreement of the Ideal Government team, as contributing authors on the blog. In the end, the best ideas (duly credited) for how e-enabled government services should work will be sent to the Prime Minister Tony Blair, as well as other key politicos, the UK government's new CIO, Ian Watmore, and efficiency review process boss, John Oughton.

It will be interesting to see how this experiment goes, and we are very happy to help Kable engage the blogosphere to get the ideas and input they are after. Best of luck, chaps!

Speaking for myself alone, I always find it quite unsettling to find my ideas accurately reflected in the Guardian:

CBS's admission that its story of George Bush's special treatment when with the Texas air national guard was deeply flawed is being seen as a key victory for the new "blogging" community of the internet against old media.

It is being seen that way because...er, it is that way.

CBS was doubly at fault. It failed to appreciate the force of the thousands of voluntary fact-checkers out there on the web (let alone trying to harness their power in advance), while also failing to interview bloggers after the event as part of an ongoing story.

No, not at fault, just behind the curve.

In fact, bloggers are often people very expert in their own fields who attract other experts when issues in their domain are newsworthy. Stories in old media can be fact-checked instantaneously and the journalists and their newspapers held to account.

Yup.

There is no doubt that the tectonic plates of journalism are moving. There is awesome potential in the internet as a gatherer, distributor and checker of news - not least through instant delivery channels such as mobile phones. This does not mean old media will die. But it will have to adapt quickly to what has so far been an asymmetrical relationship.

Blogs have battened off newspapers and many newspapers, including the Guardian, have launched their own blogs. But most newspapers, let alone TV stations, have not embraced the blogging revolution as an essential part of the future rather than an irritant in the background. The CBS saga may prove to be the wake-up call they needed.

In in the interests of accuracy (well, I am a blogger!) it behoves me to point out that the Guardian has always displayed a readiness to recognise new tehcnologies and trends and they have been aware of the growing presence and significance of blogging for some time.

That said, this is the first mainstream media admission I have encountered that has been willing to admit that the mainstream media itself is under serious assault.

A quote on the network effect of blogs, in relation to how blogs beat Big Media at CBS, from Frederick Turner:

Instapundit was getting over 400,000 page views a day at the height of the controversy; if one multiplies that by the number of other major blogs, the days the storm raged, and the amplification of word of mouth and talk radio, one is talking about near-total penetration of the US population...

What we saw was an extraordinary example of what chaos and complexity theorists call spontaneous self-organization. Out of a highly communicative but apparently chaotic medium an ordered, sensitively responsive, but robust order emerges, acting as an organism of its own. Suddenly a perfectly-matched team of specialists had self-assembled out of the ether.

Those specialists and enthusiasts are already out there, and they are growing by thousands each day. What that means for CBS and Big Media is bad news: There is a huge network of informed members of the public who will not take their reports as gospel - and whose network is powerful enough to bring the truth to the rest of the world's attention. It's no wonder that some mainstream journalists do not welcome that network with open arms; it means more work for them.

What that means for businesses is much better news: The blogosphere, that network of blogs at 4 million+ and 15,000 new ones each day (source: Technorati.com), does not consist of just political blogs or just kitty blogs or just food blogs or just travel blogs or just fashion blogs or just wine blogs or just car blogs or just shopping blogs or just makeup blogs. The blogosphere contains all of those sorts of blogs and bloggers, and much more besides - some of it so obscure that one is forced to wonder, Who writes this stuff? More to the point, who reads it? Frankly, that thought crossed my mind when I saw the air conditioning contractors' blog.

Who reads and writes that stuff? People who are into those kinds of things. I run my own multi-contributor food blog as a hobby - with food journos, authors, professional chefs and amateur home cooks alike writing for it - of which most people can see the appeal. But when I reveal that I also write for a transport blog, I get some funny looks. Who cares about cars and trains and stuff?, I can see them thinking. (Also, possibly: Man, what a geek she is.) But there are plenty of companies who want to be talking to people who are into cars and trains - like, say, automobile companies and train operators. As I have said before:

Within the wider network, within the wider blogosphere, there is a more specific (though not wholly identifiable) network, a more niche curve in the blogosphere, where your company should probably be engaged.

If the Dan Rather affair doesn't demonstrate how quickly the blogosphere can spread a message, nothing does. I wonder what the business case might be for not tapping into that network to spread your message? Damned if I can think of one.

I'm gearing up for a combined work and pleasure trip to Paris, and it has only just struck me that my first thought when I'd booked my tickets was, let's see what blogs have to say about where I should go in Paris. (And I am sure that I would have thought that prior to buying my tickets, if I hadn't had an expert booker do that for me, for free - all online, of course.)

I have been to Paris before, but I would never assume I know all the best places - hardly. While there, I will be seeing my dear friend Clotilde, she of the world famous food blog, and my travel companion is someone who is half-French, owns a flat in Paris and has spent a fair amount of time there himself. Still, as he and I have pored over the information the blogosphere has offered up to us about the city, even he has discovered things about Paris that he did not know.

First stop (after blogger Clotilde, of course): Fodors' travel blog search results for Paris. Second stop: syndicated writer Amy Alkon's blog - Amy and I have a mutual friend in journalist blogger Catherine Seipp, and I know through Cathy that Amy is frequently in Paris. Amy had a huge repository of information on hotels, restaurants, where to get free WiFi (La Coupole, the café section, Montparnasse), and lots of other great stuff.

I don't know if I can cram everything into this trip, but being a short train ride away from Paris, I won't necessarily have to - but my travel will definitely be more frequent now that I know just how much there is that I must see and do there. The travel companies that recognise the benefits of offering this kind of information - permalinked, hooked into the network we know as the blogosphere, and truly engaged with their customers and potential customers - will have a huge edge on their competitors.

In light of Dan Rather's apology and admission that he and CBS news screwed up - an apology and admission that would not have been forthcoming if not for the blogosphere - I think it is time to revisit two recent comments on this whole deal. The first, from Tech Central Station's thoughtful piece entitled Hayek Smiled: Why Blogging Works, reads:

In 1997 CBS falsely reported that a US Customs agent was corrupt. It took three years of investigation to clear his name. It won't take a month to get to the bottom of this one.

The same article points out the flaw in the big argument of traditionalists against the blogosphere's ability to fact-check the asses of big media, which basically posits that because no one "controls" it, no one can control it from disseminating the most outrageous rumors and conspiracies:

This traditional criticism of the internet has now been aimed at the blogosphere and is embodied by big journalists like Jonathan Klein who, while defending the CBS story to The Weekly Standard remarked, "You couldn't have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of check and balances [at '60 Minutes'] and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing." Klein misses the point that it's not whether you can trust some guy in his pajamas, but whether you can trust a spontaneous system of thousands of guys in their pajamas trading information and imparting small, sometimes deceivingly insignificant, bits of information.

What we've seen in the last few years is a gradual refutation of the Klein myth, that "Big Media" is more capable of sorting the truth than are 3,872,561 blogs. Slowly but surely a loose network of bloggers is sometimes beating the designed, controlled systems of checks and balances at deciphering what's true and what's not.

Author and journalist Virginia Postrel weighed in on September 13th (and my, doesn't that seem ages ago in blog time?), saying that bloggers are editors:

What CBS has learned over the past few days is that its editors aren't good enough. Nowadays when stories go public, they get checked by after-the-fact editors with expertise in every field imaginable, and that checking gets published to the entire world via the blogosphere...That those memos managed to get on national television without a caveat about their reliability suggests a complete breakdown of both journalistic instincts and journalistic process.

You shouldn't need bloggers to catch errors like this. But it helps.

Talking to a friend of mine tonight about this, he said to me, "Yeah, that's one really good thing about the internet. Once a site is big enough, it has experts in almost anything among its readers." But that's not the really good thing about blogs: The really good thing about blogs is the blogosphere. A site need not be published from some monolith in order to have knowledge and competence behind it - or reading and commenting on it. I mean, heck, there are even blogs for sheet metal enthusiasts out there, now. That network of knowledge, connected more powerfully and widely than ever, is the big deal when it comes to blogs. Sure, the ability to self-publish is revolutionary, but it's what can be done via that technology that is really world-changing. The node is not stronger than the network.

There is much rejoicing as CEO bloggers club is taking to the streets... Alright, but the number of the members is growing. I add my bit in my copious free time...

It seems that the term 'Corporate Responsibility' is not just a fashionable buzzword. Some people are taking it very seriously indeed:

With the issue of reputation becoming more of a fixture for corporate Australia, law firm Holding Redlich is Australia's first to set up a corporate social responsibility (CSR) service.

The firm says the service will help companies adopt practices that meet the demands of regulators, industry bodies and stakeholders, and comply with the array of international principles around CSR.

These principles include the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, conventions and recommendations of the International Labor Organisation, the Stockholm and Rio Environment Declarations, the Kyoto Protocol and the International Covenants on Civil and Political Rights and Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

May I just say that I do not envy the task of the person or persons who have taken on the task of wading through that lot!

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A few years ago, I worked as the website editor for a company whose customers were HR departments and their expat employees. One of the value-added aspects of our offering was regularly updated, relevant news on the issues that mattered to HR professionals and to globally mobile workers.

In order to get hold of this news, our company had a monthly subscription to Lexis-Nexis. We started off with a discounted rate of £1200 per month, and after a year we were paying £2000 a month.

Now, Lexis-Nexis is a great resource for many companies - if you can take advantage of enough of its offering to justify the cost. All we were after was the latest news that was relevant to our target audiences; we had no use for the years of newspaper archives or the public records access or any of that. The management consultancy and marketing 'experts' who were calling the shots thought that this was good value for money.

I'll leave that discussion for another time, but last night it struck me just how much money we would have saved if the blogosphere had been thriving back then. I would have been spoilt for choice when it came to news for either of those audiences. Is Lexis-Nexis happy about the proliferation of blogs and the boom in that vast network of free news and other resources, or are they taking a music industry-style If the world is allowed to change, we might also be forced to change with it - and that we cannot have approach? I don't know, but if enough companies have caught on to the fact that there are better uses for their budgets than buying news from Lexis-Nexis, I will be watching the evolution of their business very closely over the coming years. (Yes, years: They offer enough value that I think they're in for the long haul. But I anticipate some kind of business model alteration in response to recent developments.)

Pontificating about blogs in corporations today on the CEO bloggers club...

Former Friendster engineer Joyce Park has told the story of her sacking to technology title Red Herring. Rick Bruner asks:

I still haven't heard Friendster's side of the story. Have they told it somewhere that I've overlooked?

Friendster reminds me of an infant who can't figure out that, just because he can't see the jack-in-the-box once it's stuffed inside and the lid is closed, it doesn't mean that the jack-in-the-box ceases to exist. The lid was blown off this story long ago, and Friendster is still pretending that the jack-in-the-box isn't there. For a company whose business is social networking, Friendster has a very tenuous grip - at best - on the fact that not showing up for the conversation does not mean that people aren't talking about you.

Ahem:

...I propose that all war memorials to the dead are knocked down and replaced with war memorials to the survivors (the people who did their job PROPERLY), not to all the idiots who couldn't even parachute into a barrage of gunfire and manage to carry on living. After all it was not dead men who liberated Paris or shot Zulus (in that equal tussle between guns and spears) or captured Saddam Husseins. The people who were dead were no use at all (I would almost go as far to call them lazy, but certainly unhelpful) and should be ignored and forgotten...And when they're being thrown into their graves, [there] shouldn't be ceremony or flags or 21 gun salutes. No, a man should just sarcastically shout, "Oh thanks a lot," and then add "For nothing" in case anyone hasn't picked up on the sarcasm. And then punch their grieving widows in the face for good measure. And let that be an end to the whole embarrassing episode.

So says British playwright, author and comedian Richard Herring on his blog, Warming Up. Yes, it is meant to be funny. No, do not send us complaint comments or emails if you do not personally find it funny.

I talked to Richard about his blog recently, and he tells me that as well as the increase in traffic to his site (it has nearly doubled, with the one million mark looming after less than two years online), his blog readers have helped him to raise more than Ł8000 ($14,000+ US) for charity. On a really cool note, more than 8000 of his blog's readers around the world contributed to his book and one man show entitled - and let us clear our throats here again - Talking Cock. Richard adds to that:

Obviously a lot of those people would have come to the shows or bought the book.

Summing up his experiences with and feelings about his blog, Richard says:

[I]t has helped keep a dedicated army of fans interested in what I’m up to. And thus has some promotional benefits, though that’s not why I really started it....Generally I think it makes great sense to do a blog from my point of view. It keeps fans in touch with me and what I’m doing...[P]eople seem to love reading personal stuff...[P]eople do seem to get well into these things.

That they do.

In addition to keeping existing fans abreast of what Richard is doing, his blog has also helped him to create new fans. And just check out how many blogs are linking to his. For a British comedian whose humour is far from the mainstream, that is saying something. In an age of unfunny jokes forwarded to us from our older family members for whom the novelty of email has not worn off, a truly hilarious comedian engaging people via a blog is giving a better name to the concept of humour on the internet. If I could only get Chris Rock (warning: audio plays upon opening) to dump the slick-but-good-for-absolutely-nothing Flash site and start blogging, then Richard Herring's blog might have some competition in the online comedy stakes.

We had dinner here last night with a familiar face at tBBC HQ: Alan Moore, who blogs for his company, SMLXL.

As always, the food was fantastic, the wine bountiful, and the conversation stimulating. I was slightly cheered when, after Alan pointed out that the word blog is kind of funny and hard to take seriously in a business context, I responded:

Yeah, well, that's what they used to say about the word Google. Now? Not so much.

I hope that Alan will elaborate on the SMLXL blog on the idea, which he spoke about at length last night, that branding professionals need to move away from the touchy-feely, brands-are-an-opportunity-for-a-social-love-in attitude and address more concretely the financial issues that surround branding. I have a feeling that the brand bloggers in our midst may have a thing or two to say about that one.

One thing we talked about was how certain industries are dying on their feet - and doing absolutely nothing about it. Why? Because they don't do change - and no, I don't mean handing out pennies and nickels. For instance, just how many times does the music industry have to get pounded by the dynamic changes that are affecting its bottom line before the guys in charge decide to stop trying to halt progress and start figuring out how to adapt to an evolving world? As Alan put it, they need to realise that the choice is to hold on as long as they can, doing what they have always done, or do something clever and live to fight another day.

For some companies - or entire industries - this means taking an honest, hard look at what's broken. This isn't an activity that most will be eager to undertake, especially if it could mean the culling of high-paid executives at the top - which probably has more than a little to do with the fact that these evaluations aren't done as often as they should be.

What more than a few may find is that the kid who delivers the mail or makes the tea actually has more value to offer them than the MBA-possessing bullshitter with the corner office, company car and expense account. In a similar way, giving the guys on the bottom a voice, especially in a top-heavy organisation, can reveal value in a company that the powers that be never knew they had. Obviously blogs - internal and/or external - are an extremely good way of ripping the top off a company and exposing where the real value lies. And I daresay that the companies that have the courage to do this will be much better off than the ones who are afraid to peel back the lid and find nothing but rot and hot air. But how long will the latter type of company last anyway?

This may be older news but relevant nevertheless. The Daily News reports that the movie "Garden State" is taking on cult-like status among young adults in part because of the role Zach Braff's blog played in marketing the film.

I had a look at the blog several days ago and the comments section is usually in the 1,000 plus figure. Usually comments are not an indication of much, however, in this case it shows that Zach Braff has managed to engage not only his audience but created a strong community around his blog.

The gimmick is smart PR, allowing Braff to continue the conversation he started in the movie and drawing fans back for another look.

And take it from a PR professional:

Remember how the Blair Witch Project took off like wildfire a few years back? It was a seminal event for online viral marketing. Well, blogs are making this easier and engaging for both the directors and the audiences. Way to go Zach. Show the big boys how it's done.

This is what I am hoping too. I am in the process of explaining to a film producer how blogs could help him promote his movie. I do not think he knows what a blog is although in the last few days I sent him links to the Garden State, QT diary (whether real or fake, it is still a great example), Jersey Girl Diary and some other ones to show him what blogs are.

A blog could become the smartest and most effective way to halt (or at least complement) the spiralling cost of marketing that can swallow up huge proportion of any film budget. There is a sort of Laffer curve of revenue and marketing spend - past a certain point the marketing cost will make it virtually impossible to make profit. By the way, I did not come up with this, they did.

As for film blogs, the old value-for-value rule applies. Give the fans something interesting and they will come back for more. A production blog is a natural start. Another film producer friend of mine created an 'accidental' production blog for his film Den of Lions - I believe the original purpose was to give his crew's nearest and dearest a chance to keep up with them while filming in Hungary. The blog's audience spread well beyond those involved in the film.

I can imagine following up on the production blog with updates on post-production and news of distribution etc. There is always a story behind producing a film, usually the nerve-wracking, last-minute-problem-fixing, people exploding crisis management kind, but nevertheless, oddly satisfying once the damn film is out. Or so I've heard.

I will be trying to make the point about how blogs can help him reach his audience, Real Soon Now. Will blog what comes out of it.

Further to Adriana's post on the International CEO Bloggers' Club, I have been having some interesting conversations lately with a few blogging CEOs.

What I am hearing from these execs is that whatever benefits they imagined would come from blogging have been more than surpassed - and, in many cases, they just were not sure that any tangible benefit would come of it. As Five Across founder and CEO Glenn Reid told me:

I was unconvinced that it would be worthwhile, that no one would ever read it, so what would be the point?

...I was still not convinced that it was valuable to the business, but I type very fast, I'm a pretty good writer, and I thought: what's there to lose? I have been quite amazed by the response, I have to say. People really are reading my blog, people I've never even met - like you! - and, well, it surprises me even now.

That is all well and good, some might say, but what does that mean to the bottom line? Show us the metrics! comes the usual cry from the traditional business contingent.

Expanding your network and giving the business greater visibility and credibility isn't enough - we need to see numbers!

Glenn Reid reports that, apart from the increased traffic to the company website (which is certainly measurable), there has been another significant boon to the business as a result of the blog:

My blog delivers results comparable to our Google ad campaign in terms of delivering visitors to our site, an unexpected benefit!

Those are metrics that any cake decorator (as an IT Director friend of mine refers to marketing people) should sit up and take notice of. As Glenn put it to me:

My take-away is that you can't predict or control the network effect...

That may be scary to some people - Spend money without knowing exactly what the ROI is going to be? There's some risk there! To me, it's far from scary: It is perhaps the most exciting element of what is possible with emerging technologies like blogging and RSS. I have written here before about the unpredictably beneficial, pleasant results of this network effect, and I could write a hundred more posts about other such connections. As movie blogger Stephen Reid keeps saying:

The node is not stronger than the network.

Not every company needs a blog, but every company needs the support of a network. Some companies make the mistake of thinking that their node is strong enough to circumvent or even topple the network - just think back to AOL's 'walled garden' delusions only a few years ago. They thought that their content could supplant or compete with the entire internet.

The network that each respective company needs in order to succeed will vary. We have had conversations with enough people to know the usual objections - My company doesn't need to engage with angsty teenage bloggers! Our customers and industry peers are high-level executives in a very specialised area! - so I will utter something that should go without saying: Within the wider network, within the wider blogosphere, there is a more specific (though not wholly identifiable) network, a more niche curve in the blogosphere, where your company should probably be engaged. If the curve is currently unoccupied, be the seed that kicks it all off and watch the flora flourish.

Ignore the network at your peril. Engage it and reap the benefits.

I guess that was to be expected. First, it was techie geeks, then political obsessives and journalists, followed by 'turned' PR and marketing wonks. And now CEOs and other executive fat cats are onto the blogosphere.

The aim of this Club is to gather CEOs who believe in the blogosphere and its extraodinary potential and to offer them a place to share with other companies leaders the experimentation they are conducting thanks to weblogs. Corporate blogging, CRM, marketing, PR, internal communication, are part of the different ways blogs are being used today, but as we all know, we are only at the begining. And who is abble to say how weblogs will affect our business tomorrow?

So far, so good. There are two ideas behind this new club:

1. Creating an online resource available for every visitor who might want to learn/share how blogs could take part in a company's development.
2. Organizing bi-monthly meetings every first thursday evening of the month in Paris to meet in off line sessions.

I guess, we will have to organise them in London too. UK companies and their CEOs have some catching up to do with the bloggers across the channel, as this wiki page listing CEO blogs would suggest. Please email me at adriana at bigblog dot net, if you are an executive and blogging about your business or you know of any who do so.

Cool ringtones blog has been exposed as another marketing ploy:

Though the blog introduces Cindy Schmelky, 15, from Wayne, Penn with a picture and a quote "I love ringtones more than life", she's really just a figurehead for those articles as various members of the company's team write them, according to Ringingphone co-owner Bob Bentz.

This is the first time (to the best of my knowledge) that a ringtone company has created a blog and though it does somewhat bring to mind Dr. Pepper / 7 Up's infamous Raging Cow blog campaign - in that who's really blogging is misleading - the content is not all self-serving, but is mixed the with some interesting articles from this industry.

That a ringtone company has a blog is a great idea. But there is no need to mislead readers into thinking the blog is written by a 15 year-old, when it's not.

I can only agree with that. It is remarkable how the traditional marketing seems to prefer buzz generated by deceit and marketing ploys rather than attempt to create it by genuine engagement.

via Doc Searls

A very good overview of the difference between an interactive medium (blog) and 'interactive medium' (forum).

Commoncraft does some useful analysing focusing on Locus of Control, Authoring of New Topics, Intent, Responses, Tools, Chronology, Personal Connections, Pollution Control, Content Buckets and the future:

I believe that weblogs and message boards *are* different -- different enough to happily exist together in the same online community web site. My conclusion is that online communities will use the two resources to fill two different roles. Their ability to fill independent niches will make the subtle differences between them make more sense.

Absolutely. As I have argued before a forum is like a collective drawing:

...each participant draws his own line(s) sometimes without regard for the others' efforts. Who draws most lines wins. The result is a criss-cross of lines, overlapping shapes, in short, a mess that takes too much time to unravel to get any lasting value.

A blog is a painting that has been hung up on the wall and everyone standing around can comment on it, say how they would have done or why they like it. There is a clear hierarchy between the author of the article and the person who comments on it. No drawing of mustaches anywhere but plenty of interaction. To me this is what makes blogs so suitable for communication between companies and their audience.

There is also a very handy table to go with the comparison.

This post has made it round the blogosphere already but I still want to mark it here.

It is the presentation by blogs for living, to Reputations and its message to all businesses is:

Start reading and writing blogs today to gain a competitive advantage!

There was much juicy goodness and after much deliberation the following is what I'd 'take home' from the presentation:

• Don't overestimate the impact of blogging in the short term and underestimate it in the long term
• Blogging is another example of disintermediation cf. Travel Agents, Programmers, Dell
• Blogging not just for tech companies anymore... is the web just for tech companies?
• Blogs have a high Google rank because they are networked digital paper
• Link frequently to competitors and sources
• Connect with customers, speak in your voice (i.e. not 100% self promotion since that's not a natural voice) and have a two way conversation through links and comments; take criticism in stride

So traditional PR is dead, long live DYI PR.

One thing I have learned over the years since I emigrated to the UK from America is this: In the age of the internet, being 3000+ miles away from your family does not necessarily mean that you escape knowledge of the minutiae of their daily lives. (Just as importantly, I find that I don't want to escape the minutiae of their daily lives. Learning about it makes the distance between us seem far less than it is.)

So of course, when my parents decided to get the carpets in their home cleaned, I knew all about it. Today, my father emailed me with a full report on how things went:

The carpet cleaning went well...The guy said it was fairly easy to do so he did a few extras like clean four rugs we have at no charge. He also left me some spot cleaner. He even cleaned our little rug we have in the garage before you go up the steps. Needless to say, he has the right idea to encourage repeat business.

Apparently so; if the testimonials on Personal Touch Carpet Cleaning's website are to be believed, Jeff Martin's company is appropriately named.

Looking more closely at the site, I was surprised to find a lot of valuable information that Personal Touch is giving away for free. There's a guide to the most common carpet stains and how to remove them, a tutorial on different styles and fibres of carpets, and tips on how to keep your carpet clean. (I never knew, before reading that, that you're supposed to vaccum carpets in both directions. So there's my value take-away from their website right there.)

This site ought to be a blog. Jeff and his employees could blog on a regular basis about different jobs, show satisfied customers with their clean carpets, inform and pontificate about new developments in fibres and styles, talk about disgusting or funny pet-related stains, announce special offers...there is lots of scope for good content here. Running ads in the local media is one thing. But using Personal Touch's own medium - their website, in the form of a blog - to demonstrate their knowledge and skills, and to establish themselves as experts in the field, would take their business's success to a whole other level.

Personal Touch is selling its competence - in order to employ (and re-employ) their services, people have to believe that Jeff and his staff know their stuff, know what they're doing, and will do a good job cleaning their carpets. Scope for repeat business is high, which is why Jeff has figured out that making customers happy is worth doing - he wants people to be pleased with his services and to evangelise his company to other potential customers. Giving them valuable content that is easily linked to and passed around, updated on a regular basis and often amusing, would make that customer evangelism a million times easier and more infectious. Air conditioning contractors are doing it, so why not carpet cleaners?

Blogs are not just suitable and beneficial for monolithic, global companies. If an evangelistic customer like my father has me, all the way in London, totally sold on this small business and its services, imagine the value in making it even easier for local customers to evangelise to local potential customers.

Personal Touch's website oughta be a blog.

Sun Microsystems has hired the principal author of the open-source Roller Weblogger software, a move that's part of an attempt to build closer ties with developers and customers.

Sun is encouraging use of blogs to communicate directly and efficiently with people as different as bankers and Linux users, Schwartz explains:

What better ambassadors than our own employees? And what more efficient vehicle than a network connection?

Indeed. Couldn't have put it better myself.

Simon World has a briliant line-up of 50 blogging tips: Everything you wanted to know about blogging but were afraid to ask. This one is particularly true:

44. You will encounter plenty of ignorance in this blogging caper. Much of it will come from other blogs. However even more of it will come from your friends and family. Blogging is like renovating: you find it endlessly fascinating, but no-one else gives a sh!t. They are unlikely to have even heard of blogs. It is your job to talk their ears off about it. Bamboozle them, tell them how great it is, print business cards with the URL on it. They all think your mad already.

Heh.

CoolBusinessIdeas, a Singapore-based business intelligence company has built its new website around an open blog. The company publishes a free, monthly e-newsletter, collects new business ideas and innovations globally. It has expanded its reach to cater to an international audience. Adrants reports:

The blog and newsletter tracks emerging business innovations in overseas markets which businesses around the world can emulate. Written in a concise yet informal manner, the articles in the newsletter touch on business ideas such as "Micro-Purchasing", "Supermarkets of the Future", and "Innovation + Style = Lots of Customers". The idea are intended to serve as inspiration for business professionals and entrepreneurs to think of how they can use these new concepts in their companies.

Apart from the intrusively long plug for their 'free business ideas newsletter!' and business books and whatever else they can think of to push to the hapless reader that came to read the blog, it is indeed a blog. With permalinks, trackbacks and categories and more. The annoying clump of text - you can tell I don't like the ad, can't you - is so long that they need to helpfully point to the blog by a heading 'latest entry' just where the blog begins. And the blogroll is miniscule, but these are early days.

CoolBusinessIdea have the right idea. Chunk-sized information, flexible trend-spotting and commenting, interesting and informal style can make them an easy but informative read and their blog the envy of their industry peers. :-)

We got together this morning at tBBC HQ over muffins, fresh cut mango and copious amounts of coffee with Alan Moore and Axel Chaldecott of SMLXL, as well as Adrian Bailey and Kate Whalley of PeopleFanClub.

The bunch of us see each other fairly regularly, and I am pretty familiar with Alan and Axel's business, but today was the first time that I had had the chance to see the nitty-gritty of what Kate and Adrian do for companies. By the end of our time together, my hand was somewhat sore from note-taking, and my head was buzzing with ideas. (No, really: I was the only one who abstained from coffee.)

One of the important points behind what Kate and Adrian do for organisations via PeopleFanClub is the fact that, in trying to improve teams and teamwork, many companies ignore completely the individual. Anyone who has ever been on a "team away day" or retreat will likely be familiar with all of the probing into how one sees the company's values, or the team developing, or the company moving forward...with no consideration given to the individual's values or goals or aspirations.

This reminded me of the tired line, often fed to us at sports practice when I was growing up in America, that "There is no 'I' in 'team." Total disregard for the individual for the sake of the group is taught to children as axiomatic. Leaving aside how truly disturbing that is, let us concentrate on what utter garbage the idea is. As we were all talking about it this morning, I could not help but think of someone who makes a sandwich with bread from the bakery that was once good but allowed to mould, fine meat from the butcher that has been sitting out on the counter for a few days, cheese from the fromagerie that has been poorly stored and so dried out, and organic, gourmet mayonnaise that has not been refrigerated. The person then sticks the sandwich in a plastic baggie and leaves it on the dashboard of their car in the hot sun all morning. And when they are finally hungry and take a bite of the thing, they're surprised that it tastes like crap (and maybe makes them ill). Okay, so it's not the most brilliant analogy, but that's what I think of when I hear of companies who expect to produce great output with components that, while they may be of fine quality at their core, have not been treated properly and so cannot be expected to deliver the kind of results the organisation wants and needs.

Adrian and Kate also talked a bit about the idea from research done by psychologists Richard Ryan, PhD, and Edward Deci, PhD - and central to the self-determination theory - that the intrinsic motivation of individuals flourishes when three key human needs are satisfied: competence, autonomy, and relatedness.

People feel competent when they get feedback on what they say and do, and when they are able to respond effectively to challenges they face.

People feel they have autonomy when they feel they are trusted - "empowered," even (it is a word that has been abused by far too many, but it is still appropriate) - to take initiative, to learn and develop their own skills and talents, and to explore and expand their horizons.

People feel relatedness when they can tell that others are sitting up and taking notice of the fact that they are doing good work and thinking interesting, clever thoughts.

Far be it from me to be a blog bore, but it seems fairly obvious that these three needs are all met when a company opens itself up and lets selected employees use a blog to talk to the world about what they do, what they think about what they do, what they think about what others in their field are doing, and about the new things they'd like to be doing. The benefits of blogging are not just felt in the areas of a company marketing itself and relating to the public; the very people who are producing those benefits will also feel the benefit, and - no small matter, this - deliver a tangible commercial pay-off to the organisation when their needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness are being satisfied in this way.

Oh, and you can achieve this with a blog that is either external (public) or internal (exclusively engaging those within an organisation).

So it was an interesting morning all round: I learned some new things, had some new ideas, and was further assured that there really is more to this blogging thing than most people realise - even though the b-word never actually came up.

And the muffins weren't bad, either.

Some basic rehash of the goodness of blogging (which always bears repeating but we would say that, wouldn't we?) in an article by The Globe and Mail last week.

Apparently, blogs are going big business. And according to advocates of the technology such as devotee Jim Carroll, it is about time.

Whatever it is you do by marketing, you can do by virtue of a blog.

They're a useful and valuable tool to build a relationship with your customers so that your brand name, what you do, who you are, is in their minds. You can do wonderful things [with blogs] if you really apply your creative thinking.

Mr Caroll is future-trends author and consultant who asserts that blogs adapted for business use have a host of applications, ranging from customer relationship management to increasing consumer awareness of one's business on-line. Blogs also seem to attract a valued consumer demographic.

A study released by Jupiter Research last year showed that 61 per cent of Internet users who read blogs at least once a month have an annual household income of $60,000 (U.S.) or more. A recent survey conducted by U.S.-based Web ad network Blogads revealed 61 per cent of blog readers are over the age of 30, and more than 45 per cent spend five to 10 hours reading blogs each week.

Now, if I could only link this 'blog metric' to the concept of "prosumers", we are rolling - marketing professionals stand aside! :-)

Note: I found the best description of "prosumers" in the Economist feature on The future of advertising.

...there is a wider group which marketers sometimes call "prosumers"; short for proactive consumers. Some people in the industry believe this group is the most powerful of all.

Euro RSCG, a big international agency, is completing a nine-country study of prosumers, which it says can represent 20% or so of any particular group. They can be found everywhere, are at the vanguard of consumerism, and what they say to their friends and colleagues about brands and products tends to become mainstream six to 18 months later.

Such people often reject traditional ads and invariably use the internet to research what they are going to buy and how much they are going to pay for it. Half of prosumers distrust companies and products they cannot find on the internet. If they want to influence prosumers, says Mr Lepere, companies have to be extremely open about providing information.

In his piece Olympic Sized Arrogance, Dan Gillmore paints a vision of the future:

Look past today's technology. What's coming will utterly wreck the Big Media monopoly over Olympic images, and all Big Event images. When all spectators have a high-quality video camera in their phones, will the powers-that-be ban phones? Unlikely. But even if they could ban phones that are obvious, what will they do when we're carrying video cameras in the buttons on our shirts, and when our eyeglasses contain phones or other transmitting devices?

This reminded me of something I observed the other night at a Madonna concert in London. All around us, people were whipping out their mobile phones and sending still photographs and video of the show to their friends and family. When the first person did this, security told her to stop. But before long, there were so many people waving their phones in the air and using them to broadcast their impressions of the gig to those not present that security gave up trying. They could not stop the flow of information - it wanted to be free and it was.

American Olympic athlete Scott Goldblatt is blogging for NJ.com and at his own personal blog - despite the International Olympic Committee's ridiculous ban on blogging for competitors, coaches, and anyone else involved with the games. As Jeff Jarvis puts it, the IOC is saying they do not have any right to free speech and can speak only through journalists. Dan Gillmore goes further:

This is about greed, nothing more and nothing less. It is about the historically corrupt International Olympic Committee's desire to please the giant media organizations to which it has sold "rights" to tell and show the world what is happening.

Jeff Jarvis has doubts about Blogversations that gets marketers to sponsor conversations that bloggers engage in on their blogs.

Blogversations, however, gets it backward. It wants marketers to actively tell a blogger what to discuss and then they will sponsor that discussion. Oh, I'm sure they'll say they won't tell the blogger what to say, only the topic. But in my judgment, this goes over the line: It calls into question the blogger's credibility (would she be talking about this if she weren't paid to talk about this?). And it is contrary to the essence and appeal of blogs: I talk about what I want to talk about. Love it or leave it, read it or not, sponsor it or not, that's what we bloggers do.

I must say I share the discomfort over the whole concept. Part of the inviduality of the blog is the blogger's mind that acts as a filter of the reality he encouters and writes about. The talk of markets being discussions and web being talking and ads not being evil, sounds good but it still does not make much sense.

David Weinberger would also like some clarification:

Unclear from the site: Is the fact that the bloggers are getting paid made apparent? And where do these "conversation" occur? Unfortunately, there's no obvious way to get more information about what Blogversations is proposing except by registering.

Indeed. Sounds too much like viral marketing to me, with the emphasis on viral.

Evelyn Rodriguez of Crossroad Dispatches makes a thoughtful distinction between authentic and credible voice:

In my blog, I speak with a credible voice that's informed by my authentic voice -but it's certainly not my authentic voice directly. In rare instances, I relate to you in my intimate voice.

The credible voice is the one that most corporate blogs will speak in. The credible voice is the voice that savvy corporations will move towards.

Most companies today are not speaking in a credible voice, their voice is modulated by PR, polished, artificial and rather washed out. PR has a lot to answer for and so have the executives:

The story state of PR is only partly the fault of PR organizations. Much blame can be placed at executive doorsteps. For a variety of well-understood reasons, many only want to distribute highly favorable information. This is a short-sighted tactic, proven again and again in business. Ultimately, either the information emerges anyway, or a credibility gap emerges between a company and its customers, employees, and investors.

Companies so desperately try to project a polished image that fools no-one. Anyone who ever worked for a corporation, important enough to employ or hire PR professionals, knows that there is a gaping void between reality and 'the message' that it puts out. Everyone knows that neither people nor organisations are perfect. Therefore there is much to be gained by demonstrating instead that there is a drive towards perfection as well as a healthy recognition that it is a never-ending struggle. As Evelyn Rodriguez puts it:

Credibility is not built on a facade of perfection in order to win everyone's approval. You win very few hearts this way.

A blog can be a credible record of the company's advance and improvement.

via Joho the Blog

Yahoo! has its first blog, the tantalisingly named Yahoo! Search blog. :-)

The FAQs by Jeremy Zawodny say it all:

Q: Is this just going to turn into a lame PR blog?

A: I don't expect that to happen. PR does not own the blog. And it'd be a wasted opportunity if it was just another PR outlet.

Q: Will you link to competitor's sites or those you don't agree with?

A: I hope so. I've tried to impress upon the folks involved that running a weblog is about openness and that it's a two-way street. Bloggers can often smell PR influence a mile away.

Q: Will individual employees get their own corporate blogs like they do at Sun, IBM, or Microsoft?

A: I don't know. Let's take this one step at a time. (I'd personally love to see that happen.)

Good stuff.

via Boing Boing

You know blogging has gone mainstream when air-conditioning contractors are doing it.

Washington Times has one of those where are they now articles about blogs, although this one is more informed than most. They profile the ACCA, the Air Conditioning Contractors of America, and their take up of blogging.

The blog, ACCA Buzz, invites the trade group's members to weigh in on topics such as air-filter sales, new refrigeration technologies and whether the Minnesota Twins manipulate their stadium's ventilation system to prevent home runs by visiting teams. Kevin W. Holland, the trade group's vice president of communications and membership comments:

Our members may not be your typical bloggers, but this works for us.

The article focuses on the point that we preach all the time:

The group is one of several businesses and organizations that are bypassing newspapers, magazines, billboards and other traditional media to take their message directly to consumers through blogs...

... Some news media analysts say blogging is a significant shift in the way people get their news and learn about new consumer products and services.

They mention mostly examples from politics and journalism, such as the Democratic Convention bloggers, or Andrew Sullivan and MSNBC host Chris Matthews and go over the often-chewed argument about blogging vs journalism. Yawn.

But they move on to corporate blogging:

Technology companies, specifically, like blogging because they think it appeals to customers who have grown weary of traditional marketing methods. Also, because many blogs are updated several times a day, customers keep coming back to check for new information.

The importance of clear guidelines and understanding of legal implications of turning their employees loose in cyberspace is highlighted:

"Blogging is just ripe for trouble," said Rose Kenyon, a Raleigh, N.C., lawyer who specializes in employment matters. Before a business gives workers permission to blog in the workplace, management should lay out clear guidelines and expectations.

Indeed and that is why we have our own bloglawyer, David Carr, to make sure that companies ready to dip their toes in the blogosphere, don't nose-dive. In fact, there are many lawyers hooked on blogging and there is a whole corner of the blogosphere occupied by lawyers. It's got to be a good thing, right? Right?

Not that bloggers are loosing sleep over whether anyone gives them permission for blogging or not. Phil Smith uses his blog to discuss his career, as well as his future political aspirations. He did not get his boss's permission before blogging, but doubts his employer has any problem with it.

I'm an American. I did the blog without really thinking about it.

Hm, where does that leave us, Britons?

Dana Blankenhorn over at Moore's Lore has some thoughts on where the money from blogging may be coming from:

The question remains whether blogging will become subsumed into other media (lots of high-tech publishers, like Business 2.0, now have things they call blogs), whether new journalism businesses can be built on blogging, and whether blogging will be an individual or community endeavor.

He is intrigued by Weblogs, Inc, but not convinced they have found the pot of gold in their business model.

I have some serious problems with their model:

• There's no credit given writers, and thus no style to the writing.
• They've got a lot of tech, but is there is a lot more to business media than tech.
• While they support user feedback, they don't empower users to control their own content as, say, Slashdot does.

I am not sure what the last point means. What does a user mean? If by user he means a blogger, well, the statement is obviously not true as blogs are the ultimate tool for their users (bloggers) to control their content. If he means readers, well, why should they control the content of somebody else's blog? Blogs are the property of the author and if any of the readers feels that their comments are not sufficiently under their control, whatever that means, they can set up their own blog.

Read More »

Doc Searls reads Jonathan's blog and notes:

In the latest post on his blog, Sun Microsystems President & COO Jonathan Schwartz continues to talk trash against IBM as the two companies go corpo a corpo over the server business...

What matters about Schwartz's game here is that he's one of only two CXOs currently playing it. The other is Mark Cuban of the Dallas Mavericks.

The game is plogging — short for presidential blogging, and it bypasses the entire PR apparatus, as well as the traditionally blah forms of published speech by CXOs. Think of it as DIY PR for the people best positioned to make hay with it.

I do rather like the description of blogging by top executives as DIY PR. Doc also revisits Thesis 15 of Cluetrain:

In just a few more years, the current homogenized "voice" of business - the sound of mission statements and brochures - will seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the 18th century French court.

Bloggers such as Jonathan Schwartz and Mark Cuban are beaks breaking through the shell of the marcom egg.

There is goes, to the blogging glossary.

Real launches blog to fight PR war with Apple Steve Rubel headlines the news of Real taking Apple and its iPod head on.

Freedom of Music Choice is a resounding name indeed although the alleged blog format is less so. They are using PostNuke, a web-based portal system written in PHP. Better than a cludgy proprietary one, written by in-house IT, but still, there are so many blog software packages out there, all optimised for fitting in and connecting to the blog network, why not use them?

The site uses something called 'modules', which would be blog entries, I guess, in a more friendly format. If they are worried about spam and comment control (they have a forum-like threads attached to each article) this is better achieved in a blog software such as Expression Engine, which has a very robust user/contributor management system.

As Steve Rubel points out, no RSS. Sigh.

On the side bar they are linking to some good and worthy blogs under the heading "BLOGISPHERE". Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Never mind.

The message at the top rocks though. It would rock even more, if I could copy and paste it instead of typing it out... The words: message, spread and user-friendly come to mind.

Choice Rocks! Consumers are getting a raw deal with the status quo in digital music, which limits healthy, open competition that drives down prices and encourages innovation. Stand up for your right to Freedom of Music Choice!

Also, they try to engage:

This site is an invitation for your dialogue and thoughts, whether it's about us or any other player o­n the field.

Re invidiual voice and all that - some of the articles are posted by Admin. Surely the person has a name...?

So, full marks for understanding and effort, less then full marks for execution. Close but no coconut.

A recent story about Warner Brothers Records using MP3 blogs to promote Secret Machines music, alerted me to the existence of MP3 bloggers. The Morning News has a 'roundtable' talk with six of them.

There exists in the internet a galaxy of passionate music fans sharing their favorite songs, for free, with as many people as can find them.

Mp3 blogs (or audio blogs or music blogs) are the newest frontier in online music-sharing—a groundswell has appeared in the last year of people posting mp3 files of songs they love, free of charge on personal web sites (but only available for a short period of time), and usually annotated with biographical and contextual notes about the artist and the music. The phenomenon has been noticed but only barely, and the recording industry, if wise to the trend, isn’t protesting.

Now we know. Enjoy.

via Lightningfield

Hotpants is a blog about... panties. All panties, all the time.

They write about lingerie stores they like, announce National Underware Day, parties that they plan and much more...

And don't forget to check out the blogroll...

via Adrants

Theodore Dalrymple, best known for his weekly columns in the British magazine The Spectator and books such as Life at the Bottom, is one of Britain's most famed social commentators. It is a fairly open secret that Dalrymple's real life identity is Dr Anthony Daniels.

Dalrymple has now joined the ranks of bloggers, writing under his real name, at the Social Affairs Unit blog. The SAU are clients of the Big Blog Company, and we are all very excited that they have pulled off such a coup by getting this noteworthy personality on board as a blogger. Well done, guys!

Paul Chaney has a two-part article on future of blogging. In the second one he asks the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto for their opinions.

Doc Searls:

Blogs are real voices of real people. Applied by business, they leave the marketers of the world out of a job. You can't job out your own voice. You can't leave it up to some department.

The best blogs of today are Jonathan Schwartz's and Mark Cuban's. These aren't corporate orifices shitting messages. These are the top guys, speaking for themselves, and with remarkably little filtration, even by their own manners or good sense.

Chris Locke:

To Seth Godin, blogging doesn't count much because what he and his audience of business pukes care about counting are EYEBALLS. Even some bloggers are now playing this game, which is both saddening and pathetic, imnsho. Blogging and the net in general - the web in particular - have given human beings a place where they can express themselves "as" human beings, without kowtowing to sponsors who "always" dehumanize what we now, stupidly, call "content" in the service of hawking their products.

David Weinberger:

As with any technology, blogging will become invisible as it becomes popular. I somehow doubt that everyone (or even most people) will be writing daily blogs; it takes too long and not everyone likes writing. I "think" that blogs will become truly popular as a way to write about particular events and projects: you'll blog your trip and you'll set up a blog at work for the team working on a particular project.

Not much to add to that.

David St Lawrence of Ripples likens explaining blogs to lighting candles in the wind. That's about the best comparison of how hard our job feels sometimes.

In an excellent post he describes reactions we often encounter when we suggest that people or companies should use blogs for articulating and promoting their ideas, message or products.

When I ask if they might consider a weblog format, I get a politely embarrassed response as though I have suggested they put their site on LiveJournal or host banner ads for porn sites.

Even those who have well designed and interesting websites have a reason to consider a blog.

Comparing a weblog to a static website is like comparing a live display to a printed sign. Both will attract attention when well done, but the live display creates the anticipation of change that will draw viewers back again and again when the messages are worthwhile.

For example, innocent drinks has a truly fun site, witty, laid-back, user-friendly. I visited once, had a laugh, thought great guys, but have no reason to return. Maybe they don't mind, but if they do want to engage people, a one-visit-wonder is not going to do it. They could use a blog to achieve that which no website can get across and sustain.

The force of your personality, or lack of it, comes right through. A weblog is like good PR in that it quickly reveals a lot about you and your ideas. If both are worthwhile, you should use a weblog to spread the word. Otherwise, it may be too revealing and you should stick to a static website...with an unlisted URL.

Spot on, once more. Which is why we don't think every company needs a blog. At least, not yet.

So said a friend of mine to another friend of mine a couple of weekends ago. She wasn't just whistlin' Dixie.

The last two weeks has been a hectic, interesting time around here. Apart from all of the grunt work that goes into running a business, we have had an influx of visitors here in London from the United States: the journalist Nancy Rommelmann and her daughter Tafv were here for several days, and on the day they left, the daughter of Hollywood screenwriter Robert J Avrech and two of her friends arrived. The girls have now taken off for Italy and France, but will be back here again later in the month before returning to the States.

I met both Nancy and Robert through blogging.

Nancy is a friend of my friend, the journalist Cathy Seipp (we met via our blogs, too), who referred Nancy to my food blog several months ago. Nancy has been doing food and drink writing for a long time, as a writer for Bon Appetit and as the author of Everything You Pretend to Know About Food: And Are Afraid Someone Will Ask and Rommelmann's Los Angeles Bar and Nightlife Guide, amongst other publications. After exchanging a few emails, she was on board Gastroblog.com as a contributor. Nancy was at that time writing the excellent, sadly now-defunct blog Leaving Los Angeles. I read her archives voraciously and was blown away. We became close friends, despite never having met in person. When Nancy was in town and I was introducing her to my friends, more than once people were shocked to learn that we had met 'in real life' only a matter of hours earlier. (Aside: At a party we threw for Nancy and her daughter here at tBBC HQ, one of the attendees said to me - after overhearing Nancy and I talking about Gastroblog.com - "Oh, I read Gastroblog...Is that you?" Yes indeed.)

I got to know Robert some months after reading a profile of his late son, Ariel Avrech, on LukeFord.net. Luke posted a link to Robert's blog when it launched. I read it, was incredibly moved, and sent Robert an email. Over the last few months, he has become a very dear friend to me - and I was incredibly flattered that he entrusted me with sheltering and looking after his young daughter and her friends while they were in London. More than that, as the owner of a new publishing company and a novelist himself, Robert has been able to give me a lot of insight into the challenges facing that industry, both for authors and publishers. That, along with more extensive research, was the basis for tBBC's model for publishing applications of blogs.

Through Robert, I also hooked up with author Rochelle Krich for more insight into the publishing industry. And just the other day, he put me in touch with Susan Mernit of 5ive. Susan attended Bard College with Robert years ago, and stumbled upon his blog by chance last week while reading Cathy Seipp's blog. She sent him an email, Robert told me I might find her and 5ive of interest, and Susan and I were exchanging emails the very next day - the same day that I left a comment on JD Lasica's New Media Musings. That comment prompted an email from JD to me which read, in part:

It's funny, Susan Mernit and I were talking 5 minutes ago about bigblogcompany!

All this in the space of less than 48 hours. As JD put it in another email to me, with the millions of blogs out there, some days it feels like three degrees of separation. Lately, it feels like that every day. And still people wonder how it is possible to be so passionate about blogging.

The MediaGuardian joins the chorus and warns that mighty corporations ignore the whispers on web diaries at their peril.

So, the blogs are no longer a preserve of the geeks, they are now a jam of the huge corporations. Sorry.

The sites that started as observational home pages for enthusiasts have become so powerful that they are starting a new industry of blog monitoring in which media companies scour the net to advise brands on how their name is being talked about online, away from the traditional newspaper and broadcast media sites.

It is not just computer brands who are starting to realise that the blog is a huge image-making network that cannot be ignored.

Olympus is reported to have devised a 'new marketing strategy' to embrace the medium. Great, does it mean that I can now read a blog by Olympus employees? Not quite:

Whenever a new camera is approaching its launch, details are passed on to prominent blogs, a spokesman reveals, because the sites are crucial to getting interest ahead of the launch as well as getting early feedback on what the public thinks of the new model.

I see. They just included blogs into their PR, marketing and advertising checklist. Tick, we have now embraced the medium. Riiight. I get a sense of deja vu all over again.

But let's not be beastly, at least they have started to notice the conversations about them. Good going, I mean, it's only been five years since Cluetrain.

Then there is an example of what can happen if you do not tune in to the blogger...:

...a flood of bad publicity [came] for Maytag, a top-end washing machine manufacturer in America. Complaints about one of its models not emptying properly, and so smelling out kitchens, had been appearing on many blogs until they finally hit the site of Bob Vila, presenter of a popular property show called This Old House. It resulted in national press coverage of a problem that Clare Hart, CEO of media monitoring agency Factiva, believes could have been nipped in the bud, had the company been alert to the power of the blog.

They fixed the problem and now they monitor the web for early warning signs. That is good, truly a positive development. However, why not join the conversations with your own medium? Granted, a washing machine manufacturer probably cannot see the point of a full-fat blog for themselves but who is to say that they could not make a success of it? I can think of at least a couple of appliance manufacturers that would make a splash with a blog - Smeg and Nespresso.

The article does zoom in on one of the most important features of a blog, credibility. Blogs seem to fit into the picture painted by Trust Barometer, which measures the trust we place in certain types of people. A company CEO is eighth on that list, after specialist business magazines, we trust family and friends and colleagues; journalists are sixth.

So it's a pretty shocking piece of research that shows we trust people who we feel are like ourselves and are not out to promote something. That is why blogs have such power. We trust them, and if we disagree with an opinion, we normally have the option of adding our say.

And there is the inevitable 'power of the blogs' as demonstrated for Blinkx in a recent spate of publicity. Om Malik, one of the journalists in the meeting between Business 2.0 and Kathy Rittweger, CEO of Blinkx, was so impressed that he immediately wrote about it on his blog. She reflects:

He called me to say he'd done a 'blog' on us and I have to confess I was disappointed as it didn't sound as good as an article. Within a couple of hours we were being mentioned on thousands of sites and I had venture capitalists calling me left, right and centre. The blog made us so popular that we had to bring forward our launch from autumn to June.

So what are you waiting for? Get a-blogging!

Mark Glasser in Online Journalism Review weighs in on a positive trend regarding blogs:

The Wall Street Journal Online is promoting one story per day outside its subscription wall to bloggers. NYTimes.com is boosting the number of RSS feeds it offers. Media companies are starting to work with - instead of against -the blogosphere.

So, from legal debate about deep-linking to linky-love?

What made the Journal trade in its legal threats for free content for bloggers? Bill Grueskin, managing editor of WSJ.com, is a fan of the blogosphere and "gets it," in the words of blogger Jeff Jarvis, president of Advance.net. When the Journal started opening up for bloggers in May, Jarvis wrote, "This is good for bloggers and good for business. And it's smart of the Journal to care about reaching out to this audience."

But it seems not all is about love and kindness.

Grueskin says traffic generated from blogs to the free features has been "substantial" for compelling stories. While he couldn't be specific about numbers, Grueskin said the links from blogs sometimes rivaled the traffic generated by links in Yahoo Finance.

And the eternal (or so it seems) 'battle' between bloggers and journalists. Tom Biro, sees a shift in the marketing communications landscape

I can't tell if journalists are really 'warming up' to bloggers, but they seem to have a realization that bloggers are super helpful in bringing readers to their work. Twice in a week I had authors submit their own articles through my 'Got a story idea?' link at the top of the pages. This, of course, leads to interesting e-mail discussions back and forth about the article, leading finally to a post in some cases. I have one that I'm working on right now, from an author at PRWeek.

So we come back to one of the main uses for a blog - medium. If PR is the art of getting and managing a company’s message across the media by proxy, then blogging is using your own medium for the message.

Over on Sean Bonner's blog, there is a discussion on what makes a website a blog. This is one of those issues that might seem trivial but actually cuts to the core of what is really behind what we do.

Sean refers to the distinctive features that Jason Calacanis mentions on his blog (ah, the network effect!) and adds one of his own: Identifiable author(s).

I think all these points are correct but as I have said before, a key feature of blogs is the ability to be part of the blogosphere, which means the ability to link to individual articles is of a blog's very essence.

In fact I would say that most of the features that Jason Calacanis and Sean Bonner mentions are the things that a blog should have as 'best practice' but are not necessarily essential defining elements (for example there are many indisputably successful blogs which do not have public comment sections). Similarly you can have a group blog which does not show individual authors... it is just not a very good idea.

The definition we use for what makes a blog a blog can be found in the Samizdata.net blogging Glossary.

PC hardware blog quotes (within fair use parameters) and links to techie website article. Bizarrely, techie website threatens blog with legal action. Blog goes public with the issue. Slashdot links to blog post about the matter. Two hours later, on a Sunday night, techie website's executive editor sends the following email to blog:

Hey! I'm the executive editor in charge of eWEEK.com -- and before this situation unravels any farther, I need to make a couple of quick clarifications about our reprint policy:

While I haven’t gotten all the details about what happened, this legal warning to PocketPCTools seems to be a result of miscommunication within our company. We understand and embrace the principles under which sites such as PocketPCTools link to and excerpt our content. There are plenty of occasions when a professional media company needs to question the wholesale appropriation of its content or the use of its marks. From everything I understand about the PocketPCTools case so far, this is NOT one of those occasions!

We're moving to correct the situation now ... PocketPCTools was apparently acting within the appropriate bounds of Web etiquette -- actually, doing us a favor by sending us the traffic -- and Ziff Davis was apparently mistaken in issuing this warning.

My personal apologies to anyone inconvenienced by this error. We’re investigating the situation now and will act accordingly.

I read about this thanks to Cory Doctorow's Boing Boing post entitled Naming-and-shaming on Slashdot: better than hiring a lawyer. I think the title of this post goes one better.

Clay Shirky has an interesting post at Many-to-Many on tech-determinism:

the software does not actually program what goes on in it; context and contrast are such strong human forces, they overwhelm the simple technical affordances and limitations.

The same thing is happening with blogs. Many people only know bloggers as sad teenage girls who write about their love of weedy popstars with dodgy facial hair and baggy jeans, or as politics junkies, or as grown men who live with their parents and post photos of their kitty cats.

Those are the people who dismiss the idea of commercial applications - beyond ad sales - for blogs. Of course they are underinformed and missing a trick, but there is something thrilling in explaining to such a person exactly the trick they are missing and seeing their eyes light up with understanding and enthusiasm.

And then they start telling you their ideas for good commercial blogs, and pretty soon you are reminded of that which keeps you chained to your desk, writing blog posts on a Saturday night and lying awake at night: We have no shortage of good ideas. But there really is a shortage of hours in the day. If only there was a blog solution for that...

Doc Searls has an interesting observation about press reports of acquisition rumours stirred up by Schwatz's blogging about Novell and Sun and IBM.

PUBLICITY STUNT? Having stirred up the takeover tempest, Sun now has suddenly dropped the issue. A corporate spokeswoman referred the matter on Aug. 3 to Citigate, an outside public-relations firm. Citigate spokesman Noel Hartzell said Schwartz wasn't "available." And he cautioned that Sun "does not comment on rumors or speculation."

Doc Searls opines:

Meanwhile, there isn't a blogger who knows Schwartz who doesn't believe that Schwartz wouldn't respond to an email. Which means we may have a first: a big-time magazine being blown off by a company whose head honcho would rather take his case to the blogosphere.

That would be nice and Doc may be right, but I can't seem to find Mr Schwartz's email anywhere on his blog.

Or maybe it's just one more proof that there's no way a PR department or agency can "handle" a free-range CXO, or even an ordinary rank & file employee. And that the best information isn't going to come through Official Channels. And that when it does, there's often not a damn thing Official Channels can do about it, other than babbling default boilerplate that carries all the meaning of an error message.

Well, that is right on the money. It is an interesting situation to say the least and let's see what happens next. Probably not much but there will be others.

Update: Hm, seems that Doc Searls was right...

Dan Bricklin is exasperated that an editor did not understand the importance of his mentioning perma-links and so edited the reference out from an article he wrote for News.com about blogging. I feel your pain, Dan.

So few people understand that perma-links are not just a 'nice' feature for a blog to have, they are a crucial element in what makes a blog a blog. I would go so far as saying that the ability to perma-link to an article is one of the two absolute pre-requisites for defining whether of not a site is a blog or is just a 'blog-like website' (the other feature being articles presented in reverse chronological order).

Without perma-links, it is very difficult for others interested in what you have written to link to it on their own blogs so that they can say what they think: perma-links facilitate discussion and dissemination. Blogs themselves are just one of many web formats. What makes them really interesting is the fact they are part of a social network called the blogosphere... and without perma-links, they ain't part of that network.

So whenever I read someone who really understands what makes it possible for blogs to be a social phenomenon benefiting from network effects rather than just a web format, I am moved to shout "Hallelujah! At last, some one who gets it!"

Jonathan Schwartz, the President of Sun Microsystems, has been getting some attention for his blog.

Schwartz is among a small number of senior executives in corporate America to adopt the blog format for explaining his views. He's already one of the best at it, and other executives could learn something from him.

He also seems to understand this very well:

What the best blogs tend to have in common is voice: They clearly have been written by human beings with genuine ideas and a passion for what they're saying.

I think the attention he get is deserved and not only because of his position. The content is interesting and he does manage to get across a person at the other end of the keyboard.

Another executive has been blogging for some time although intermittently - Groove Networks' Ray Ozzie. He says the blog gives him a communications channel under my control.

I feel as though there's a conversation - many conversations - going on out there. It lets me feel like I'm part of that conversation, and when I get calls and e-mails, there's confirmation that I'm part of the conversation.

Dan Gillmore's favorite senior-executive blog is Blog Maverick, written by internet billionaire Mark Cuban, owner of the NBA's Dallas Mavericks. He takes on sportswriters and offers pungent commentary on sports and investing.

Despite legal issues that can be sorted out by understanding the blog medium and context within which it operates, executives have much to gain by blogging.

I don't think corporate blogging is a fad. The blog brings a human voice to the enterprise. It's not just good marketing. It's good business.

Quite.

There is a new(ish) corante blog, Strange Attractor. (I came across is a couple of weeks ago but only now got round to mentioning it.)

There is much blogging goodness there, for example, here:

We heard quite a bit about blogs in the knowledge management sphere - how companies are starting to use blogs and other social tools to help them gather information that’s currently locked up inside their employee’s heads and to bring new information to people’s attention. Blogs are also being used in project management as a way of building teams and encouraging constructive risk taking and collaboration.

And this bit, which particularly 'resonates' with us:

Many of those working in this area are having to deal with the fact that the majority of people just don't know what blogs are, so there’s a large amount of persuading and evangelising to be done in order to get users to accept these tools. Ninety per cent of the work is educating people and changing their existing mindset so that they can learn how to get the most out of blogging.

Suw Charman plans to delve more deeply into some very interesting topics, so watch her space. I like the following:

• Blogs are oral communications in a written format. What implications does this have for those of us working in this area professionally? How can this format be adapted to business use and how will businesses need to adapt in order to make best use of the blog format?
• Forming networks. Blogs are invaluable as networking tools, but they don’t work well in isolation. What other tools are required to make the best of blog networking opportunities and what are the emergent behaviours amongst users?
• Categorisation. It is too easy to lump all blogs together under one, ill-fitting umbrella, and extend conclusions from one small subsection of the blogosphere to the whole thing. How can we categorise the blogosphere and where do common generalisations fall down or turn into misconceptions?

Dan Gillmor's new book, We the Media, is out on the shelves in the US. Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing gives it thumbs up:

I was asked to read this earlier for a blurb, and was completely taken with it - it's the sort of book that I will be encouraging others to read for years to come, the sort of book that underpins both my work at EFF (because so much of Dan's thesis about democratized reportage hinges on the importance of a free and open network) and my work as an sf writer (because Dan's vision of the future is so compelling.

Here's the blurb he wrote for the book:

Clear-eyed, hype-free and for all that prescient and inspiring. We the Media is Gillmor's heroic effort to bridge the tech-obsessed polyannas like me and the skeptical grownups whose hardened attitutudes won't admit of this stuff. He's done us all a service by writing it for us.

The book has a website by the publisher, O'Reilly and Associates. It can be purchased on Amazon, alas not in the UK... Yet.

Now onto my least favourite topic - metrics. I have to make a case to my colleagues about why I think we should not get into metrics argument or case with clients as I believe that looking at blog from that perspective misses the most important aspect of blogging. iMedia connections writes about blog metrics that include in-bound links, velocity, feedback and stickiness. This makes sense:

Because the heart of social media is in the aggregation and amplification of community expression, metrics based on the strength of the message and quality of the receiver are more valid. As technology consultant Shel Israel told the audience, "While traditional media establishes a passive, static relationship between author and reader, the social media provide true interactive, passionate exchanges of information and ideas."

It is true that neither businesses nor blogs have reached consistency in the measurement of their influence and authority. That is part of the problem with social media - the ability of those who see their potential to convince of their 'power'. Blog are a good demonstration of influence of a single person in an online community but this effect needs to be first understood correctly in order to achieve the same in business context.

We try to avoid metrics - as understood by 'interactive media' types - hits, clicks etc. Not only are such measurement one-dimensional, they change the way people see tools such as blogs and other communication mediums. There is also a problem with understanding what communication is about and just because you cannot measure something the way you are used to, it does not mean it is irrelevant or even intangible.

Technorati is measuring in-bound links and using it as a "vote" for attention to understand a blogging site's influence.
With a database of 3.2 million bloggers, A-list bloggers move to the top of Technorati's list based on the blogger's number of in-bound links. But even this novel approach is considered crude by Technocrati CEO David Sifry who told BlogOn audience:

Only looking at the number of in-bound links is too blunt. We need a measure of relative authority. We're closely watching velocity - the change in the number of a blogger's links in one hour divided by the blogger's total number of links.

For myself, I find the metrics discussed in the article only a starting point. What constantly amazes me about Samizdata.net is not the number of unique visitors but the fact that they happen to be each day. We need metric for affinity and loyalty.

B L Ochman identifies Ten companies that missed great blog opportunities.

It doesn't matter whether companies are big, with benefit of PR agencies, or small – many are missing opportunities to integrate blogs into the marketing mix. The following are 10 examples of sites and campaigns that are crying out for blogs. If they had them, they could dialog with customers, sell product, and also have some fun.

And the nominees are...

1. Newman's Own Organic Dog Food - don't even have a website
2. Teva - produces sport sandals and footwear
3. Starbucks - missed perfect opportunity for moblog
4. Rowenta - sponsors extreme ironing sport on website, a mobile photoblog could do a better job standing on its head
5. Pomegranate Juice - blog about the responses of consumers tasting the products
6. DaimlerChrylser Xmas Stunt - a blog of the family's experience
7. WD40's Anniversary Site - perfect use for a business blog to write about all the WD40's uses
8. Ditties - blog would be a smart marketing for dumb name
9. Trojan Condoms - information center cries out for a blog
10. Sony, Lego and Marvel joint promotion based on Spiderman - no hype, blog would do a better job

So there you have it, not all candidates are obvious or big brands but that makes them more interesting and suitable for a blog and the style and culture that comes with it.

Blogs have many faces and some of them are more like clown masks - blog is becoming a popular medium for having a little fun with the credulous. The more frequent the postings, the more they respond to reader feedback and the more interesting the subject matter, the more people are drawn into the fiction. Alex Boese, who runs the Museum of Hoaxes, an online compendium of urban legends and other fakery says:

It kind of takes the old phenomenon of literary hoaxes a step further, where you're interacting with these authors day by day. And it's so easy to hide your identity online and to hide the contextual clues that people would need to find out who you are.

It seems that blogs are still new enough that skepticism about their authenticity has not yet set in.

Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion doubts that veteran blog readers can be easily cought out although a trusted friends' referral can get even experienced readers let their guard down.

If a friend passed you the Web address, then you definitely think it's true because you're talking about word of mouth. If you think about it there are sites that are blogs that look like professional news outlets that you would never know that they're written by amateurs.

A variety of hoaxes have spiced up the so-called blogosphere. Among them are Andy Kaufman Returns , in which an unidentified writer purports to be the eccentric comedian, reappearing 20 years after his death; Rance, the musings of an anonymous Hollywood star; and Jane's Blog, the daily diary of a starry-eyed, oversexed young woman in Los Angeles who turns out to be a fictional character on the Oxygen TV sitcom "Good Girls Don't."

USA today/Reuters writes about how blogs are fast gaining corporate recognition and soon may be acknowledged simply as important.

In a sign blogs are moving mainstream, major technology companies including Microsoft and IBM came together at a recent conference to discuss the profit potential of the Web publishing format. Venture capitalists, start-ups, and technology titans gathered at the BlogOn 2004 hosted at University of California Berkeley's Haas Business School to consider the commercial use of blogs and issues, such as privacy concerns, that surround blogging.

This is an area that we have addressed some time ago and devote one third of our training to privacy, confidentiality, trade secrets, fair use and copyright issues. Basically, anything that can expose the company to consequences of careless blogging.

IBM sees blogs as a way to revolutionize employee communication, James Spohrer, director of IBM's Almaden Research Center points out:

It's about decreasing social space between employees, and increasing the amount of knowledge shared between people.

Informal and personal, blogs also pack a lot of marketing potential. Charlene Li, an analyst at Forrester Research says:

Blogs are a way to put a human face on the company because of the continuous interaction and relationships employees can develop with blog-readers.

Yeah, we know. Nice to hear it anyway...

via Micro Persuasion

A key message emerging from BlogOn 2004, a two-day conference at the University of California's Haas School of Business, is that the Web log is the hottest new enterprise tool.

At the even last week, blog software providers, evangelists, engineers and others explored the disruptive and fertile landscape of online diaries both corporate and personal. Microsoft is again Exhibit A in the case for the blog's usefulness to the enterprise. Lenn Pryor, Microsoft's director of platform evangelism acknowledges:

Microsoft is not thought of instantly when it comes to transparency and openness. Blogging is "a way to scale our ability to communicate with customers in an open and honest way."

Blogging for Microsoft meant vast decentralisation of the company's corporate communications and wrestling of control from its legions of public relations employees and contractors that control the company's message. There are about 1,000 Microsoft employees maintaining largely unregulated blogs.

Judging from the Microsoft experience, especially, the blogosphere-accepted Scobleizer it would seem that the corporate utility of blogs, is in making businesses seem less corporate and giving them a human face.

If a company's management can get over the fact that it can no longer effectively control any 'messages' inside or outside the organisation, it may find a blog its greatest ally.

I see that Dell has a Linux blog, called with disarming clarity, Dell Linux blog. It is good to see use of the format that is easy to use and flexible, alas, Dell does not seem to make the full use of the advantages blogs can have.

On the good side, the blog has:

• Permalinks and comments


• Categories


• RSS syndication

However, it misses out on:

• Archives - by date (if a blog does not have an about me blurb, I always like to check the first post) and by author (if a blog has several, it is advisable to have author archives too)


• Comments section (instead it links to a page with an email address and some stuff about how they should not be contacting them for tech support)


• Trackback


• Blogroll

So you get updates, fairly informal language, but no feedback, no community connection or network. Oh well. Still, they have a blog.

Wired has a very upbeat article about blogging, joining the latest hype about blogs, what with BlogOn 2004 last week, bloggers at the Democratic Convention in Boston this week and some genuine Microsoft bloggers.

While Microsoft may be the biggest corporation to attempt to harness the power of blogs and social software in order to be a better company, it certainly isn't the only one. Lots of small and large companies, including eBay and PayPal, are turning to blogs and other shared tools for both internal and external projects.

There you have it.

A few weeks ago there was a spate of blog posts about bloggers and their bosses that I have bookmarked and only now got round to posting here. This is an issue that we will encounter on our mission to get employees blogging and so I was keen to mention the debate here.

First is Scott Rosenberg, who agrees with Tim Bray, who is of the opinion that any corporation that doesn't do this in the future is going to be playing catch-up, and the other optimists that blogging can give enterprises a more human face. But...

I'm sorry to be the pessimist at the party. But for large numbers of workers in America, particularly those at big companies, the dominant fact of life remains don't piss off your boss.

So the odds of them feeling at ease publishing honest Web sites about their work lives are extremely poor. The blogs you're going to see from within most traditional companies will be either uninformative snoozes or desperate attempts at butt-covering and -kissing. Not because people don't have great stories to tell -- but because telling the truth has too high a cost.

David Weinberger weighs in, with a caveat that he has never been right with any of his predictions :-):

I do agree that it'll take a long time for corporate public blogging to spread beyond easy industries, such as high tech. But, I think it'll happen faster than Scott does. First, internal blogging will happen relatively quickly because it's a great way for employees to build their reputations, a motive as powerful as the urge not to piss off your boss. Those internal blogs will go onto the extranet and eventually some will make it onto the Internet.

Second, the first public blogs we're likely to see outside of the sw industry will be more like the Dean blog than anything else: They'll be always upbeat but still lively, full of voice, and worth reading by enthusiasts.

Ross Mayfield points out that although blogging first happens in information intensive industries, it can happen anywhere a manager wants to gain competitive advantage and is willing not just to give up some control, but recongize its already lost. And he agrees that, internally, blogging can also begin in less disruptive activities, like projects or lines of research.

After such exhaustive record of the 'conversation' I guess it is my turn now to say something. Well, I agree that not all company can and should have a blog or encourage their employees to blog. (Which is not to say that if their employees blog in their own time, it's none of their business.) It is very important that blogs are not the proverbial hammer to the proverbial nails. We keep reminding ourselves and others of that with our 'slogan' - Not every company needs a blog. Yet. Yes, we believe that blogs will be relevant for every company whether as a format or as a medium.

I have a different perspective on the entire debate, without fundamentally disagreeing with any of the points above. Company blogs are possible, in fact desirable, as they give businesses a chance to achieve what all the marketing, advertising and branding so often fails to do - relationship with their customers and the resulting loyalty.

The trick is to find the right type of blog (a blog is a mere tool that can be use in many ways), the right attitude, the right people and the right tone. The team behind tBBC is a bunch of 'ordinary' bloggers (i.e. not from marketing or media industry) who have built a strong brand for their group blog. After some back slapping, we carefully analysed how on earth we managed that and spent some time working out how to pass on that knowledge to enlightened businesses and individuals.

This does not mean that it is easy to get all the things right for a credible and successful (company) blog, it does mean, though, that there are people who have the expertise to focus on a particular company and find the most effective way to design their blog and make it work. They also have the guts to say, no you do not actually need a blog...

Steve Rubel notes the good press Microsoft has been getting as a result of embracing the blog as a medium for it's internal and often external communication.

The corporate vice president of developer and platform evangelism, Sanjay Parthasarathy, is responsible for making sure that third-party software developers bond with Microsoft in new and unique ways. VARBusiness has an article praising his ways...

And, finally, he thinks he has come up with a plan to reach out to this community in a way that will appeal to even the most die-hard anti-Microsoft zealots: blogging, something an estimated 800 Microsoft employees are doing with the company's blessing. That's up eightfold in just a year.

I regularly read the Scobleizer, a blog by Robert Scoble. I find it useful, occassionally entertaining and almost always fascinating when he blogs about anything that directly concerns Microsoft.

What's interesting is how truly free-wheeling some of the ramblings on these sites can be. Consider SimpleGeek, a Web site penned by Chris Anderson, who works for the vendor giant. Anderson's disclaimer reads "...No, I don't think that everything that Microsoft does and produces is wonderful and perfect..." Despite this, he clearly advances Microsoft's agenda through wit, humor and even humanity.

So although I am still no big fan of Microsoft, I am interested in what it's people have to say and am positively influenced, to some degree, because the company let's them use their own voice unfiltered but by common sense. If the Redmond ogre can do it, so can any other company...

David Hornik is a partner at August Capital and the author of the VentureBlog. For some time now, he has not only been excited about the power of the new Web log platforms and he also put the money where his mouth was by funding several start-ups involved in this technology.

Nevertheless, he feels that despite genuine reason for excitement this nascent industry finds itself stuck on - itself.

His objection is the proliferation of panels on - circle the applicable - blogs, social software, RSS, social networking, emergent technology etc. He condenses the essential content of any past and future social-software panel into:

Social networking is blogging dumbed down for the masses blah blah blah tribecaster blah blah blah widget blah blah blah What is the connection between social networks and blogs? blah blah blah the most efficient media platform ever blah blah blah read-write, not read-only blah blah blah All software is about people blah blah blah put this stuff in context blah blah blah monetizing relationships blah blah blah a new dimension to the Web blah blah blah I met my wife on Match.com blah blah blah.

That strikes me as fair, if rather harsh, representation of many of such gatherings. I am sure that they have their uses, mind you, meeting people who independently arrive at similar conclusions about new technology and its application is a tremendous boost to any entrepreneur trying to put them to work. However, there is a limit to how much progress such talking and 'panelling' can bring about.

So I grinned when I read this on his blog the first time round but Hornik now relates how a torrent of responses to this 'transcript' propelled him to the place of No.1 sceptic of social software. He explains his position in an article in CNETnews.com.

Without exaggeration, I think that blogging software is revolutionizing the way people communicate--whether to share pictures with family members or distribute a product spec to an engineering team. And I think that RSS (Really Simple Syndication) will enable one-to-one communication of content, pricing, trends, etc., in such a simple fashion that all information will ultimately have an associated data feed.

I do not believe that any more public flogging of these ideas is going to help move that technology forward.

I cannot argue with that either.

Social software, as a general matter, is a good idea. But in the particular instances we've seen to date, there are a lot of things that make little sense, provide little value and will not sustain the interest of the users.

Yet over the last 12 months, we have all done about as much talking as we have building. It is time to call a moratorium on the "blah blah blah" and get down to the business of building great software. To paraphrase Kenny Rogers, there'll be time enough for talkin' when the building's done.

Indeed. Let's get on with it then.

InfoWorld editor has a letter this week about how dialogues started online shape the content of the magazine.

He describes the effectiveness of Jon Udell's blogging techniques to practise a new model of hybrid print/online journalism using InfoWorld cover story about Microsoft's decision to ship Longhorn as late as 2007 as an example:

Jon was troubled by some of the design decisions he heard coming out of Redmond. So on June 2, 2004, he posted the first of a three-part series on his blog, challenging everything from the wisdom of WinFS (Longhorn’s proposed relational-database-driven, search-centric file system) to the need for Avalon, the new proprietary GUI.

By June 9, when Jon posted his third installment, "Avalon’s enterprise mission", the blogosphere was abuzz with informed responses from knowledgeable insiders.

The editor concludes:

Although Jon has been plying the online-to-print feedback loop since 1996 (when the medium was a newsgroup, not a blog, he says), his article represents perhaps the most realized, and successful, version of that vision. Other journalists are sure to follow.

via Scobleizer

Jeff Jarvis's testimony of the first glimpses of moving from the fringe shadows to basking in the attention of the mainstream.

And I report from the front that I am no longer treated like Spiderman in the Bugle: as a menace. There is a recent and refreshing openness to weblogs and citizens' media among the media big boys.

Well, it's more than that. It's fear. I gave a spiel on technology and the newsroom -- about more than just weblogs, but it turned into a discussion of just weblogs -- and at our closing session, half the participants said they were awakened about blogs and even frightened of being left behind in this blog thing.

The blog entry, a veritable blogopotamus, is about Transparency and the news and full of fascinating observations. It may be about news business and journalism but that is mainly because the industry has been at the first to get really affected by the emergence of blogs. The whole discussion about transparency will come to businesses as well. It is already being forced top down, in the usual cumbersome and damaging manner, by regulation, e.g. Sarbanes-Oxley Act. There are other forces that drive the need for transparency, accountabiliy and trust in business and as A VC blog noted there is a movement toward human freedom in business that may be as fundamental as democracy was in government 200 years ago...

Again, read the whole thing.

Last night, Adriana and Perry and I skipped up the road to the House of Commons for the launch of the Hansard Society's new report on political blogging. There is much that can be said about the report itself, but much more interesting and valuable to me were - surprise, surprise - the conversations I had with some of the people at the event. There were a lot of familiar faces - there always seems to be some kind of blogging event happening at Parliament - but also some I had never met. In the middle of a chat with one attendee, he said to me:

No offence to what you do, but it seems as if blogging would be a good shortcut for a company that wanted to talk to its customers.

I think I had a six mile smile on my face when I heard that. Far from being offended, I was happy to see that this stuff really is not as difficult to understand as a lot of people seem to want to make it.

Yes, blogging is a fantastic way for companies to talk with their customers. Of course it is. But there is nothing wrong with the fact that it is an easier, more efficient way of doing that. Far from it - that is what blogging for businesses is all about. There are no bonus points for doing things the hard way. More to the point, there are bonus points for doing things the right way.

Steve Rubel posts a few good links that presumably fell through the cracks of his inbox/news reader but are worth retrieving. My favourite one is After The Lawyers, Can We Kill All PR People? I know, how predictable of me.

I would really like to believe that not all PR people are this bad, but I'm beginning to lose faith. Last year, I wrote up a longer piece about PR people who don't understand blogs and tried to do things like trick bloggers into writing about the companies they represented.

A healthy rant follows. The best bit is:

...Also, don't claim that you "did online PR before the Internet." You didn't. The internet was there before you were. This isn't difficult, but bloggers are not traditional press. While some of them may accept press releases, the fact that you can't bother to take the briefest amount of time to figure out what kind of publication we are suggests you're not so tech savvy after all.

Ouch. Check out the comments to the post, they actually identify the PR company with the pompous claim.

Referral logs are the back-end of the blogopsphere. They tell you who is hitting your site. Some of us check them and follow them through and some of us do not. When we were building up our commentary blog before hitting a decent daily readership (our hobby that we do not mix with business), we used to click through various weird looking referral links and occassionally found something interesting. Often the links lead nowhere and that was fine too. Why? Because referral link originator is not necessarily concerned about whether the 'linkee' finds it or not. If they really wanted to do that, they would use trackbacks. That is what they are for, after all.

So I was surprised to find out that Rick E Bruner expects all the links to lead somewhere that welcomes his eyeball.

tBBC is a virtual company and as such we practice what we preach. One of our services is enabling companies to understand and use internal blogs. We have a very active internal tBBC blog that we use as knowledge management, communication, brainstorming and interaction platform for those who work with us. It is fun, it is ours and it is password protected as it contains many ideas that we would like to develop further ourselves before we unleash them on the world. It is also run by a different software engine (Expression Engine), so we have daily practice with more than one blog software package and recommend our clients the best one for their particular needs. (How very professional, I hear you say. :-))

The content on the internal blog is many and varied and intented only for those we know and love. We have toyed with the idea of making it public one day, depending on interest and our situation in the future. But I digress.

Upon encountering the login screen of our internal blog, screen-shots courtesy of Rick E Bruner, Rick was confused. I cannot understand why, really. The url clearly states internalblog and the login page suggests that he is not meant to go any further. It does not take a web specialist to work that one out, surely. I mean, it does seems rather unprofessional for a blog specialist, if you ask me - not understanding trackback and not paying attention to a self-explanatory url that one is trying to access (yes, we changed the welcome page, you eagle-eyed reader)... Oh dear.

But wait, it is tBBC, who are unprofessional! Instead of taking screen-shots of our esteemed internal blog, it would have taken only a few seconds to send an email or better yet, read the damn url and make the connection. But I digress again. The reason Rick thinks we are unprofessional is because we write in a language he does not approve. Not a very 'businesslike language'. How dare we! On our internal blog! Shock, horror! End of exclamation marks.

In fact, we just love being able to say what we think, after many years of being stuck in very professional professions indeed - I confess to being a management consultant and a risk analyst in the City of London, pinstripes, cufflinks and all. Woe is me! And I am sick to death of 'professional' appearances that hide no substance.

The use of language on the log-in page was, er, harsh, and we would not have intentionally used that somewhere we would expect a customer or an outsider see it. Unless we really like them. The only way Rick or anyone could have found it was by examining their referral logs and even then it would have been obvious that it is intended for our own eyes only. In this age of political correctness, some people find the use of real world language in a work environment rather surprising, but that is the way it is. Po-faced we ain't.

We understand our clients, deliver what they need and occassionally become friends with them. Sod 'professional' appearances, whatever that means.

Yeah, we are tough like that.

Note: I am not picking a fight, honest, just addressing Rick E Bruner's blog post about us and his blunder into the innards of the blogosphere connectivity. We emailed him nice and easy, explaining the issue. He emailed back, nice and amused and gracious. This post is for those who were not privy to that email exchange. Oh yeah, and defending the 'professional' honour of tBBC and all that... Not that you care, sob.

In a response to Adriana's post calling for Odeon to fire their marketing director, a reader complains that she should have first written to the man in question, Luke Vetere, in order to converse with him. And only when that conversation had failed, the commenter says, should she have posted about his ineptitude and wrongheadedness.

If anyone out there has that kind of time, I so want to be you.

As I said to that disgruntled reader in the comments to Adriana's post:

Markets are conversations, but just as with other conversations, life is too short to waste talking to the lost causes in this game.

And believe me, we have talked to a lot of lost causes. If you laid them end to end, you could circle the earth and possibly even fill the hole in Vetere's head. One quickly comes to realise that there is no time to drag every backward-thinking, customer-disregarding marketing control freak onto the Cluetrain.

That said, if anyone else wants to volunteer for the job, have at it. Maybe the accessibility advocate who is being threatened by a lawsuit from Odeon can get Luke Vetere's contact details for you when he faces the guy in court.

Jeff Jarvis, president and creative director of Advance.net, Condé Nast's online arm, gave a presentation in Detroit to Daimler Chrysler today about citizens' media - including blogs. He has posted a bit about his experience here, and includes a link to an entry from one Daimler Chrysler internal blog, Crossbrand. The Daimler Chrysler employee who authors Crossbrand, Cleo, writes that:

I just find it hard to believe that tricking and forcing people to see ads is the way of the future. I'm all for engagement, conversations, and making what we're selling something worth talking, rather than shouting, about.

Kudos to Cleo for getting it. Now that you get it, keep spreading that meme - internally and externally.

Jeff is offering to give his presentation to anyone who wants to "hear the sermon," as he puts it. Jeff is a good guy with whom I have enjoyed conversing over the last year - about the personal, the political, and the blogworthy - and definitely one of the biggest blogevangelists you'll find outside the Big Blog Company. I know he has got plenty to say that's worth heeding, so do try to get your hands on him and his presentation if you are at all interested in the topic.

The latest column from journalist and blogger Cathy Seipp, which touches on US political news satire program The Daily Show, gives food for thought. When the field was still wide open for Democratic presidential candidates, the show's host, Jon Stewart, tried to commiserate with Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle on his competition for the nomination against eight other hopefuls. Stewart relates Daschle's reaction:

He said, 'No, it's an exciting time.' [...] And I said, 'Really? Because it seems like it's crushing you.' And at that moment he just kind of stopped, and he started to giggle. That's the moment you look for, where they're showing their humanity — if it still exists. Which in many cases, you know, it does not.

The employees of many companies seem to operate under the misconception that the more polished their demeanour in interacting with customers and other members of the public, the more easily their competence will be accepted. "I sound like I know what I'm talking about, with all my big words and confident assurances," seems to be the thought.

What these people are missing is that a hell of a lot of companies are speaking in that slick, jargon-y manner, and none of them are really fooling many people. As disillusioned as the public is with politicians and their PR-approved utterances ("Yes, I am thrilled that I have so much competition for your vote!") they are equally as disillusioned with companies and their PR-approved utterances ("Yes, we are thrilled that we have so much competition for your business!").

The fact is that it is entirely possible - easy, even - to retain your professionalism and speak in a voice that rings true with people. When my train is running late and a recorded voice comes on the loudspeaker to annouce that Train Company X "apologises for any inconvenience this may cause in the course of your journey," I know it's a scripted line. The general reaction from me and the other passengers will be a collective "Whatever." When that voice is an actual person on the actual train, who comes on the PA and says, "Sorry about this - we know it's a hassle, and we're doing everything we can to get it right, so thanks for bearing with us," I don't doubt that the message is genuine. "Well, at least someone is acknowledging what a pain this is, and is willing to talk to us like human beings."

The sad, awful thing? Any train company employee who diverted from the script, or overrode the recording with a human announcement, would likely be in big trouble with central office if his superiors caught wind of what he was doing. What that person would really deserve would be an expression of thanks or a pay rise. As Jon Stewart puts it:

All we want is one human moment.

Of course that's not really all we want, but that one little thing can mean a lot. The good news is, organisations are catching on to this all too obvious fact and using the best tool at their disposal - blogs - to express their authentic voice.

Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine disputes validity and meaning of a statement made by Mena and Benn Trott during their talk at Blogtalk as reported by Jane Perrone on the Guardian blog. (There seem to be no permalinks to individual posts there so in my book it does not meet at least the minimal requirement for a blog.)

They were saying that the 1% of 'political pundit' weblogs distort the image ofwho bloggers are, when the reality is that 99% of bloggers are not writing about political issues and arguing about ideology, but writing about their personal lives...

I don't buy the numbers but this does raise an interesting and needed queston: How many blogs are intended for public consumption? How many are media and how many are communication? The number of media blogs will continue to grow but so will the disparity as this, the world's easiest publishing tool, is used for publishing anything, even shopping lists.

The fact that all these different uses are made of the same tool says nothing about any of those uses. That is, just because novelists and secretaries used typewriters, nobody assumed they were all writing when they typed. So it's meaningless to look at percentages of total blog tool use and draw conclusions. What will be meaningful is to separate media from communication and then look at how many there are, what traffic and audience they get, and what subjects they cover.

Exactly, blogs are tools. Even if 99% were kitty-blogs (a blog recording feeding of the author's cat as the highlight of his/her day), one effective blog is enough to demonstrate that it can be a potent tool put to other uses. And we have a lot more than one to show that.

Om Malik is right - FCC Chairman Michael Powell's pseudo-blog format is not a blog.

If you are going to blog, well start a weblog at fcc.gov. In other words, we should limit the confusion to policy and not bring it to the blog-world. And in case someone insists on calling your statement a blog, remind them not to put the following as a footnote - it takes away any pretension of authenticity. Side note to news agencies: please check with webloggers on the definition of a weblog.

It was obvious that once blogs start reaching the mainstream, there will be people who will use the term blog as a buzzword to appear more cool or more ingratiating to their audience. I guess we should rejoice then. Not so - without proper understanding of blogs as a format or style or community, these people are annoying to those who have made the blogosphere a comfortable place to spend a large portion of our free time. Not because we are some sort of 'guardians' of true blogging but because we understand what make the blogosphere tick. Some of us are struggling to think about it further and put it to words. And some put it to work...

Pseudo-blogs are deeply frustrating, as we are aware of the misconceptions and lack of understanding of blog as a medium, which really do not need to be deepened further. Explaining the full impact of blogging is complex enough as it is.

Steve Rubel points out a report released last week by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

In certain circumstances for certain populations, the Internet has its appeal because it is seen as a more abundant source of information, and in some sense a source of information that you can't get in the mainstream news," said Lee Rainie, director of the project.

Another interesting piece of information was by Jay Rosen:

People who use the Internet are more approving of things found on the Internet, and others are more likely to rely on the mainstream news media. If you don't use the Internet, your opinion of it is going to be very different than if you do.

Dana Blankenhorn remarks on what he thinks is the biggest change in blogging [which] is going unremarked: Group blogs are replacing individual efforts.

Long story short. Turning blogs into group efforts is one step down the road toward making them professional. The next step - and it's a vital step - is finding a business model for blogging that works, that doesn't involve begging, and that enables growth.

Looking at blogs as a journalistic or commentary media, independent and unattached, the business model is indeed not forthcoming. At this stage, blogging is a hobby. We think the next stage is to use blogs as a medium for those who have and need something to say to their audiences. Companies are fine candidates for such distribution of the power of publishing and we want to help them find and maintain their own voice.

The group blogs Dana mentions are a different proposition, they act almost as an alternative, complementary media to the traditional ones. (To be honest, the business model of the traditional media does not strike me as worthy of emulating.) I think some revenue model will emerge, remember, we are now at the beginnings of the whole blogging phenomenon.

Doc Searls is on the roll posting a typical email from a PR person, who typically works for an outside agency, and typically has no real clue about what the client company makes.

Doc,

I see the theme for the September issue of Linux Journal is wireless communications. Our client, WiFear, makes a FIPS (Federal Innovation Progress Standard)-certified FearWall™ that effectively controls unwanted hacker intrusions within trusted enterprise context systems. They may be able to provide you with insights about data magnet downtime vulnerabilities and IT degaussing framework risks over both short and long term dynamic audit fraction samples.

For many years, industry requirements have enacted confidential standards surrounding conformance practices that only recently have begun to approach unforced compliance with Pitt-Staple-Bargas (PSB) requirements. Most competing products still fall short of Government Reform Enterprise Protrusion Reduction Act (GREPRA) standards, even once those are known.

WiFear's FearWall and SmallBox™ flagship products are used in many enterprises to effectively limit secure intrusion by mandated inspection regimes, which is why they have become recognized worldwide as the leading feature retention player in their segment.

I'd like to set up an interview for you with Zdb Lrfmstrdl, the co-founder and interim CTO of WiFear, to discuss any of the topics I just listed, or to show you how FearWall can serve as the cornerstone of any company's wireless prevention integration strategy.

Regards,
Carter Offnow
Lettice Gettace & Trubble
Ph: 499-335-8766
Fx: 499-335-8799

The real fun starts though when Doc Searls offers advice on how to go about writing a letter like this.

1. Leverage only the most highly refined internally-created marketing bullshit as source material. Ignore anything from engineering or other honest and reliable sources.
2. Pad the text with references to obscure regulatory bullshit, bogus market status, and other jive that nobody, including whoever orginated it, fully understands.
3. Show no evidence of having a meaningful relationship with anybody at the client company other than nameless marketing factota, in spite of being granted apparent permission to set up interviews with actual company executives.
4. Forget that a monthly magazine works three months out, at the very least; not two or less.
5. Show no interest in what the editor receiving the email has written in the past.
6. Show no interest in the editor's magazine, other than one item on an editorial calendar.
7. Provide no links, to anything.
8. Show no awareness that the Web even exists, much less serves as a useful source of information for anybody, much less an editor who probably spends his or her life looking stuff up on it, when he or she isn't busy also writing on it.
9. Always write as if you relied entirely on BuzzPhraser for content.
10. Or Dack's Web Economy Bullshit Generator...

Fun's over, now is the time for a serious point to be made - five years after Cluetrain technology PR has not learnt anything despite being unmasked and mocked so effectively. I suppose they must have learnt something - how to keep their clients believing that they are getting value for their PR buck.

Halley Suitt revisits a case study, A Blogger in their midst, she wrote almost a year ago for Harvard Business Review. What she says is both very interesting and encouraging:

The piece I wrote last year in Harvard Business Review was a case study of a company trying to deal with their worst nightmare - a smart, loudmouthy, well-loved, radical weblogger as an employee. Even if your company was in this kind of a pickle, I'd still vote to keep the weblog and see what good might come of it.

First I think blogs come as close as anything to fresh word-of-mouth buzz marketing and so I think there's much more upside than downside to having a company blog.

That said, I think you really have to bite the bullet and let someone who really may not always agree with you in the company, do your blogging.

If you have to vote for someone with a fresh voice and real criticism of the powers that be within your company OR a dead-voiced PR corporate communications blog, always pick fresh - it's like vegetables. You may have to dodge some bullets or stamp out some fires thanks to that kind of blogger, but the trade-off is worth it. The trade-off is a voice of great intimacy and knowledge talking about your product or service directly to your customers.

Absolutely, this is the 'paradox' of blogs' penetration into the business world - blogs are, among other things, a tool for creating a brand, maintaining customers' attention and affection. And as such appear to be under the domain of the marketing and PR departments, especially in the context of business-as usual. However, an authentic voice will not materialise unless they delve deep into the company itself and its true value - employees.

In theory, there is no reason why clued-up PR people cannot blog on company's behalf but in my experience this is bound to backfire unless PR and marketing people are duly de-programmed of decades of interruption marketing.

PR and marketing departments need all the control they can get to force the rest of the company to be 'on-message', which makes it impossible for them to blog. Blogs are a very different species of communication...

But what's really going on is establishing word-of-mouth intimacy based on a bedrock of credibility. I'm sorry, but if you think advertising on TV, on the radio, in newspapers, in magazines or even on the sides of buses can do this - you're wrong. They may create brand awareness of your brand, but they don't create brand lust.

A good blog that allows for an honest consideration of the product, the market, the industry where that product lives and dies and gives useful information to customers is beyond amazing in this world of phony-baloney advertising. I've seen my kid since age 5 know that most of the commericals on TV are completely bogus and enjoy throwing things at the screen when they are on.

Meet the new generation, which I hope is going to be much worse for marketing and advertising industry than the most sweat-breaking nightmare of a Chief Marketing Officer.

... and the reason for that will be that blogs will be the internet, rather than just a differentiated part of it. The process is already observable because many of the people who read blogs are not actually aware that they are reading blogs. To them the difference between a website and a blog is not obvious, they just know that "some websites are updated much more often, and those are the ones I read and come back to". People do not read blogs because they are blogs, but rather because they are manifestly better than static websites.

In the foreseeable future the disintermediation of the 'webmaster' will be almost complete and a new generation of people who hardly know any html at all will be putting content on the internet. Either 'website' and 'blog' will eventually become synonyms, or one will just replace the other with all websites being what used to be called a 'blog'.

Blogs are the future of the internet but they may or not still be called blogs. But a rose by any other name...

Mmmm....it smells of blog

Yesterday, in a conversation, I mentioned a recent wave of Cluetrain buzz. Here is some more of the Cluetrain revival - and a wonderful rant calling for a second edition to boot:

Since the publication of the Cluetrain Manifesto, the world survived the flipping of the millenium digits, the bull market ended, the radical right wing revolution rode a pendulum swing of popular support, blogging tools and syndication emerged, the triples based semantic readjustment of the web begtan, Internet2 got well on its way to showing us the potential of unlimited bandwidth, DSL provisioning became so standardized and profitable that even the telcos could make money at it... globalization drove a lot of off shore outsourcing of services from the USA, and SPAM... god, has SPAM ever found a home in our hearts and minds.

Recent conversations have turned on digital identity, Open Source, GNU and the creative commons, content management, syndication, wireless, micropayments, and RFID. The hydrogen economy has peeked at us from around the corner and ATT has lassoed the stupid network and is trying to take it away from its birth parents.

Conversation killers like Microsoft, SCO, and Dave Winer's condition have emerged to suck up tens of thousands of person hours of productivity. But beneath that there has been a carnival flourishing, with marks on the midway buying iPods and eating cotton candy, while the show goes on in the main tent: some of the best writing we've ever seen emerging on the "blogs," Flash animations and new cyber forms of art and erudition... conferences at the University of Chicago and the University of California... the struggle with the forces of repression to hold keep the Electronic Frontier open, geeks subverting corporate hierarchies with a tool set that includes old standards like Perl and MySQL and emerging scripting and database tools that I haven't heard the acronyms for.

I think I need a second edition of Cluetrain... I need these people to help me focus on what's happening, what's possible, and where we might be going from here.

A first prize for understanding all the allusions and references in the post.

Just a quick follow up from last week's post on the blogosphere-clueless Netflix. HackingNetflix was contacted by their PR wonks:

I had a very informal chat with Netflix. Based on my prior attempts to establish a dialog (Bloggers & Corporate Public Relations Departments), I was surprised by an e-mail and then a conversation with representatives from Netflix.

Netflix, like most companies, has limited resources and bandwidth, but they are working on a strategy to reach out to the online community. They are very aware of the blogs and Web sites that discuss Netflix, and are listening to the chat rooms where we complain about, criticize, and compliment them.

They do get it. We just have to give them some time to figure out what to do with us.

Hm, I am not so sure that they 'get it'. You don't need to have a 'strategy to reach out to the online community', for chrissake. It's very simple - start having a conversation and do not send snotty letters/emails to bloggers that want to talk to you.

via Micro Persuasion

Danah Boyd puts the frustrations, sorry, challenges, we face every day in trying to bring the benefits of blogging to companies into words.

What is special (and magnificently more frustrating) about blogs is that they stem from many metaphors, including newspapers/magazines, journals/diaries, and log notebooks. No wonder people are up in arms screaming that it’s not like a newspaper, it's like a diary! or vice versa. They're both right and wrong. If you're stuck in a metaphoric understanding of blogging, the conflicting metaphors are problematic and discount your approach to the system.

Explaining blogs to people who never heard of them or only know them within particular and narrow context, such as journal blogs or political commentary blogs, is sometimes very hard indeed. This is because there are two aspects to a blog - the format & style and the social network. The first includes format features such as permalink, trackback, comments, blogroll, archives etc and the second is the blogosphere. The latter follows from the former and therefore we believe that it is possible to define a blog at least in a sort of minimalist fashion.

As a rule of thumb, we say that if you cannot link to individual articles, it is not a blog. Permalink rules. Otherwise, the format is that of a blog, at the most rudimentary level. There is a lot more to the blog format, of course, but that is the minimum. The trick is to explain just how the particular format features and other blog functionality such as RSS gave rise to the blogosphere phenomenon and to many other aspects of online communication. Most people tend to judge a new medium according to the old one it may be vaguely replacing, no matter how different the new medium actually is. It takes time for them to see the full extend of the difference.

Now that most people are on email, it is rare to have to explain that form. But when people were starting up, it was confusing. My grandparents thought that i couldn’t write because my emails were strewn with spelling errors, lacked capitalization and were often fragments. Nowadays, they get it because they get that email is different than letters.

We often talk amongst ourselves how many people don't 'get' blogs and internet. It is hard to explain what exactly that it is and we are working on it, since we do want to avoid looking like a bunch of cliquey teenagers. But it's good to see Danah using the same point.

With blogging and YASNS, people haven't "gotten it" yet. Even many of the people creating these technologies still think that they're building out the metaphors. Of course, if they stay trapped in the metaphor, they're doomed to failure. It is crucial to understand that YASNS and blogs are different than their metaphoric precursors.

I agree with Danah's conclusion - the best solution is to be a practitioner. It shows you a different perspective on things that you can certainly grasp intellectually but their long term effect or the impact on a particular individual needs sometimes to be experienced to be believed. That is why social software, networking and other emergent technologies and phenomena have a hard time demonstrating tangible impact.

This is precisely why it's bloody hard to study/discuss these technologies without being a practitioner. Distance is valuable as a researcher, but it's also limiting. You need to engage with the culture at a deep level in order to study it. Because digital technology cultures are so peculiar, you need to be involved at an intimate level. Being a lurker is just not the same. It is the practice of engaging with these technologies that makes you able to move beyond the metaphor.

I think that the kind of communications and social interaction that digital technology has enabled so far is in its infancy. To me it's self-evident that the long-term impact of all this on the way people interact, ideas are generated and disseminated will be enormous, we are seeing only the second wave of the social impact of such technology. Or more like 1.2 wave.

I have to confess to using a metaphor when it comes to blogs too, albeit a defensive one. Whenever people say that blogging will not amount to much because there are just sooo many bad and pointless blogs, I like to ask them back that just because there are a vast number of trashy books, printing press is not such an impressive invention after all. Something tells me that Guttenberg must have heard the argument...

The good news, at least you can't 'burn' blogs... well, not yet at any rate.

The editor of CNet.com, Charles Cooper, has an article about political blogs and their bloggers being invited to Democratic Party convention.

The Democrats plan to invite a limited number of bloggers to their summer political convention in Boston. A Republican spokesman quoted by the Associated Press says the GOP is still thinking about what it wants to do. My hunch is that they'll do pretty much the same as the Democrats. And why not? This is the best guarantee of "positive" coverage since the spinmeisters in the Pentagon came up with the idea of embedding reporters with the troops fighting in Iraq.

However, he has no delusions about the attempts of the politicos to manipulate blogosphere to control the 'message'.

"You've got to closely watch what they do," a political consultant recently told me, adding that campaigns can't afford to adopt a casual approach to blogs that pop up during races. "Some of them are really crazy."

If not crazy, then agitated. If not agitated, definitely hostile. And if not hostile, then most assuredly independent. Such may be the attributes of blogging democracy, but it sure ain't what political professionals want to unleash into the midst of their media moment of the summer.

Ignoring the fact that this is exactly what God created bloggers for, why would a blogger want to blend in with other media? Credibility is the main asset each one of us has, our declared bias together with content valuable to some audience out there, is what makes blogging one of the most interesting phenomena on internet. Lose that and blogs are where indymedia and other 'alternative' channels have gone before.

Charles Cooper correctly points out that the plan will inevitably boomerang.

Do you really believe that bloggers with legitimate street reps won't scream bloody murder? The reality is that the parties will get skewered--rightfully--for manipulating these oh-so-shiny cyberprops when they'd be better served by inviting folks of an independent bent.

His conclusion is ominous for those who want to use blogs as another medium for their carefully crafted 'message':

Still, in a word that has raised agitprop to an art, I don't take anything at face value anymore.

Blogs are a credibility machine for those who are happy for their authentic voice to be heard.

Nick Denton of Gawker, Gizmodo (etc. etc.) fame is perhaps the best known face on the commercial blog scene and certainly the most quoted these days. I also think he is quite incorrect in his understanding of why people read blogs, which means I think his business model is not one I would care to follow myself. Do I think all of what the redoubtable Denton does is wrong? No, not at all, but I do not really think the foremost advocate of blogging-for-business really understand blogs that well and I do not think he understand the blogosphere at all.

Most people do not look at something because they want to have advertisements shoved in front of them. Old style 'interruption marketing' might work when people have few options, say just a few TV channels, and are willing therefore to accept advertising as the 'price' for something else they value, but what Nick Denton seems to be saying is that there are lots of people who actually like reading ad-copy and will read blogs that are just well packaged advertisements (or 'advertainment' if you prefer) when the Internet is awash with places giving content away and doing no such thing. I simply do not believe that is true. Yet I do believe that there is a role for commercial blogging.

People read blogs to get a different perspective, even if they do not always agree with it. If people want to read a blog which is largely advertisement dressed up in well written urban hip and blog-speak rather begs the question, why would such a person not just stick to established media channels which are filled with endless marketing? Are blog readers really so dim as to not pick out the fact they are just being handed the same old interruption marketing message dressed up in a slightly different way?

I think for a commercial blog to succeed, it must do the same thing as a successful non-commercial blog, and that means it must be interesting and credible to its audience. In fact I would say a blog is a 'credibility machine'. To use the words of the Cluetrain Manifesto, a blog must speak with the author's authentic voice if it is to be believed... and it is a rare company indeed who can be authentic if all people hear from them is what their marketing and PR department say.

For companies and other institutions to blog successfully, and people like Macromedia, The Adam Smith Institute, Microsoft and others do indeed blog successfully, then they actually have to speak in ways that are a long way from a press release that has been carefully worded by the PR department, and a million miles away from copy produced by an advertising agency. No one actually believes that crap any more and sticking it on a blog just makes it stand out like poop on a pool table.

No, if a company wants to blog, it needs to decide that it wants to be forthright and talk to people like human beings... if you have desirable or difficult or complex products and have interesting things to say about them, people might actually be interested in hearing what you have to say if you can convince them you are not just parroting the same old sales pitches served up for the Google Generation.

Cross-posted from Samizdata.net

The Seattle Times reports that the world's richest man may start his own blog, one of those online diaries that have been the rage among techies for the past three or four years.

Bill's blog won't be all business, either. He's expected to share personal details such as tidbits from recent vacations, according to tech pundit Mary Jo Foley's Microsoft Watch newsletter. Citing unnamed sources, she reported yesterday that Gates is about to start blogging "real soon now."

Microsoft spokesman Mark Murray noted that Gates talked up blogging at gathering of executives in Redmond last month.

Bill and the company are very enthusiastic about blogging. Bill talked a lot about the power and potential of blogging at the CEO Summit and the advantages it gives to communicating and sharing information with a wide range of potential audiences.

Now 44 percent of U.S. Internet users contributed content to the Web, and 2 percent maintain their own blogs, according to a February study by the Pew Internet & American Life research project. With about 128 million adult Internet users in the country, that would mean there are more than 2.5 million blogs.

Corporations, especially software companies in the Silicon Valley, embraced blogs as a way to interact with their customers.

I used to liked Netflix. Why? Well, I read about them in the Economist's e-commerce survey, how their business model is disrupting large film rental businesses such as Blockbusters. Good. We are all for disruption by progress. In the same article, it was mentioned that they would be expanding to the UK. I was counting the days to signing up for their service. Well, ok, not really, but I was keeping an eye on it as I am waiting for a similar rental model in the UK. [A friend tells me that there is one called lovefilm.com, bye-bye Blockbusters and Prime Time Video...]

There is a popular blog, HackingNetflix, run by a former PR professional, who approached the Netflix PR team. Twice. Once to ask to be added to the press list. The second time for an interview with a human twist, asking questions about Netflix that customers do not see on their site. He was declined both times. You can see the email from the PR department here.

I think most companies don’t get blogs yet. I know Netflix public relations is concerned with making USA Today and the New York Times happy, but how can you ignore a community that has tens of thousands of your customers? I had 1,000 people visit my site today, plus an untold number that read my site through RSS and Atom feeds. If you do the math it’s easily 20 – 30,000 readers a month (and growing!).

I know I'm not alone. It’s hard to get companies to take bloggers seriously. I really like Netflix, but they are slowly withdrawing, closing themselves off from their customers (they recently removed their phone numbers from the site). Instead, companies should be embracing these online communities, comprised mostly of the highly desired "early adopters2 that evangelize products to the general population.

He is absolutely right and I hope this spreads far enough for Netflix to hear. Steve Rubel, Scoble and Dave Winer all mentioned this on their blogs. I will be watching out for any feedback.

I have always believed that blogs are the best available tool for companies to have a conversation with their customers at the moment. In a sense, letting your employees to talk directly with your customers is about breaking down the barrier created between the company as a collective entity and its markets and policed by PR and marketing departments.

Tearing down the wall is our battle cry and that is why this quote from BusinessWeek about blogs as the latest guerilla marketing tool kit for organisation is right up our street.

Until recently, the thought of employees blabbing freely to the masses about their work on company time - without the suits from PR hovering over them to stay "on message" - would have created panic in the executive suite. But in the past year, employee blogs have begun to multiply across Corporate America - and a growing number of companies approve....In an era of fragmented media, with companies struggling to get their message out any which way, blogs are becoming a kind of undercover megaphone. One way to think of them is as the latest guerrilla marketing tool, a new kind of brand bait.

We see our mission as convincing companies that 'marketing by megaphone' does not work and may actually be counter-productive. We also want to get across to them that there are other ways of making themselves seen and heard and that they do not have to wait until the McDonald's of this world decide to spurn monolithic marketing and come up with "brand journalism"...

via Robin Good

Robin Good on videoblogging:

Videoblogging maybe the next small evolutionary step, of independent publishers, propping up just around the corner. For what I can see and understand the technology is all in place and what we really need is only a brave new company to take this to the mainstream. The ease of use, compatibility and large installed base of the Macromedia Flash plugin inside browsers everywhere makes this very technology the best candidate out there for one-click videoblogging. How long more will we have to wait?

I realise that Robin Good is asking for someone to produce a blog software designed for videoblogs. To us, videoblogging is the fun stuff that we are waiting for too. Well, we have been keeping videoblogging in mind for some time, the trouble is that most of our clients and potential clients are just becoming familiar with blogs and blogosphere. We are looking forward to a client who will want all the juicy stuff - photoblogging, moblogging, videoblogging, the lot. In the meantime, we keep an eye on the development and dream of things that move...

Blog Herald earlier this month announed that Jason Calacanis has launched a new blog titled "Autoblog" on the subject of automobiles.

Never one for great fanfare Calacanis simply announced the new blog by email with the simple words: "We're happy to announce the launch of our latest blog today: I think you can guess what it’s about". Although his stable of blogs has not received as much publicity as that or rival Nick Denton of Gawker Media, and has been previously heading in the direction of quantity over top quality, he deserves credit where credit's due on this one, with the blog being aesthetically pleasing, having dropped the dowdy look of many of the Weblogs inc blogs (but keeping the proforma navigation set) and seems full of interesting vehicle information. Looks like he's on a winner.

No, he is not. Cars are one of the ideal subject for blogs and car manufacturers would do well to talk to their customers about the products that they already are talking about anyway. Blogs need an audience and a mission. Calacanis blogs (and Denton's for that matter) have a mission, sell as much advertising as they can by generating hits for their blogs. Can't blame them for trying, but it shows the fundamental misunderstanding of blog audiences, individuals that feel they are getting something valuable and a distinctive alternative to professional or industry media and publications.

There is something pathetic about this blurb on Autoblog:

Autoblog is a blog — an online magazine — obsessively covering the auto industry. We aren't paid to mention specific products and we don't get to keep all of the cool stuff you see here. We just love cars. All advertising will be clearly labeled as advertising.

To me this screams hey, we are a pukka blog, we are in and hip and cool! Read us, we are just as much fun as all these other blogs. But maybe it's just me. Just because I can't stand it, does not mean that many people won't read it and the Calacanises and Dentons of this world will get enough revenue to have their weblog models validated... However, I think I will stick to my idea of using blogs to spread ideas and memes by conversations.

Jeff Jarvis compares Sean Bonner's metblogs to sausage:

... and you know what the say about watching sausage being made.

According to the blurb on their site, metblogs offer hyper-local look at what's going on in the city. Hmm, Mr Jarvis is right about why their contents are equally unappealing as that of a sausage.

A blog, like any media thing, has to deliver something of value to its audience or it won't have an audience.

The faux blogs do not offer value for value, all they want is your eyeball, just like the traditional interruption marketing. They put a veneer of 'engagement' on it, which show lack of respect for their audience. Let's see what happens to such blogs. I guess they will be the one mentioned in the press as examples of corporate blogging...

Update: In earlier version of this post, I had a meaty go at Calacanis blogs as they seemed to be implied by Jeff Jarvis. Apparently, Jeff Jarvis meant Sean Bonner's metro blogs, not Calacanis blogs. I must agree to differ, my point applies for both. Yeah, I am tought like that.

Adrants shares the good news that contrary to popular belief and now proven by a study, webloggers and those who read then are not all teenage girls whining about their boyfriends.

A recent study by BlogAds (in which Adrants participated) of 17,159 blog site visitors found 61 percent are over the age of 30 and 40 percent have households incomes of $90K or above. BlogAds Founder Henry Copeland says:

The impression has been that the typical blog reader is a college student with an entry-level job, and therefore not an incredibly desirable demographic unless you're trying to sell beer.

What this probably means is proliferation of pseudo-blog, where companies will try to 'crack' this new phenomenon and jump on the bandwagon by calling their efforts 'blogs'. First, they would have to get a clue.

AdAge.com looks at Nike's new "Art of Speed" blog on gawker.com that it calls a public experiment that other marketers will watch closely.

The Art of Speed, which appeared earlier this month, showcases the work of 15 innovative filmmakers to interpret the idea of speed -- a branding concept Nike is pushing leading up to the Olympics. It was masterminded by interactive shop RG/A, which developed the site, the trailer and the introduction of nikelab.com. While R/GA is responsible for the overall Art of Speed campaign, creative for the blog is handled by Gawker's creative team.

The article points out that Art of Speed lacks the typical personal voice and diary-like qualities that would normally earn the moniker "blog." But that apparently is not necessarily a problem, according to Colleen DeCourcy, executive creative director at online communications agency Organic, as long as gawker retains its credibility. Go figure:

Gawker's credibility is what really matters. In some circles, Gawker has more authenticity than Nike. That's why blogs really work for advertisers, because of the credibility of the blog.

Also, according to the article Nike is not the only net-savvy marketer trying to take advantage of the blog upswing. Microsoft is working on MSN Blogbot, which presents relevant blogs to consumers in response to search queries, said Becky Emmett, an MSN spokeswoman. And Oxygen Media launched a blog to promote its new show Good Girls Don't.

I had a look at it earlier today. It sucks. No, really.

The conclusion is ponderous:

Whether blogs will develop into a happening medium for big brands depends on whether they can figure out how to use the sites in the same spirit readers do.

And Ms. DeCourcy strikes gold with this one:

Marketers can't really take part in the dialogue on the blog because it would be inauthentic. It's like plastic surgery: You can tell fake conversations.

I think I like her.

Yeah, that's what we think, too. But don't take our word for it. Dana Blankenhorn, whom I consider to be something of a superstar in business journalism, has this to say:

Every site ought to be a blog.

[...]

A blog defines a template with dynamic content in the center and static content along the sides. Most blogs are built on a database metaphor, to make searching for items easy. Why couldn't those be product searches?

The best blog packages are also scalable. They enable community as a basic function. Both corporate and political sites still use static home pages and reserve the "blog" for an inside page. As a result, as in the Dean campaign, people simply bypass the home page and bookmark the blog.

What people most want in pages they bookmark is dynamic content. They want to know that each time they hit the page there will be something new to see. Blogging software enables just that. The blogging metaphor also makes it simple to build a site that's dynamic, scalable and easy-to-maintain. So why aren't big companies doing this?

Blankenhorn blames the media's portrayal of blogs as the output of a bunch of sad, navel-gazing nerds with nothing better to do than post photos of their sixteen cats or write about the last argument they had with their girlfriend. As a result, blogging has a bad image as a self-indulgent hobby that's the sole domain of amateurs.

That certainly plays a role in the slow uptake of corporate blogs. But there's a bit more to it than that, and - as is often the case when dealing with business - wacky priorities and hesitation to break away from the herd both figure largely.

Read More »

Sun Microsystems, in an effort to engage in genuine, valuable two-way communication with customers and developers, has introduced free-for-all employee blogging at blogs.sun.com.

While this is the first time Sun has allowed and encouraged all members of staff to start their own blogs on the corporate website, some employees have already been blogging for a year on the company's Java.net site.

Tim Bray, one of the creators of XML, has been at the forefront of Sun's move towards widespread corporate blogging. As he puts it:

"The language of marketing is the language of faceless corporations, and most people don’t like it," Bray said. "I think the company got a little bit of a case of 'big company' disease. It’s hard for a big company to be good at communication."

Well, it's hard for a big company to be good at communication when it relies on corporate-speak and interruption methods of trying to extract feedback from customers. But engaging people via blogging, using an authentic, human voice, is a truly interactive and highly effective way for any company -- regardless of size -- to communicate.

The Institute of Directors recently published, in conjunction with KPMG, a guide called Foundations for Growth: Key Questions for the Ambitious Board. (Unfortunately, this publication was produced for IoD members only, and so no online version is available.) In it, they discuss the European Union’s information and consultation directive (ICD), which will be phased in from March 2005. The regulation mandates that "employees have a right to two-way communication on the things that affect them". Rather than bemoaning the imposition of the new law, the IoD sees this as a prime opportunity for employers, saying:

The directive should not be seen as a bureaucratic burden but as the trigger for a review of systems of employee communication. The more companies operate remotely, the more people work off-site, the greater the risk that interaction is lost. The ICD provides a timely opportunity for engagement.

Internal blogs are, of course, an excellent way of engaging employees and communicating not just the things that the law requires their employers to keep them informed of, but also those things that will make people feel valued.

And if they feel valued, they will work better, harder, and with the intention to stick with the company that makes them feel that way. As Joanna Higgins, editor of the IoD's Director magazine writes:

Inspired leadership is not about making employees happy, it’s about making them engaged at work.

The good news is that, with blogs, employers have the ability to do both.

An article about blogs in workplace and their hidden dangers when workers go too far.

Well, for start I don't think the dangers of workers going too far are limited to blogs and the ones specific to blogs are not that hidden. However, it is worth noting that the weblogs as tools can be applied pretty much anywhere where information and its timeliness matters.

Web logs also are emerging as powerful workplace tools, helping workers stay on top of their professions, as well as helping organizations manage team projects.

But let's get the bad stuff out of the way first:

It's not all sweetness and light, however. Used unwisely, blogging can cost you your job. Last month, a low-level staff member in a U.S. Senate office was fired after posting "unsuitable and offensive material to an Internet Weblog." Jessica Cutler, 24, had blogged about her sexual encounters with unnamed officials.

Last fall, Microsoft contract worker Michael Hanscom was fired after he posted a photo on his blog of Apple computers being delivered to a Microsoft loading dock.

In 2002, popular Web blogger Heather Armstrong (dooce.com) reported being fired for remarks she posted about her company, even though "I had never mentioned the company or any employee by name."

And according to Rebecca Blood of San Francisco (rebeccablood.net), author of The Weblog Handbook, (Perseus, 2002) at least one person she knows was not hired for a position because "the people at the new job found out she was complaining about her present employer" on her blog.

Oh, dear. The easiest way to get bloggers to blog 'in synch' with your company is to make your company get a clue and of course, let the Big Blog Company sort out the rest...

Giles Turnbull spoke to the authors of the seminal Cluetrain Manifesto - five years after it first appeared online.

The Manifesto set sparks flying among the internet community when it first appeared online in April 1999. Its 95 theses were a direct challenge to the business world. "Markets are conversations," the first stated. Wise up, corporations. Your customers are talking to each other, and laughing. At you.

Thanks to the internet, people were now able to communicate with one another - comparing products, prices and services - faster than corporations could churn out press releases. The interconnected market was fast becoming smarter and more adaptable. In a business environment dominated by marketing campaigns and press releases, there were real people connecting to one another, holding conversations inside and outside the accepted edges of their organisations. The implication was that the wise company chairman or chief executive had to take swift action to free up these human voices. A clued-up company would engage in the online discussion, not ignore it.

The question is has anything changed in the last five years? Was Cluetrain on time? This is important to us, as the Big Blog Company is based on the principle that a person with a human voice speaking from within a company would have far more impact on that company's reputation than a multimillion dollar public relations campaign and that companies have to relinquish some, if not all, control of their carefully fostered image, and let their employees talk directly to the public.

Doc Searls quotes some 'clueful' examples such as Apple's direct retail stores where people can bring their broken down computers. Microsoft that has 500 or so employees who maintain public weblogs, especially the Channel 9 site www.channel9.msdn.com, where the developers of Longhorn, the next version of Windows, engage outsiders in their conversations. Also, Google, apparently, has done many things right, including talking to users as though they are actual people. Let's propagate that phrase...

And the final, most important conclusion is the authors 'endorsement' of weblogs:

Weblogs, says Weinberger, are the unexpected proof of the Cluetrain's central idea that people are drawn to the internet because it gives everyone a voice. The only thing that prevents more companies setting up more employee-controlled weblogs is the fear of litigation. "There are genuine issues of legal accountability that need to be sorted out".

Well, we can do that. That's good news for the Big Blog Company.

The New York Times has yet another article about how blogging is not what it is cracked up to be.

Blogging is a pastime for many, even a livelihood for a few. For some, it becomes an obsession. Such bloggers often feel compelled to write several times daily and feel anxious if they don't keep up. As they spend more time hunkered over their computers, they neglect family, friends and jobs. They blog at home, at work and on the road. They blog openly or sometimes, like Mr. Wiggins, quietly so as not to call attention to their habit.

A few blogs have thousands of readers, but never have so many people written so much to be read by so few. By Jupiter Research's estimate, only 4 percent of online users read blogs.

Indeed, if a blog is likened to a conversation between a writer and readers, bloggers like Mr. Wiggins are having conversations largely with themselves.

It is amazing how they miss the point about blog being a tool, unlike Mr. Wiggins. My book analogy holds - printing press is a tool, it can produce a boring book, or a badly written book, or even a book with an appalling content but that does not decrease the value of the ability to print books or the 'habit' of book writing and book reading.

Blogs are exactly the same. The fact that some people do not use the tool to the same extend and success than others is hardly a news flash. I just wish that whose who write such pointless articles saw a bit futher than their own keyboard...

Chad Dickerson of InfoWorld writes about their internal Weblog that started as an experiment. Already, it’s indispensable...

Our internal use of Weblogs has greatly accelerated, and we’re beginning to see more tangible benefits as we’ve begun to reach a critical mass of internal contributors. At the end of March, my team held an off-site retreat and created a rolling six-month plan for IT initiatives at InfoWorld, which we posted to a Weblog available to all employees. For each month in the plan, we created a checklist of projects we would be working on and noted which ones would be completed in that month.

We also scheduled what we call "fire drills" — our internal term for the intentional failure of a specific key system to test fail-over capabilities in the event of an unexpected outage of that system. Posting this plan on a Weblog made three key things happen. First, it forced the team to strategically organize its IT initiatives into a coherent roadmap fit for broader internal consumption. Next, it created a sense of accountability for these initiatives within the IT team because we had collectively agreed on the initiatives and documented the process. Finally, posting our plan for the entire company to see helped foster a sense of accountability to our non-IT colleagues within the company.

This information is priceless and there is more....

We are in the final throws of setting up the tBBC internal blog - Real Soon Now! that will be run on Expression Engine rather than Movable Type. We already have an internal blog for another current project and it has proved to be more than the sum of its parts, so to speak. Read the whole article and note the conclusion that we need to spread to the world.

Weblogs are not just for the hard-core techies....It’s amazing how a system so simple and easy can produce such profound results.

Jon Udell about the push-pull debate:

Forget the old rules for how Internet content arrives. It's all about end-user control.

Absolutely, the end-user rules. Any product or service that attempts to restrict what the end-user can do and should do, gets what it deserves. Migration of customers to a less limiting competitor. This is where the 'new economy' is revolutionary, it turns the old business models based on control of channels to market and therefore of customer into crusty old entities chasing their own tails. Traditional marketing will be the first to go. Udell has more to say on this:

Recently I spoke with Dave Lewis, vice president of deliverability management and ISP relations at Digital Impact. His company's motto: "Making e-mail marketing more effective is our single-minded passion." In one of his online essays, entitled How to Keep B-to-B E-mail From Getting Caught in Filters, his first rule is "Get permission."

I argued that RSS does away with the need for marketers to ask our permission, for us to grant it, for marketers to play by the rules when we revoke it, and for us to trust that marketers will play by the rules. With e-mail marketing, control resides with the sender and permission is a "best practice." With RSS, control resides with the recipient and permission is an inherent property of the medium.

I feel Dave's pain. E-mail direct marketers are stuck between a rock and a hard place. They believe e-mail is necessary because it's an "intrusive" medium, yet they are forced to neuter e-mail's intrusiveness by complying with the opt-in gold standard. Unfortunately, there's no middle ground. With RSS recipients can have, and increasingly will demand, control of the channel.

Dave and I agreed on one point. "You'd be crazy not to communicate with your customers in their medium of choice," he said. My preference is RSS. Trust me with control of the channel, and I'll be more likely to trust you with my business.

Mr Gates made the news by saying exactly what we have been saying for the last year or so that blogs and syndication are a great way to 'pull' your customers to you and build up credibility.

What blogging and these notifications are about is that you make it very easy to communicate. The ultimate idea is that you should get the information you want when you want it.

Oh well, he's got a much better publicity machine... What it does mean though is that many others will suddenly start paying attention to 'blogs' and offer to set them up... As we often stress - the Big Blog Company does not 'sell' blogs, it teaches companies how to use them in talking to their customers. Microsoft is also likely to offer 'blogging' tool of its own but we should make our point before that happens.

There is a furore over popular blog publishing software Moveable Type's new licence arrangements continues to send shockwaves across the blogosphere. As it happens we adding additional non-MT software solutions anyway, but I think that what is really interesting about this incident is that trackback has truly come of age.

For those who do not known, trackback is a technology which alerts a blog that another blog has linked to a specific article.

Like many very thoughtful bloggers, I think SixApart have just taken their best weapon, pointed it right at their foot and pulled the trigger. Certainly we will be using Moveable Type more sparingly from now on.

But what really interests me is not the specifics of the future of Moveable Type software but rather the storm of hostile trackbacks have provided SixApart with magnificent and unequivocal information on what their market really thinks. The business implications for spontaneous feedback like that are almost inestimable. Of course that does not mean SixApart will correctly respond to the explosion at the core of their business model, but the fact is that the information they need to do exactly that has just landed on them in a very helpful and rather spectacular manner.

Trackback has come of age. It is now an indispensable feature for any commercially oriented blog.

You can always tell that when a new trend has taken on a degree of permanence because people start writing in-depth analyses said trend by reference to historical precendents.

Nico Maconald writes in 'The Register' about 'The Future of Weblogging'

There is much to celebrate in the development of Weblogging – but the discussion of it is often uncritical and un-ambitious. If Weblogging is the answer, as so many claim it is, what was the question? As with the discussion of electronic voting, there is an assumption that there barriers have been put in the way of a democratic and public activity. It follows from this view that the Internet in general, and Weblogging in particular, are conscious answers to these challenges.

But this isn’t the mid-nineteenth century, when the radical Chartists in Britain took advantage of developments in printing and the postal service to publish a newspaper for newly literate and radicalised masses. In that case the government of the time really did try to suppress their activity, by requiring newspapers to be licensed by the Post Office. Today, by contrast, New Labour actively solicits our participation in the ‘Big Conversation’

I think the question is as plain as a pancake: how do you make your authentic voice heard through an inchoate fog of establishment media, PR, spin and soundbites?

Read More »

Channel 9 is a new blog, or online diary, run by Microsoft programmers. Launched April 1, it features interviews with Microsoft employees, "insider" information on new products and breaking news from the software giant.

While Microsoft says the site is about "building community," it also serves another purpose - getting the company's point of view out without relying on the media. Joe Wilcox, an analyst with Jupiter Research explains:

It's using blogging to manage the message. It has an insider-y feel, but the fact is these guys are evangelists. It's more of a marketing tool than anything else.

More and more, corporations are turning to blogs as a way to reach their customers without relying on television or newspapers. Unlike news releases, blogs create a personal connection with employees, with a relaxed tone and the ability for readers to ask questions.

Macromedia, IBM and other technology companies let their employees blog about new products, the corporate environment, even hiring practices. But they also debunk rumors, counter magazine stories and promote their companies.

Blimey!

Naveen Bachwani asks if there is a case for blogs in the corporate world:

According to online resources, enterprises are now beginning to tap into the power of blogs to complement their traditional content and knowledge management processes. Enterprise-specific blogs often end up using the same user-friendly Web publishing tools available on the Net, combining them with enhanced access controls and features like search to improve their functionality.

Many organizations are also seeing the merit of using weblogs as a tool for project management. If you are managing a project, running a project weblog is a great way to collect, organize, and publish the documents and discussions involved. The chronological view offered by blogs makes it easy for every participant to be informed on a day-to-day basis. And features like category archives and XML feeds only add to their utility. Besides, it's really easy to upload relevant scraps of information—whether documents or spreadsheets or images—to each blog post. For organizations, not only do blogs offer obvious advantages over e-mail, but compared to intranets and Web sites, they are very resource friendly and easy to use.

The blogosphere is clearly here to stay.

We know that and are working on the UK companies to see the light too.

Our latest project to go live is a blogsite (blog/website hybrid, like our site for example) for cutting edge marketing firm SMLXL. Their catch phrase is 'From interruption to engagement', which is very much what commercial blogs are all about. Rather than marketing by megaphone and being an annoyance to potential customers in the process, commercial blogging offer a way to engage people in a manner more like a conversation in a marketplace. Don't just take our word for it, ask SMLXL.

PatrickWeb reminds us that One of the ways that you can tell if a new Internet technology is going to be successful is to look for skepticism.

When people begin to say the hype exceeds the reality, it means we are on the way toward the reality exceeding the hype. I am not referring to new business models that are going to make water run uphill, but rather to fundamental technologies such as the Internet itself, the Web, Java, Linux, WiFi, and others. All of those were discounted in the early days. Blogging has now entered the phase when we can be sure it will be enormously successful and change the fundamentals of how information is written, distributed, syndicated, and archived. How do I know? A recent story by The Associated Press proclaimed that "Blogging still infrequent, study finds". The study found that somewhere between2 percent and 7 percent of adult Internet users in the United States are bloggers. The implication of the story was that "only" 2-7 percent of Internet users were blogging. I find the 2-7 percent number extremely encouraging. (read more)

In 1994, the number of people using the Internet -- as a percentage of the world's population -- rounded to zero. Today there somewhere north of 500 million users. If "only" two percent of them were blogging that would be 10 million people. I think that is an extraordinary number. And "only" about 10 percent update their blogs daily. Only? How many authors update books they have written? It takes more than a year to get a book out the door. If one million people are updating their point of view daily using blogs, that too is extraordinary. We are at the early stages of something really big.

I am always puzzled by those who 'denounce' or belittle blogging. Blog is a versatile, flexible and user-friendly tool that can be used in many ways by many people or businesses. Why on earth is there a need for some journalists, media outlets or some IT geeks to periodically announce to the world that blogs are not what they are cracked up to be and they are smarter than that...?

Dan Farber of ZDNet asks:

What's all the fuss about blogging? It looks and smells mostly like writing, self-expression conveyed in a chronological format that invites comments and the inclusion of a variety of media types and links, similar to a Web page or e-newsletter. In fact, blogs (weB LOG) provide a way for non-programmers or HTML jockeys to present their writings, ramblings, diaries, rants, marketing spiel, political advocacy, research or whatever online communication with simple, yet increasingly powerful tools.

He goes through some issues and points that have been debated in the blogosphere ad nauseam, however, it is good to see a 'mainstream' publication take a positive interest in blogs. Well, where have they been?

The interesting bit for us is about blogging in business:

Similarly, some corporations are supporting the practice of blogging among employees to provide an outlet for creativity, opinion, dialog, as well as propaganda. Microsoft's most well known blogger, Robert Scoble, is a technical evangelist for Longhorn, the next version of Windows. His popular blog is not vetted by Microsoft's guardians of the faith, but he admits to consulting occasionally with public relations to make sure he isn't leaking non-disclosure information.

Yep, we know all about that. Microsoft is not the only company that has bloggers.

Amateur Hour has a post about an article in the USA Today about blogs. What is new about such article in a major media outlet is that it is neither dismissive, nor ignorant and thoughtful about both the strengths and weaknesses of blogs as a medium of amateur journalism.

As Jay Rosen, a blogger and the chairman of New York University's journalism department, puts it:

Readers are becoming writers.

Tom Bevan, a former advertising executive, turned to full-time blogging:

That's one of the fantastic things about the blogosphere and the Internet. If you have something to say that's interesting, you will eventually be heard.

Gigaom has some fascinating (well, for us bloggers, anyway) news about Jaques Vallee's passion for blogs. He is also known as the father of the internet .

Weblogs are a new form of that and I think this is what the network’s real purpose. Weblogs are much more practical than websites and people can interact. They will have a big impact on journalism and politics.

Vallee’s views are counter to many other so called experts who believe that weblogs are adding clutter to the Internet, breakdown Google and basically reducing the value of the institutional media. He believes that weblogs play a major role in this campaign, because it is the only way to find out how a particular politician thinks and reacts on an issue.

A 10-second quote on CNN does not make sense and the folks want to react to the information they get. Politicians who are in tune with this are more realistic. Howard Dean has used it effectively and I think politicians cannot hide behind press releases and press relations officers anymore.

This is interesting. To us it is obvious that blogs are a new medium that can do what websites and other forms of online communication cannot, i.e. individuality, personality and credibility. Blogs can also be many things to many people and that is one of the reason of continuing debate about the importance and impact of blogs on areas that are either ignorant of them or adversely affected by the emergence of blogging. These are interesting times in the blogosphere and may they long continue to be so.

John Patrick, president of Attitude LLC and former vice president of Internet technology at IBM has an article on weblogs in CIO insight:

Weblogs, or blogs, are, at their very least, Web pages for self-proclaimed pundits, and often are nerdy, inane and barely grammatical. But increasingly, blogs are showing up on the corporate intranet, and, when left alone by corporate censors, can energize collaboration and give new life to the concept of knowledge management.

Apart from a more general introduction of blogs that our readers are already familiar with, he also comments on knowledge management, an area that the Big Blog Company is branching out into:

Knowledge management wasn't overhyped. It was underdelivered. Blogs can potentially deliver the grassroots discussions and knowledge-sharing that top-down, corporate-sponsored efforts never could.

Our thoughts precisely...

The article is based on an interview with John Patrick and contains a few words to those know-it-alls who often talk down anything new that they have not come up with:

I think this blog phenomenon is one of those things that comes along every decade or so and gets completely underestimated by just about everybody. It's very much like what's going on with Wi-Fi now, and very much what happened with the Web ten years ago. Blogs are a whole new Internet channel, yet another example of how the Internet has made it possible for new ideas to come along and change the status quo.

I think a lot of times people see something come along and they say, "What's the big deal? We had that in 1972,"—like knowledge management or artificial intelligence. When instant messaging started, a lot of people said, "oh, this is no biggie. We had this on the mainframe in the 1960s." It's true—we did. But what makes IM different is that now we have the Internet—the widespread sharing of information. That allows for collaboration, it allows for a global effort. So it spawns many more ideas, it allows a new thought to take off like wildfire.

Stand-by for the raging element.

With apologies to Bob Dylan... We have just finished a blog for David Smith, the economics editor for The Sunday Times. Increasingly well known journalists are seeing blogging as a useful adjunct to their work and we are delighted to have been the people who brought David into the blogosphere.

David maiden blog article is entitled George Bush's scorched earth economics policy. The EconomicsUK Blog promises to be a regular stop for economists, policy wonks and politicos!

While my partners, Perry and Adriana, are wowing the crowds over in America, I am left holding the Big Blog Fort. So while they press the flesh and kiss babies on their whistle-stop tour I am sweating away in the engine-room greasing the mighty wheels of the whole operation. Which is to say, the banking bureaucracy, the VAT returns, the accounts and the invoicing.

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Well know British journalist Stephen Pollard is the latest recipient of a spiffing new Big Blog Company blog. Stephen is already well on the way to becoming one of the leading on-line journalists and we hope now that he has a proper full function blog, this process will continue.

The Adam Smith Institute, one of the world's most respected think-tanks, has just gone live with their new blog. We were delighted to be the people who were chosen to set up their blogging operation and train them in blogging 'best practice'.

We modestly predict that the Adam Smith Institute blog will quickly become a 'blog of record' for free market views across the internet.

Tonight the Big Blog Company will be attending en-mass a seminar about blogging being hosted at the Houses of Parliament in London.

It will be interesting to meet fellow members of the Blogerati in such a different context.

In case some of the people attending did not get the message, the time has been changed to slightly later (now 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm), and the venue is now the Grand Committee Room in order accommodate the larger than expected demand for seats. Entry as before will be via St Stephens Entrance, Houses of Parliament

To the extent that anyone has an opinion on blogs at all, that opinion seems fairly well divided between those who think they revolutionary new means of communication and those who find them to be a tiresome gimmick. Although not perhaps entirely co-terminously, the former tend to think that blogs are 'The Next Big Thing' and the latter tend to think that they are nothing to get excited over.

Who is right? Well, being a blogger myself it is hardly surprising to find me in the former camp but there is more than personal preference behind my optimism. See, I clearly recall a very similar debate being had about websites a decade or so ago. The lines of the debate were startlingly similar to those above i.e. those people who believed websites were the 'wave of the future' and those who assured everybody that these wretched computer-thingies were merely a passing fad and would never catch on.

It is because those latter people turned out to be so woefully wrong that Perry, Adriana and I have all nailed our colours to this mast and, like Elizabethan Adventurers, have set sail into uncharted waters in search of legendary treasure and to make our fortunes.

My turn in the Crow's Nest tonight....

But that does not mean format is not important. Some people have taken the view that blogs with comment sections are just strangely formatted forums, but I think that misses several very important distinctions.

The format of most forums is such that the starting post is just 'first amongst many'... it starts the ball rolling for discussions between readers but quickly looses its importance as the thread of the posted comments under it lengthens. A blog on the other hand, by virtue of a blog's format, gives much more prominence to the article to which the comments pertain.

As a glance at the comments section on any popular blog will show, all heavily reader commented articles will see the discussion drift off-topic. However the threaded (indented) format used in many forums, whilst adding a useful interactive organizational feature, actually encourages digression into views increasingly removed for the initiating article. The flat comment format of (most) blogs does the opposite by not according visual prominence to digressive side discussions.

Of course if interactivity is prized above all, then this digressive nature of forums is not a bug, it is a feature. I do not depreciate forums at all, far from it in fact. However Blogs, particularly commercial or punditry oriented blogs, are not trying to do exactly the same things as forums. This ability to retain more focus on the initial article is the critical feature for most blogs.

Thus a blog sacrifices by design a degree of interactivity in its format in order to keep the emphasis on the article. For this reason I tend to depreciate the use of threaded comments on blogs as I think that it detracts from the more focused core of what a commented blog is all about: discussing a specific article.