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Charlene Li of Forrester Research blogs about the new report about online marketing. The report is not free but she helpfully summarises the top three points:

• This is not the return of “The Bubble”. The growth is coming from marketers having to make tough decisions about allocating scarce advertising dollars – in many cases, funding online channels from traditional channels. Back in 1999/2000, spending often came from exuberant spending, fueled by venture money.
• It’s more than just about search. Search is great, it’s growing, but it’s not the whole story. In fact, I anticipate that search will become much more integrated into traditional brand advertising – witness what Google and Yahoo! are doing in terms of tying CPM- and CPC-based products into the same ad ordering system.
• Marketers will shift channels away from traditional channels to fund online marketing. The key is perceived effectiveness—most marketers saw traditional channels like TV and print becoming less effective over the next three years. Given the pressure marketers face to make every dollar count, they will shift spending to channels they believe are more effective. But note: this doesn’t mean a wholesale flight away from traditional media—I think it’s more of an adjustment in the marketing mix that takes into account the greater time and influence Internet use plays in our lives.

The official executive summary is not very encouraging:

Consumer broadband adoption has made the Internet a pervasive influence in users’ lives. Marketers have responded by pushing more of their budgets online, especially into search advertising, display ads, and rich media TV-style ads. The $26 billion that marketers will spend in 2010 in online display ads, email, search, and classified ads will represent 8% of all advertising spending — rivaling spending on cable/satellite TV and radio. Almost half of all marketers plan to increase online ad spending by decreasing spending in other channels.

So we are going to see more banner ads, flash ads dancing around our screens and ‘targeted’ advertising. The marketers got themselves another channel. One that they can monitor, measure and ROI completely whether we like it or not, if only the stupid consumers did not delete their cookies, adware and spyware that we plant on their computers so we can measure the stickiness of their eyeballs.

Oh joy.

Joi Ito joins the debate and has some interesting things to say:

Getting beyond the language (consumer vs user/customer, buzz vs conversation, etc.) I think that trying to understand how conversations work and at what point something becomes “creepy” is a really important discussion. Is it creepy when I blog about a restaurant which gave me extra soup because I said I would blog about them? Is it creepy that the link to Seth’s book above is a Amazon link that has an affiliate code to a non-profit that I’m associated with? Is it creepy that someone is is wearing a Creative Commons T-shirt to be “cool” even though he doesn’t understand the licenses? My feeling is that if you have transparency and if things like Amazon links are providing value to the conversation rather than detracting from it, it’s NOT creepy. And using that test, I don’t think BzzAgents is creepy and I think with some tweaking, BzzAgents can be made uncreepy for some of the more sensitive people as well. I think that at the end of this road lies the future of PR and advertising and trying to understand how companies and products can participate in conversations in un-creepy ways is an important question for companies and customers alike.

We’ll see.

An interesting interview with Ben Edelman, a 25-year old Harvard student, who made it his business to analyse how spyware and adware programmes work and who makes his findings public.

The whole interview is worth a read but this is the most relevant bit, especially in the view of my previous posting about adware and marketing industry and the growth of both…

What was the most interesting thing you’ve discovered?
Edelman: There’s just a huge amount of money changing hands here. The biggest, richest American companies are buying advertising through spyware. The biggest, richest venture capital firms are investing in those who make this kind of unwanted software. That’s names like American Express, Sprint PCS, Disney, Expedia, Guy Kawasaki’s firm.

The reason I am going on about marketing and advertising in the same breath as adware and spyware is that the more the industry seems to be focusing on the internet, the more metrics obsessed they become. Finally, the nirvana of all ad pushers - the ability to measure every movement of our eyeballs to the last flick of eyelid. Ideally. There is a school of thought that believes that this is what it means to use new technology, to be ‘interactive’ and to market/advertise online.

You’re using the word ‘spyware.’ But you also mean the advertising-based networks with pop-up ads, right?
Edelman: Absolutely right. My claim is that each of the so-called adware networks has obtained installations and is still obtaining installations in ways that offer such poor notice and obtain such limited consent--sometimes none at all--that users can’t fairly be said to have consented. If they didn’t consent, and their activities are being monitored or transmitted, then that’s spying.

Exactly. 

That’s it. The blogs have arrived now as a legitimate weapon for P&G against Unilever’s Axe, the fastest-growing deodorant brand in the US. The Axe brand was built around funny ads showing young men they can use body spray to attract women. Now, rival Procter & Gamble Co. is betting on body spray to attract girls to its Secret brand.

P&G is using Secret Sparkle Body Spray and its range of teeny-bopper-oriented scents to lure entry-level consumers for the segment-leading women’s deodorant. To do so, it’s using an unusual campaign that includes sampling and iPod giveaways via fast-growing tween fashion mecca Limited Too as well as animated TV ads and the brand’s first blog marketing.

The brand’s first blog marketing! Be still my beating heart! How on earth are they doing it? By getting hold of the hapless teenagers and spraying them into submission. Wait, I lie, they ‘target’ them during their ‘formative years’:

“Girls have started using deodorant younger and younger,” said Dave Knox, assistant brand manager at P&G overseeing the body-spray launch. “It used to be 12 or 13 was kind of the entry point, and that’s slowly ratcheted down each year. ... If you don’t target the consumer in her formative years, you’re not going to be relevant through the rest of her life.”

I mean, a brand’s gotta do, what a brand’s gotta do. Be relevant or die. But they are certainly novel and innovative using ‘non-traditional’ media:

P&G isn’t using the blatant sexual innuendos found in ads for Unilever’s Axe… Instead, it’s using tamer animated ads from Secret’s shop, Publicis Groupe’s Leo Burnett, Chicago (planning and buying by sibling Starcom Mediavest Group, New York), which broke earlier this month on cable and network programs targeted toward older teens, such as WB Network and MTV.

[/sarcasm]. Oh wait, but where are the blogs? This must be it:

The body sprays are also integrated into a popular tween online hangout, Neopets.com, as a reward for which girls can redeem the “Neopoints” they earn. P&G last week launched Secret’s first blog-marketing program at SparkleBody-Spray.com.

So, I tried SparkleBody-Spray.com but no luck. Searching in Google I get to here. Still I see no blogs…

The PR & marketing blogosphere picked up the article by Pete Blackshaw, Irrational Blogguberance?.

It is a good article, well worth reading and hard to disagree with. I especially agree with the following points:

• Blogs won’t help brands regain control. Companies can influence the relationship but consumer will remain in control.
• Despite the allure, many companies simply aren’t blog-ready. Successful blogging speaks with passion, authority and sincerity, which most companies and brands just aren’t there yet.
• Blogs will challenge and erode agency margins. Consumer-generated media revolution puts the means of ad production in the hands of consumers.

Such articles do not cover the most important benefit of blogging - the need for engagement, the ability to join conversations that are happening about companies whether they like it or not, the end of ‘mass media’ and rise of (to me) a viable alternative. Anyone can tell their story and bypass the traditional media - not everyone succeeds but the level playing field is there. To me, that is revolutionary… and I have been observing what it’s doing to journalism, marketing and PR as they are the most affected industries. But such articles are usually written as a backlash against what they perceive as hyped phenomenon that may or may not be affecting their job. In this case, Peter Blackshaw responds to a recent very positive article on blogging in the MSM:

After reading the recent Business Week cover story, ”Blogs Will Change Your Business,” my internal cognitive dissonance radar began to detect a few blips on the screen.

The most important point, however, is what it brings to an individual and, by extension, to a group of individuals i.e. an organisation, a company etc. It gives them the unprecedented ability to communicate with the outside world, not just because blogs are an easy format to update by non-techies but because there is a network that they can join and use to diffuse their information. But you already know that, dear reader. To see it in action, look at Les Blogs conference in Paris where most bloggers knew each other… not because some media deign to write about them, but because of their blogs and other blogs linking to them. I consider that revolutionary as I can’t see how that would have been possible on such a scale before the blogosphere without some top-down umbrella organisation connecting all those people and getting them together…

Yes, blogs are certainly not the answer to every marketing question but my position is that marketing is often asking the wrong questions and it’s not blogs’ job to answer them and be judged by whether they answer it or not.

I give you two headlines from CNet news.com: Research: Spyware industry worth billions and Online advertising on upswing. In the first article I read:

Based on statistics published by the Internet Advertising Bureau, spyware could represent almost 25 percent of the entire online advertising industry. “We can hope that the advertising industry will provide some help in trying to root out the truly malicious forms of spyware, but as long as there is an attractive return on investment on this activity for some people, this isn’t going to stop anytime soon.”

In the second I learn:

Spending on online advertising is projected to reach $14.7 billion in 2005, as more marketers lose confidence in the effectiveness of traditional ads, according to new research. Nearly all of the marketers surveyed said they plan to cut spending in traditional channels such as print and direct mail to fund increases in online ads.

This means there will be clamour for more online marketing metrics, ROI and other fancy slicing and dicing, dividing by four, bringing in the sheep… and thinking it works. Groan.

As a marketer, I’m angry at the fact that I’ve learned to filter out 95% of the 3,000 ads I see each day.
Dave Balter

As a consumer, I’m proud of the fact that I’ve learned to filter out 95% of the 3,000 ads I see each day. And ... I hope I am astute enough to discover when a BzzAgent “shill” is “shilling” me.
ericb in the comments to Lessig’s post on BzzAgent and CC.

CNet News.com has an interesting interview with Henry Jenkins, director of the Comparative Media Center at the MIT, who is perhaps the most prominent scholar in the country devoted to examining pastimes often deemed profoundly frivolous. News.com spoke to Jenkins about the evolving relationships between big media companies and their active online audiences, and focused particularly on the relationship between Lucas and his fans.

Hollywood has been deeply suspicious of amateur productions, has largely read it through the Napster lens of saying all this stuff is piracy. If we don’t control this it’s bad for us. There has been real resistance to the emergence of a public culture around movie content. Many of the studio executives have had a hard time distinguishing between downloading movies and making your own movies, for example.

It’s about control, which is threatened by creativity and participation. Mr Jenkins says a few things that sound familiar:

In my new book, “Convergence Culture,” I spend a lot of time tracing the history of Lucasfilms’ relationship to its fans, continually trying to incorporate them, but at the same time being nervous about them and ultimately regulating them to control what can and can’t be said.

...

So essentially what Lucas has ceded to fans are the things that Lucas could never have controlled to begin with. And what it’s asking for in compliance is that fans don’t do anything that enters into the gray area, where fans might argue that it’s critical commentary but Lucas is going to see it as encroaching on his rights.

...It creates a double layer. There is the most visible layer, what’s going to be out there on the Web that people can find. And there’s stuff that is made but is hidden from view, that maybe gets shown at face-to-face gatherings but can’t be publicly distributed. It doesn’t mean the stuff isn’t made, but it means that certain stuff gets a lot of press, attention and visibility, and a lot of stuff is buried from view.

So, Star Wars fan base is vibrant, has created its own network and content but it is tightly controlled. I wonder whether without the continuinty from the past, which probably made the Star War fans get used to and accept the way they are treated, fans could be treated this way nowadays… Something tells me that those days are over.

To me, Lucas is interesting in embodying the contradictions of where modern companies are. Where it’s one franchise across media, and you’re a fan of the franchise, your level of engagement is regulated to different degrees depending on which section of Lucas is dealing with you. Because even though it’s an integrated company, in a way, these different parts of the company work with differing ideas and logics.

No one inside the media industry really knows how far they want to go with a participatory audience. They don’t know how much they want to trust consumers to be more actively involved in the creation of the content, more actively involved as evangelists for the content, bringing in new people, stimulating interest and so forth.

I guess they do not want to go too far - how can you control the message and measure the ROI on participation and interactive media if you do not know where things can go...? And in any case, evangelists are unstable, aren’t they? So it seems that the best the industry can do is to work itself up to generating ‘word of mouth’ and ‘buzz’. Oh and carefully controlled rewarded consumer feedback and behaviour.

Lucas is a fanboy filmmaker and likes to protect those types of fan participation that he grew up with, that he’s familiar with and comfortable with. But (he) has been surprisingly intolerant of some of the other modes of fan production.

Much of the above applies to many people in the media and related industries that are affected by the explosion of participation by their previously mute consumers/markets/audiences.

This blog has Creative Commons license attached to it. We like Creative Commons and think that it is the kind of copyright that makes most sense online where the point is to distribute and attribute, not to protect and charge.

So, it is with interest that I saw the news of Creative Commons going into a partnership with BzzAgent. They launched a grassroots marketing campaign to promote Creative Commons on 29th April. Hang on, I thought the whole CC was a grassroots project. But as Lawrence Lessig points out one of the aims of the partnership is to extend their work offline as the vast majority of BzzAgent action occurs offline.

The marketing campaign is a network of volunteer brand evangelists who share their honest opinions about products and services with other consumers. The Bzz agents are regular joes like you and me who bzzz (or promote) different campaigns.

Still, I have a problem with this. Why? Because there is a fine line between a genuine conversation about something one is passionate about and a controlled or contrived engagement on behalf of a client. However genuine the opinions of the bzzagent are transparency and therefore credibility will always be a problem. Oh, I can clearly see the benefits of generating buzz by such agents to marketers and perhaps see it working for a while as a novel marketing technique but I am afraid I can’t see it work long term. The perverse result will be that when someone recommends a product genuinely, people will not trust their enthusiasm anymore. Well, I wouldn’t but that may be just me… On a more theoretical note, I remember reading about BzzAgent a few months ago and I found the best explanation of where the line such marketing crosses is, in this New York Times magazine article. It relies on the different between two different markets - monetary and social. Although in the article, this is used to supports the point of the viability of agents, this holds true only for as long as they are unpaid or unrewarded for their efforts, which certainly no longer seems the case.

Why would the volunteers work so hard to get other people excited about these products? Another line of research suggests a possible answer. This school of thought would characterize word-of-mouth volunteers as operating not in a traditional money-in-exchange-for-effort ‘’monetary market,’’ but rather in a ‘’social market.’’ A social market is what we engage in when we ask our friends to help us load up the moving van in exchange for pizza. The research suggests that we are likely to get a better effort out of our friends under the social-market scenario than by offering the cash equivalent of the pizza. (A recent article in the journal Psychological Science finds that ‘’monetizing’’ a gift, like the pizza, by announcing how much it is worth, effectively shifts the whole situation from social market to monetary market.) Under some circumstances, we will expend more effort for social rewards than we will for monetary rewards. This suggests that the agents may do more to spread word of mouth precisely because they are not being paid.

For the round up of the debate, Suw rose to the challenge as did Gwai Lo. Also worth checking feedback in comments on lessig blog.

Update: A thoughtful blog post about the whole issue from a personal persective of a dispassionate CC supporter.

We had counted Sun out, assuming that by now they would be dead or irrelevant. They’re back. I think it’s their [expletive] blogs.
- a Sun Microsystem’s competitor (via The Red Couch)

These two articles have been blogged extensively but the positive things they say about blogs simply must be recorded on this blog. The Economist goes for blogging in a big way, following from Murdoch’s speech last week:

Blogs, moreover, are but one item on a growing list of new media tools that the internet makes available. Wikis are collaborative web pages that allow readers to edit and contribute. This, to digital immigrants, may sound like a recipe for anarchic chaos, until they visit, for instance, wikipedia.org, an online encyclopaedia that is growing dramatically richer by the day through exactly this spontaneous (and surprisingly orderly) collaboration among strangers. Photoblogs are becoming common; videoblogs are just starting. Podcasting (a conjunction of iPod, Apple’s iconic audio player, and broadcasting) lets both professionals and amateurs produce audio files that people can download and listen to.

The tone in these new media is radically different. For today’s digital natives, says Mr Gillmor, it is anathema to be lectured at. Instead, they expect to be informed as part of an online dialogue. They are at once less likely to write a traditional letter to the editor, and more likely to post a response on the web—and then to carry on the discussion. A letters page pre-selected by an editor makes no sense to them; spotting the best responses using the spontaneous voting systems of the internet does.

And the BusinessWeek has a front cover and a headline made in heaven - Blogs Will Change Your Business. You see, we told you…

Go ahead and bellyache about blogs. But you cannot afford to close your eyes to them, because they’re simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself. And they’re going to shake up just about every business - including yours. It doesn’t matter whether you’re shipping paper clips, pork bellies, or videos of Britney in a bikini, blogs are a phenomenon that you cannot ignore, postpone, or delegate. Given the changes barreling down upon us, blogs are not a business elective. They’re a prerequisite.

If you can have tinbasher blogging and yoghurt blogging, it is hard to think of the kind of business that cannot blog.

The authors of the article also get the full implication of blogs and related technologies, again something that does not come as a surprise to the readers of this blog:

Sure, most blogs are painfully primitive. That’s not the point. They represent power. Look at it this way: In the age of mass media, publications like ours print the news. Sources try to get quoted, but the decision is ours. Ditto with letters to the editor. Now instead of just speaking through us, they can blog. And if they master the ins and outs of this new art—like how to get other bloggers to link to them—they reach a huge audience.

This is just the beginning. Many of the same folks who developed blogs are busy adding features so that bloggers can start up music and video channels and team up on editorial projects. The divide between the publishers and the public is collapsing. This turns mass media upside down. It creates media of the masses.

....

Picture the blog world as the biggest coffeehouse on Earth. The racket is deafening. But there’s loads of valuable information floating around this cafe. Technorati, PubSub, and others provide the tools to listen. While the traditional Web catalogs what we have learned, the blogs track what’s on our minds.

Why does this matter? Think of the implications for businesses of getting an up-to-the-minute read on what the world is thinking. Already, studios are using blogs to see which movies are generating buzz. Advertisers are tracking responses to their campaigns. “I’m amazed people don’t get it yet,” says Jeff Weiner, Yahoo’s senior vice-president who heads up search. “Never in the history of market research has there been a tool like this.”

Exactly. And yet there are those who say that there is too much information and how that causes distress to the marketing industry…

Jeff Jarvis blogs about Wilson Quarterly with its cover story on The Collapse of Big Media and calls it a description of a melting point. Tipping point is so late 1990s…

Collapse is not too strong a word to describe what has happened to America’s major news media. Stripped of their old economic and technological advantages, befuddled by the changing character of their audiences, and beset by new competitors, they are reeling from the blows recent scandals have dealt to their credibility and presige. Their old authority is one, and with it, perhaps their ability to define for Americans a shared realm of information, ideas and debate.

There are many scary stats bandied about, the old media types take note.

• Daily newspaper circ from 1990 to 2003: 62.3 to 55.2 million
• Number of daily U.S. papers from 1990 to 2003: 1,611 to 1,456
• By age group, percentage of Americans who read a paper yesterday: 18-29 - 23, 30-49 - 39, 50-64 - 52, 60+ - 60
• Time spent by 8-19 year olds on all media: 6 hours, 21 minutes; time spent on print media: 43 minutes
• Combined viewership of network evening news: 1980 - 52 million, 2004 - 28.8 million
• Median age of network news viewer: 60
• Percentage of people who believe all or most of what’s on: network news - 24, CNN - 32, FoxNews - 25, C-Span - 27, PBS NewsHour - 23

And more media meltdown stats here.

This post is full of link goodness as Jeff links to the indepth presentation by Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley on Age of Engagement. Very interesting…

David Beisel of Genuine VC has a great and balanced post about how the right product and good communication, not hype make a good online strategy:

I am surprised by the number of entrepreneurs that I meet with and talk to who don’t have a true online communications strategy, which I’ve blogged previously. Whether or not a company has a blog or some other form of incremental content, there is a conversation going on with or without them.

I share the sentiment. It is now easy to follow the conversations with many tools springing all over the net and the blogosphere. But somehow it seems that most companies have not made the leap from their reliance on the hot air PR-speak to joining the conversation that is going on whether they like it or not.

I think that the key with any online communications strategy is balance. There is a conversation going on, so join it. But hype is just that. A positive conversation will continue from your own lead – if you have a great product and solid business.

Indeed. Even a great conversation will not save a bad product or service. And you don’t even need a blogging VC to tell you that.

Although this was the last session and people were fading fast after a steady flow of blogging juicy goodness, Doc’s presentation was given some serious attention. Even the backchannel went quiet for a moment. These are very brief notes as Doc was talking fast and consistently relevant stuff which makes it very hard to catch up and write them down. You can find the slides of the presentation here.

Would like to make people think and challenge the way they see things
FCC – Federal Communication Committee would like to run the net and came up with ‘decency’ rules. First amendment protects freedom of speech and press but broadcasters are not protected. How do you reconsider?
Broadcasting moves content thought channels but speech happens in a place. Content isn’t protected but speech is.

The real Matrix is metaphors – cognitive linguistics 101.
We think in terms of other subjects
We borrow vocabularies for subjects
Every metaphor is a box of borrowed worlds
Two examples:
Time is money - we waste it, save it, spend it, invest it, lose it, set it aside.
Life is travel – birth is arrival, death is departure, crossroads, choices and careers are paths.

Use the War box – attack, campaign, command, defend, dominate, entrench, flank, forces impact etc. There is a war going on between metaphors for the web and for blogging. We move content through the medium with a transport protocol. If we think of blogging as content for consumers in an audience we lose. Were not consumers anymore but producers – users are not longer outsiders. That’s why people talk using jargon –nothing to do with decency.

Syndication is what makes web a live writing and publishing.

So blogs are about writing rather than content. Blogs are journals – not sites, not content, not media, not here to deliver experience, not emergent synchronisation mode. Who are journalists?

Blogs are by readers and writers for other readers and writers. They are by artists, experts and other artists.
Blogs inform, not deliver information and the difference is critical. Information is commodity, content. Yet, the verb to inform comes from ‘to form’, meaning that we actually form each other.

We are all authors of each other. Authority is the right we give certain others to form and shape what we know and that authority is earned and granted, not delivered.

Vast and growing meritocracy. Demand side supplying itself – oldest argument, demand side, will supply. No big brand invented blogging. If blogging had been let up to the Big Boys, never would have happened.

Blogging grows through new protocols, standards and practices (mostly from the demand side) – not by raw numbers of participants. Blogs don’t have to be sticky - leaving is more important than staying because what’s sticky are ideas not bounded by any blog. [ed. quote of the session]

Blogging is about rolling snowballs downhill, not about pushing rocks uphill. Blogging is about making and changing minds. Most ideas worth sharing are not finished. What is more important? Being right or being interesting or being useful or becoming authoritative?

This was the best session and that’s saying a lot after a day of talking and listening about blogging. Doc’s perspective is the one that is of most interest to me, as it tries include blogs in a wider understanding of communication and interaction between human beings. It also make is possible to differentiate between other forms of communication and industries and see the long term implications of blogging clearer. And most importantly, I got to meet the man after years of reading his blog.

Hossein Derakhshan of hoder.com, Yat Siu of Outblaze, China, and Asian correspondent for the International Herald Tribune.

Hossein
70 million population
4-5 million internet users
Media state monopoly and control
75,000 blogs

Blog as windows, bridges and cafes:

Windows (social changes)
self-expression
tolerance
individualism
free information – journalist banned from parliament turned to blogging (Massih Alinejad)

Bridges (society)
connecting between different divided societies, social islands
immigrants – non-immigrates
3-4 million left after revolution, great chance to connect
politicians – citizens, reformist candidate, former vice-president, religious/secular community
using blogs as their own medium

Cafes (politics)
Ideal speech situation – equal power for everyone
Blogs vs state-controlled media
Unique space out of the state monopoly for crucial political debate
Public space that is not state owned and controlled, discuss Iran’s nuclear programme or election 2005 debate of the boycott.

Yat Siu
120 million users by the same time next year
10MB upstream and downstream guaranteed 26 euros
South Korea 100MB up and down

How you define a blog? Homepage in China, Asia – the Hompy. The social element is the chat room – customise avatar and character, your identity online. Social effect is the influential factor there is also a backlash against, people die as they forget to eat (!). Online games. Blogging come to Asia and then spread there. Eastern technologies influence the western development once Asian culture goes mainstream.

Herald Tribune correspondent for Asia
In dictatorships blogs and related technologies can be about access to information. For example, people use IM to warn each other about diseases that government covers up. Also, people are often accused of lack of spontaneity and there have been demonstration organised via blogs.

Hossein
Individual voices trying to prevent US from attacking Iran…

Yossi Vardi, a founder of ICQ, gave his nod to blogs as member of the social software family.

Yossi
ICQ has amassed over 180 million users in more than 245 countries since its launch in November 1996.

Social software gives the context for understanding blogging, internet. What we see today is only the beginning of the phenomenon. Social signalling – [ed. I think bloggers refer to this as social tagging, see Flickr, Furl and delicious]. Blog will become one of the major uses of interfaces, API as people integrate different sites to each other, enhancing reputation. Blogs belong to a strong family of applications of social software.

Update: A much better account of Yossi Vardi’s talk by Ross Mayfield.

Yann Chapellon, Le Monde Interactif, Neil McIntosh of the Guardian blogs, Jochen Wegner of Focus Magazine, Pierre Bellanger of skyblog and Skyrock.

Neil McIntosh
The Guardian has been interested in blogs for years. 10m users a months. We have been blogging since 2000 although our first blog had no trackbacks, no comments.
Election 2005 blog - gets thousands of comments, from readers and journalists.
We also have blogwatch, the Times has started blogging and we link to it as well. There do something called The Blair Watch Project, with doctored photos of Blair, Howard and Kennedy.

Jochen Wegner
We think that MSM should embrace blogs. There is about 100,000 blogs in total in Germany. There are some editorial weblogs of MSM - regular about 25; facultative about 20-30. A tiny number.

Broadband/blog penetration gives an interesting perspective. What are the reasons for low take up of blogging by the mainstream? Elites in Germany tend to have an anti-technology attitude. There is also a very reputation-oriented culture. If you are big brand people trust you, if you are a blogger, not the same. To me the key virtues of blogs is precisely that they are non-journalistic.

Yann Chapellon
We have had a huge take up from both users and journalists. 200 renewed blogs – good stuff.

Pierre Bellanger
1.8 million active blogs, 10 new ones every day [Ed: 28th April - I just got an email from Skyblog press officer David Roizen, who requested that I correct his number to 6,000 a day. There you have it. I guess I should take it as a good sign that someone cares what I write on my blog even though it’s a press officer paid to care about such things… ] We have become a major player of blogging scene using not the usual type of targeting. We have gone after the first digital generation that use mobile phone and internet while growing up. They are the first generation of people using it as native tools and it changes everything. We are not a conventional radio station, we see ourselves as a community. Our aim is to create full large-scale national conversation between all teenagers in France, it’s about the social link.

Rules are important and respect the individual, we have moderation and try to keep order and respect.

Question: Between giving people a way to express themselves and defining boundaries are you taking responsibility of educating your users?

We try to create a community spirit, with freedom of speech, which we respect. 1 million people is posting everyday, full moderation is impossible. We have words alert that may lead to content moderation, we have Cybercop on every blog.

Main problem is when you are confronted with, for example, blogging about suicide – what do you do? Do you close them or what do you do? We work with association about prevention rather than censorship.

Neil
Post moderate comments seems to work well for us. Effects of network just happen, you don’t need to impose it.

[Ed. A lively debate on censorship ensued, with the IRC backchannel on the main screen fighting it out between those who wanted ‘educate’ the youth and bestowed responsibility on Pierre to do so and the L’Anglo-saxons who say ‘no way you can moderated/censor blogs, the whole point of blogging is to be unfiltered, personal and genuine’. Of course that does not make them worth reading but I disagree with any central or standardised approach to blogs and blogging. There are ways that works and even they evolve, but that’s all.]

Yann
Music is important and you can have MP3 not all are illegal, government gave money to the record company, so there are free MP3s. What the government is promoting is new habits – it’s good to do that.

Neil
We have experimented with podcasting.

Pierre
We already distribute shows for iPod. So podcasting is no bother for us, just a new ways of promoting radio station and bringing the idea of podcasting to our audience.

This was a powerpoint presentation by Miklos Gaspar of Blogads with some interesting facts, some of which I reproduce here. The session was probably most interesting for those who are focused on the ‘media’ aspect of blogs and their advertising potential.

Definition of Alpha consumers, opinion makers:

• 75% over 30
• 43% more than $90K income
• 70% influentials
• 21% bloggers

Network hubs
Viral marketing

86% bought books online vs 46% bought travel online

Gourmet Station campaign 1
76 cent CPC cost per click on food and hospitality sites
on 8 generic blog $1.6 cPC

Gourmet station campaign 2
Tweaked for a gay site, targeted worked better - 70 cents per click

Channel 51 – creativity ads used blogs

Network effect
buy through network
advertisers do not know blogs but target audience

Summary points:

• Target influentials
• Network effect
• Fitting creatives

This session, chaired by Dominque Busso, had the most panellists. Gaby Darbyshire of Gawker media, Jason McCabe Calacanis of WeblogsInc, Julio Alonso of Weblogs SL, Christophe Labédan of The Social Media Group, Ludovico Magnocavallo of Blogo.it and Stowe Boyd, Corante

Stowe
It’s about social media. We are after the culture [mindset?] not a mass media publication. We connect to community, people who care about social tools, e.g. we have a copyright blog, and build from that advertising, consulting, and events. We find people who are experts and bring them to our Corante roll. We don’t create them, they create themselves.

Jason Calacanis
Le Monde or Times, you expect a certain way it was written – bosses, editors and by the time the story is published is not what you submitted. The reader expects ‘refined content’. But he comes to blog with zero expectations. It’s unfiltered. You can see my comments, my spelling errors but you know I am not being filtered. Both [blogs and journalism] have the same job – to tell the story but two different processes to get to the truth. As a journalist, I say that blogging is more efficient to the truth. It’s the process of filtering journalism does not get you closer to the truth. With blogging, if you get something wrong, the world knows immediately

Christophe
On the one hand we have the traditional media with structured information and on the other side you have bloggers. I think we get more information from blogs. On a blog you can’t avoid confrontation.

Lodovico
Blogs are not common as US, on topics that we are expert. Lot of mistakes but get corrected by other bloggers and readers.

Jason
Define the writers. We split revenue with our bloggers. 6-9 months until the money starts coming in. People want to get paid in perfect way and they take the deal. We want to have 500-600 blogs in the next 2-3 years. And the only way to do that is to give them [bloggers who write for us] what they want and pay them money. Some work only 2 hours a week, some more up to 40 hours a week. Ballpark range $100 to $3-4,000.

Gaby
New barrier to entry – anyone can do it, content and quality, you have to be talented. Writing for us is also for prestige. The distinction between editorial and advertising is blurred. We focus on quality content. We pay flat fee, and the problem then is making sure that the writer can see the fruit of success. But we guarantee you salary that is journalistic salary. It means that you cannot control the business… just like in a traditional publication.

We tried to keep the balance between fair and right to keep talent and make sure that business can invest in growth of new titles. Advertising is not good for writers. People write about what they do.

Stowe
This kind of nano-publishing is another segment of traditional media. In Corante, different parts of the business are done for different reasons…

Gaby
What makes a blog successful is far more interesting. It’s about the quality.

You don’t need capital to launch a blog, as a result of individual blogs as a different objective. In turn you are paid in respect etc. When journalists talk about bloggers parasitical on journalism, they don’t have the time to scour everything. The entire blogosphere is a huge army at disposal to anyone interested in using it. Researching deeper and deeper – well connected and can write in a way that no traditional publication can do. It’s a symbiosis not adversity.

We certainly try to do things right in the ‘new industry’, we make phone calls, fact check, and if we are wrong, we correct.

Dominque Busso
It’s hard for big media to focus, bloggers can.

Stowe
I always tell people who say that they don’t have time to read blogs - you must take the time and do that before you launch blogs yourself. An extra hour on internet is an hour that they don’t watch television.

Creating a brand – consistency, design, regularity. Many bloggers would do that on their own. Title just gives expectation of the brand.

Jason
Tried to buy small business blog but the people are so independent that they would never come to work for us. We have to find another type of blogger.

Stowe
Blogger burn-out is an issue.

Publishing blogs are a stop-gap measure, resurrecting publishing model on the blogs is not the future. [Quote of the session.]

This session had Euan Semple of the BBC, Ross Mayfield of Socialtext and Lee Bryant of Headshift.

Euan
Small scale, letting it grow, connect individual pieces. Tolerance, socialising issue of trusting each other is significant. Start changing the power play within organisations. A year ago, we started blogging. Project blogs, contextual links, blogs give internal people to publish and produce content.  We use wikis to produce collaborative documents.

Internal leaks are not a new problem and we try to come up with policies of what is and what isn’t acceptable. We are creating a reputation engine finding out who is linking to who and reading/aggregating them.

Ross Mayfield

Innovation is competitive advantage. There is friction when people work together, innovation happens when there is productive friction. People need simple tools 90% exists in email, largely broken. 30% occupational spam cc/bcc. There is a need for communication using something simpler – wiki weblog email IM – social text. Wiki is a collection of pages anybody can edit and link together. Linking to a page is simple and every page has a name.

It’s how people use the tools – don’t have to have rigid boundaries. In applications and tools rely on people using them to realise their efficiencies. They need to fit IT and management infrastructure – unfortunately.

Wikipedia – collaboration on the scale not seen before. More about participation, the communities exist inside. Innovation – letting your employees to be a little bit more free to express their ideas.

Lee Bryant

Low cost way for companies to build social infrastructure. Enterprise software is usually extremely expensive and is part of the top down mentality. Out of synch with innovation. How to deploy it and integrate it? Can’t sell koolaid to companies – how can you do the non-technical work. Tools, weblogs and personal sharing publishing tools etc, open standards, such as RSS, sharing info etc. Flickr, google and Technorati that you can do to feed information to the organisation. That’s what I mean by social software.

Weblogs – people have a discussion, domain for knowledge. Wiki very good root collaboration, objective, documents, project map, cheap and easy way. Flickr – sharing presence and perspective is quite important within organisation. What you see and where you go. Delicious – social bookmarking tool, different subjects and different people tagging them too. Share knowledge, clear use within organisation. Concept of aggregation – email is broken but people use it. Can subscribe to what they are interested it – piece of glue that sticks things together. Different systems – document management, KM systems – if you think of social software is providing light weight interface that belongs to the people rather than the company. Adds value to existing technology, even before integration.

Not using systems and other communication applications – using email instead. Let people reorganise their own feeds and information and then you can start bringing stuff to life.

Use of flexible metadata. Devised top down but do not fit day to day needs. Social tagging – delicious and flick, own language and aggregation. Every piece of information should be exposed to RSS feed and then do whatever you want with it. As a result you are creating a fabric within the organisation – weblogs, wikis, limited local ways, project groups and they emerge gradually. Don’t scare them into a big system. Modular and bottom up. Then you start seeing the benefits. Add features gradually. Launch early, it will gradually work, you can start achieving something. Finally, engage people in their own language.

Which is going to be bigger? The BBC or Scoble at Microsoft?

Halley’s the moderator for a panel consisting of Darren Barefoot, Andrew Carton and Paolo Valdemarin.

How many have blogs and corporate blogs? Who is Scoble and who cares? Microsoft blogger who brings fame to the company. Let me tell you about the panel - Darren Barefoot did Northern Voice. Paolo and Andrew, blogs about Treo on Treonauts.com. Without the permission of the company, decided to do it on his own, it’s an interesting view of a corporate blog. What they think about the future of blogging in the next five years:

Darren, background in PR and marketing. How do I get on blogs? Lists of ones you want to get on. Interesting thing – meme and stories about your company into the media. Bloggers a middle layer, PR firms are just beginning to recognise that they are important. Need to pay attention to bloggers and talk to them. Influencers, writers, the phenomenon of how media works. TV stations – decrease the number of journalists, new sources of stories in the blogosphere. Everyday, read stories in MSM that I have read on blogs. Journalists are reading bloggers – stories bubble up and then surface.

Paolo: Small medium size companies – vast majority of blogging companies. Talk to the customers as well as create a new kind of empowerment.

Halley: Internal blogging – inside companies but not just yet.
Andrew : Building community around blog in a corporate environment. [?]

Halley: A company just opened a magazine BusinessWeek about blogging, they must a blog. CEO bad writer, so what do they do? Where is the place for a company to start?
Darren: Do not let PR people anywhere near it!

Halley: Group blog or one voice…
Paolo: one voice, small companies, express themselves in small environment. [ed. lots of talk of small companies]. Glossy brochures and flashy websites and do not understand that there is a better way

Halley: Is there some value in blog for a single voice.
Andrew: comforting to majority of customers, using blogging as extension of the business need to have the right mindset.

Corporate blogging bit not so informative, not enough examples and too disjointed but I guess that is the nature of the panel and the speakers talking about their personal experiences.

Halley: Should we have advertising on your corporate blog?
Darren: Absolutely not.
Halley: Not even their own?
Darren: Maybe

Andrew: Marketing perspective – content. Deconstructing the product, the logo everything. It’s like a lego toy, take the pieces and put them together your own way.

Hugh: blog cheap and easy and advertising is pure buzz, hard to get them pay attention
Darren: aspects of PR will go away, press release, forming relationships is not going away and blogs are another way to do that [ed. quote of the session]. Compelling blogs have personality whether personal or corporate. Photos, individual features etc. PR not associated with authenticity

Darren makes lots of good points, no time to capture it, just read and subscribe to his blog.

Did not catch most of it but here are bits that came my way and stuck.

Barak:

Email is slow synchronicity – days and week disappears
Need for storage, permanence – web can be used to create permanence and communications

Permalinks and persistence – sociological implications, core definition
Persistence – ability to find discreet pieces of information, digitisation of content – dig in and find pieces

Meg - example of Flickr. It’s not just comments on a picture, but also can make a note and start references pieces of the picture, chopped post, reference each bit, smaller pieces. More targeted conversations – very interesting.

Joi
Apple suing bloggers – protection to bloggers as to journalists.

Questions from the audience: Can six apart protect bloggers from attacks by companies?

Answer by Barak: With power comes responsibility… you have responsibility to make sure you don’t get into trouble. We give you a tool – flexible that allows you to express yourself. Government we are careful privacy and your right to publish. Copyright laws etc, no interest of losing protection of Data Protection Millennium act. It’s a balancing act, in the end we provide a service and you need to decide how you use that. 

These are going to be notes, rather than full text. If some of it makes sense, I did my job but I don’t expect all of it to be clear.

Internet is not the smartest netwok

There is a ‘creative class’ in different position in different country – that is why the Brazilian, Iranian and French bloggers have more in common with each other than let’s say with german blogs. There is similarity between Japanese, French, and Iranian. Gap inside the country – creative class – technology special class that provides openness and innovation.

Advertising – downloading music from internet – not a thing anyone can do about it – pepsi ad – selling to this ‘creative class’. Ito plays the add, playing on the fact that kids don’t care about whether dowloading is legal or not and will do it anyway.  Watch user behaviour and create products that fit that, understand that you can’t force them and change their behaviour – go with the flow. Then Joi plays the same clip with some ‘adjustments’ from the internet audience doing things to the advert that the authors certainly did not intend to! Very funny.. the link on the slide is here.

iPod shuffle, an example of a product outed by bloggers before its official release. They are not against companies, but they want to tell the story(ies). So don’t go around suing them.

Long tail. There are many movies, books, music that are now part of the long tail i.e. part of a curve that capture economic rational of stocking titles. There are a number of titles, for a bookstore you have to sell a number of books before you can make profit. Amazon, as a virtual bookstore, can go down the curve stocking not only content that makes sense in traditional physical distribution but also content in the long tail – space that does not fit into the traditional distribution view.

What is happening is that the sales in that space much bigger – the tail, stuff that wasn’t available before, is now bigger, huge rentals of documentary, not be able to go for distribution. Word of mouth becomes very important. The question is how you find the content. It’s delivery vs discovery. Before, the big problem was how you get it to customer. Now the question is what do I listen to, not how I get it. It is not about advertising, but word of mouth is the way to get attention. Example of talking in chat channels – there is some Chinese music that is very popular as a result of being shared on internet. Problem is not to protect the content but how to get people to listen to the stuff – 95% are copies. [ed: Quote of the day]: The worst thing than being copies is not being copied.

Blogs and Citizen Media
Ad and marketing – shouting and then figure out what we are thinking – you can stop shouting now as we are telling you directly what we are thinking… Example, Kryptonite – www.bikeforums.net. Joi show the infamous video of the lock being unpicked by a bic pen. The company lost 10 million dollars in 10 days – bloggers say your locks suck, can’t hide the truth.

Rathergate - Dan Rather had to apologise to G Bush, CBS may cancel the show. Some of the bloggers picked up the pieces, nobody used to do that.  He is an important icon, MSM and bloggers.

Fast Lane blog, another example, a frank discussion by guy who makes cars. Completely different kind of trust than from traditional brand building.

Another way, a BBC article put it in technorati and see what bloggers are saying. Infoworld article, the same but it already has technorati profile embedded in it.

Myth of intellectual property - creating something is investment and need to protect it. This is a new idea. Joi uses a different concept based on the commons and the fact that creativity can happen outside corporations. E.g. 93% books originate outside corporate world, so copyright exists to protect this small percentage.

There a common mistake to assume that just because someone is amateur they are not as good as professional. The amateur vs. professional is a false dichotomy. Amateurs can’t afford to do it for money - not true, see Linux developers who do not do it for money. This is a dangerous idea and can be disproved - professional sex is not always better than amateur sex! Much laughter follows…

So give it away for free [ed. content, not sex]. Creative commons clip is shown. The point is as long as you give me attribution, you can use it. Another clip of George Bush and Tony Blair footage synched to a romantic song – much hilarity ensues.

US republican national convention remix - Invoke 9/11 - clip of politicians repeating september eleven and saddam hussain and other phrases that characterised the debate of the events, terrorism… George W. Bush Keeping America Scared. Joi talks about how some tried to argue that you can’t use speeches as they are copyrighted. Importance of freedom of speech…

Paris is the navel of the blogosphere, at least for one day. Six Apart’s conference on blogging, Les Blogs, has attracted the A-listers or alpha bloggers from around the world. Yes, even from the UK.

There will be some furious blogging of the event, as the heavily connected hoards descended on the French Senate – Palais du Luxemburg.

The first session will have, apart from the Six Apart crowd, Joi Ito and Meg Hourihan , Flickr’s Caterina Fake and Nokia’s Charlie Schick all engaging in a bit of trendspotting. Social software will a buzzword of the day, I guess that is the nod to the mainstream that needs big vague descriptions of the blogging phenomenon that often dares not speak its name. At least in the UK.

After a ‘networking’ break, we shall hear Halley Suit of Worthwhile Magazine and her blog.., Andrew Carton of Treonauts (the moderator of the i20 conference on digital marketing in London, Paolo Valdemarin

There is supposed to be wireless in the conference room, which did work for one glorious moment. I started blogging confidently and was making good progress, when the connection was lost. Having experienced a blogger’s worst nightmare of clicking ‘publish’ after a long blog post only to be confronted with ‘the page cannot be displayed’, I have copied the text into word – now just waiting for the connection to come back on.

I am also one of the few privileged (read got here early enough) to get one of twenty (!) power outlets for my notebook. Yay, I made it.

[more hyperlinks to follow later, off to blog the event now...]

Yesterday I attended a conference Marketing in a Digital World organised by i20events. I was asked to talk about the ‘empowered consumer’ and the embracing thereof.

I really liked the venue, in London’s Natural History Museum and its scheduling - the event was later in the afternoon (4pm). This is good as one’s attention does not have to be abused sustained all day for a number of interminable sessions. The audience consisted of people in the UK “new media marketplace” and the panel had speakers respected in the industry. 

Faith Carthey, MD, i-level
Rob Horler, MD, Diffiniti
Janet Winslade, Managing Partner, M-One
Glen Drury, MD, Kelkoo UK
Dan Clays, MD, Quantum
James Hamlin, Media Director, Match.com
Anthony Rhind, SVP of Strategy, Media Contacts

The moderator was none other than the entrepreneur and blogger, Andrew Carton, of Treonauts.com. Predictably, I talked about blogs, while trying to explain that they are the tip of the iceberg, a symptom of broader trends that are emerging from the online world and have so far largly passed under the traditional radars.

There were a few points that made it clear to me just what a different world it is. For example, someone complained that there is too much information online these days and one does not know where to start. Now to me, this sounds like the surreal dialogue from Amadeus:

EMPEROR: My dear, young man, don’t take it too hard. Your work is ingenious. It’s quality work. And there are simply too many notes, that’s all. Cut a few and it will be perfect.

MOZART: Which few did you have in mind, Majesty?

There is indeed a glut of information and I speak as a blogger with about 200+ feeds in my aggregator… But that is a good thing as it drives home the point that you can no longer control the message or its distribution. As for knowing where to start, there are so many ways to monitor the blogosphere or the internet and find out what’s happening as new tools appear almost weekly (or so it seems).

Another thing that struck me was that the overriding attitude towards online and the ‘empowered consumer’ was one of caution, fear of ‘fat lawsuits arriving’ as ‘big corporations are going to fight back’ and recognition that SOMETHING MUST BE DONE ABOUT IT (the ‘empowered consumer’ not the law suits). I did not get any sense of what that something is other than continuation of slicing and dicing, counting the legs and dividing by four, bringing in the sheep to use the Cluetrain vernacular.

Kudos to the organisers for letting me speak about the online ‘underworld’ and the impact it will have (and already is having) on the marketing industry. I highly recommend reading and listening to Bob Garfield’s Chaos Scenario for a fuller picture of what people like us and their friends have been banging on about in the UK. 

I am pleased to see the debate about fake blogs aka as ‘character’ blogs evolving to a more practical level. I give you Dr Quack:

Are you a fake blog character, brand or logo that has been pilloried for the part you’ve played in turning the business blogosphere into a joke?

Do you wile away the days behind closed curtains terrified that someone may shout obscenities at you in the street?

Depressed? Lonely? Scared?

Dr. Quack understands your pain and will remove your shame because you aren’t the one to blame.

Tony Perkins of AlwaysOn, the blogazine of innovation writes in the hard copy (not available online) about Bill Gates’ comments on blogging during a private dinner at Gates home on Lake Washington:

Blogging makes it very easy to communicate. It gets away from drawbacks of email and the drawbacks of a website. Eventually, most businesses will use blogs to communicate with customers, suppliers and employees, because it’s two-way and more satisfying.

That’s a simple statement, true and coming from a ‘businessman’ such as Bill Gates ought to appeal to the more traditional suits.

Perkins adds his own thought:

Gates knows that the referral power of the blogosphere is also exploding and marketing and PR executives must embrace this reality or risk losing control of their messages.

Lose control of their messages? Marketing and PR executives, Step. Away. From. The Message. You cannot control it anymore, the best you can do is to shape it, while respecting your audience and the medium you use to engage them.

via The Red Couch

Another article in the New York Times on the topic of bloggers and employees. This time the action is a bit closer to the ‘blog’ home, a Technorati employee, Niall Kennedy gets into trouble, almost.

One evening last month, he channeled one of those off-duty opinions into a satiric bit of artwork - an appropriation of a “loose lips sink ships” World War II-era propaganda poster altered to provide a harsh comment on the growing fears among corporations over the blogging activities of their employees. He then posted it on his personal Web log.

But in a paradoxical turn, Mr. Kennedy’s employer, having received some complaints about the artwork, stepped in and asked him to reconsider the posting and Mr. Kennedy complied, taking the image down.

Apparently, bloggers like Mr. Kennedy are starting to realise that corporations:

… are under no particular obligation to tolerate threats, real or perceived, from the activities of people who become identified with those brands, even if it is on their personal Web sites.

Interesting, I am not sure what it means to ‘tolerate threats, real or perceived, from the activities of people who become identified with those brands’. Obviously, there is confidential information and privacy issues but as far as the ‘brand’ is concerned, if an employee is making fun of it, well, it should be a useful signal to the ‘brand’ creators that something is not right.

Strange that years after the Cluetrain, the blogging world can put up with an argument based around the assumption that brands belong to the corporations, which spend millions of dollars protecting their brands.

… this isn’t about us and them. It’s about us. Them don’t exist. Not really. Corporations are legal fictions, willing suspensions of disbelief. Pry the roof off any company and what do you find inside? The Cracker Jack prize is ourselves, just ordinary people. We come in all flavors: funny, cantankerous, neurotic, compassionate, avaricious, generous, scheming, lackadaisical, brilliant, and a million other things. It’s true that the higher up the food chain you go, the more likely you are to encounter the arrogant and self-deluded, but even top management types are mostly harmless when you get to know them. Given lots of love, some even make good pets.

I am starting to think that Chris Locke was a bit too optimistic about the management types after all.

The point is not to condone doing something stupid as an employee, just because he or she has done it via a blog and blogs are groovy, doncha know, so that must be OK… It is about the idea that there must be just one approved voice coming from the mothership. Such ‘voice’ has always been a fantasy perpetuated by ‘brand strategists’ and blogs have made it clearer that while such a voice has never been credible, it can no longer be imposed.

The [ad] industry’s key currency is basically reach, frequency, exposure and cost per thousand. And where the currency out to be is about outcomes, engagement and effectiveness. Because right now all I’m doing is I’m measuring how cheaply or how expensively I’m buying the pig. I’m not figuring out whether or not the hot dog tastes good.
Rishad Tobaccowala, president of Starcom IP quoted in Bob Garfield’s Chaos Scenario article.

A must read blog post by Jeff Jarvis about Rupert Murdoch’s important speech and warning to the American Society of Newspaper Editors telling them that papers are whistling in their own graveyard and recommending some solutions, including even blogs:

...these new [digital] natives want news on demand, they want news to be relevant, they want a point of view (hello, FoxNews), they want news that affects their lives, they want the option to get more information and points of view, and they want to join in the debate.

He also mentions Merrill Brown’s report for Carnegie whose conclusions were quoted by Murdoch.

What is happening right before us is, in short, a revolution in the way young people are accessing news. They don’t want to rely on the morning paper for their up-to-date information. They don’t want to rely on a God-like figure from above to tell them what’s important. And to carry the religion analogy a bit further, they certainly don’t want news presented as gospel.

Instead, they want their news on demand, when it works for them. They want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it. They want to question, to probe, to offer a different angle.

Most importantly, Murdoch gets to the heart of the matter when he says that technology isn’t the problem - attitude is.

What I worry about much more is our ability to make the necessary cultural changes to meet the new demands of the digital native. I said earlier, what is required is a complete transformation of the way we think about our product and the Internet itself. Unfortunately, however, I believe too many of us editors and reporters are out of touch with our readers. Too often, the question we ask is “Do we have the story?” rather than “Does anyone want the story?”

And the data support this unpleasant truth. Studies show we’re in an odd position: We’re more trusted by the people who aren’t reading us. And when you ask journalists what they think about their readers, the picture grows darker. According to one recent study, the percentage of national journalists who have a great deal of confidence in the ability of the American public to make good decisions has declined by more than 20 points since 1999. Perhaps this reflects their personal politics and personal prejudices more than anything else, but it is disturbing.

This is a polite way of saying that reporters and editors think their readers are stupid. ...

Newspapers whose employees look down on their readers can have no hope of ever succeeding as a business.

Lately, a number of newsmagazine and newspaper sites have started blogs. The results, especially in bigger publications, are often dreadful. Many mainstream-media blogs serve as repositories for the journalistic detritus that wasn’t good enough for the print edition. They manage to combine the worst of both worlds: Hemmed in by tradition, they lack the candor and point of view that distinguishes good blogs. Bereft of good material, they lack the depth and quality of print journalism.
Bill Grueskin, managing editor of WSJ.com in interview by Jay Rosen on MSM (mainstream media) blogs.

Upkeeping a blog everyday is the new media equivalent of daily bleeding a cat. It starts off feisty and playful, then turns pale and lifeless until dead.
The Absurdist (one of the blog’s random rotating taglines in the sidebar)

Finally we get to hear what Kryptonite, the unofficial poster child for companies burned by the blogosphere, has to say about it. The interview with the General Manager of the company is interesting, mainly because he still does not seem to understand what caused the PR disaster for Kryptonite.

Community Guy says it all:

He clearly misses the point all together - if you had a better relationship with the world outside of the company walls, you wouldn’t have to “be ready”. You’d already be having the discussion.

I’ve not done well in the newspaper coverage. The Internet is a way to get my message out to people who are wired.
- Supervisor Chris Daly, San Franciso, who has begun a blog (actually just a site with entries that are called blogs) to counter what he feels is biased reporting in the local paper.

Last night I attended a Six Apart event on blogs, in action at the Polish club, which is a very nice trad-looking venue indeed. A good counter-balance to the high-tech and business topic and the audience. The people assembled were an interesting bunch and my impression that there is a pent up demand for such events. My only reservation was that much was crammed into the session and a series of events would allow to spread the backlog of blog knowledge to ‘evangelise’ in the UK. It would also allow a sustained focus on blogging, which is sorely needed here. The good news is that Alistair and the tBBC gang are planning such a series, with focus on individual sectors and industries. So, watch this space.

I was taking copious notes during the session but having come across Suw Charman’s account, I put my hands in the air and said ‘teach me master’ - I am a fast typist, or so I thought, but Suw’s “demon typing hands” put me to shame. She captured most of the talks on her blog and I shall only reproduce the one by David Carr, our esteemed bloglawyer, who first scared everyone away from blogging and then told them what to do about it.

David Carr
Lawyer and director with the Big Blog Company. Issues around libel etc.

Lots of horror stories that can frighten any blogger - the lesson from that is stay away from lawyers. There are several issues, such as privacy, but the one that comes up most often is libel. It’s a major worry and with good reason. Some people have formed the view that the internet is beyond the reach of law and that you can post whatever you like and it doesn’t matter. This is nonsense. All the law that applies to traditional publishing applies to blogging. There’s a little difference in the way corporate and vanity publisher are treated, but not with libel. Whether you are commercial or not, the position is unsatisfactory for bloggers. Law is governed by the Defamation act,

In 97, someone pretending to be one Dr Godfrey posted to a Usenet group and said lots of horrible things about him, the real Dr Godfrey took the view that the comments were libellous. Faxed Demon internet, and asked them to take it down. Demon said it’s nothing to do with them, they were just hosters. Godfrey took Demon to court and won - Demon said they were innocent carriers. But that only works up to the point that they have received notice of the libel. Because Dr Godfrey had noticed them, and not taken down the posting, they lost their defence.

Law does not require you to police your comments - if someone leaves a libellous comments, you are not necessarily obliged to do something about it unless someone notifies you, and then you must take it down. Difficulty is what is a plausible complaint and what is silly and frivolous. Puts blog owners in difficult position, because they will remove the offending item rather than face a lawsuit, although implication that someone wrote something libellous could also be interpreted as libellous.

Have disclaimer on the comments to the effect that your comments are here under sufferance and that it’s a privilege not a right, and that comments may be removed at any time for reasons of law, taste or decency. ‘On any grounds that the editors see fit’. May be less important with personal blogs, but particularly with commercial concerns.

Photos and permission is another issue.

All in all, a good evening that should be repeated.

... and not thinly veiled PR.

Since blogs became the next big thing, an increasing number of companies have come to see them as the next great public relations vehicle—a way for executives to demonstrate their casual, interactive side.

But, of course, the executives do nothing of the sort. Their attempts at hip, guerrilla-style blogging are often pained—and painful.

Rebecca Blood says:

Repositing marketing materials on a blog is a waste of time. I would advise them to just stop right now. Those materials already exist. The blog that is powerful is when it is real.

As has been said so many times on this blog and elsewhere, blogs can provide companies with a connection they don’t otherwise have with the public, employees and clients. But it may take some time before executives figure out how to best use them. David Weinberger goes back to the nature of blogging - it is a conversation:

Success in blogging is exactly the same as success in conversation, where if you stay on message, you’re being a bore. It’s very hard to wean yourself. You stay on message then congratulate yourself for staying on message. Then what you do is alienate readers.

Amy Joyce of Washington post seems to imply that unless company bloggers disclose something that they should not, the blogs are not worth the read.

Although corporate blogging gives many readers what they want from a company—an avenue to listen to and talk to decision makers—it also loses that edgy, voyeuristic feel of personal blogs about bad bosses, annoying roommates and flings. As much as personal bloggers blithely ignore the conventional boundaries of etiquette, corporate bloggers edit themselves to avoid disclosing a company secret or representing an organization in a way not intended by the marketing department.

Well, if the only way for company blogs to attract readership is to titillate them into visiting the blog, business blogging does not have much future. Fortunately, this is totally unnecessary as the reason why people read a blog is that they get something out of it. And it isn’t necessarily the same thing you get out of reading tabloids. Personal does not mean, indiscreet or under the company radar. It certainly is not necessary for Tinbasher or La Fraise… or indeed for Scoble.

Company in trouble? Chief executive in the middle of some scandal? Don’t expect anyone to be emoting about it on a corporate blog. No mention on Lutz’s blog, for instance, that GM’s stock fell to its lowest level in more than a decade this week. The day Boeing’s board announced its chief executive had resigned after an investigation uncovered that he had an affair with a female employee, Baseler wrote about competition from Airbus SAS.

Actually, I would expect an executive with a blog to emote or at least address anything that is happening to his company and is already public, positive or negative. That is the whole point of a blog - a medium for those who have something to say and are willing to do so in a genuine conversation. Then it works just fine.

I mean me, for a change. 

You have readers, not “consumers.”

You have writing, not “content.”

Today’s paper is tomorrow’s fishwrap.
- Doc Searls

Eide Neurolearning blog wonders what effect is all this blogging having on the brains of bloggers… This question is based on the assumption that

… our mental activities actually cause changes in the structures of our brains--not only what we think, but how we think as well. Given such activity-directed change, it always makes sense to ask whenever large numbers of people start using their brains in new and different ways, what effects these new activities are likely to have on brain structure and function.

This is what Drs. Fernette and Brock Eide discover:

1. Blogs can promote critical and analytical thinking.
2. Blogging can be a powerful promoter of creative, intuitive, and associational thinking.
3. Blogs promote analogical thinking.
4. Blogging is a powerful medium for increasing access and exposure to quality information.
5. Blogging combines the best of solitary reflection and social interaction.

For the full juicy goodness (and explanation of the above points), read the whole thing.

The conclusion is that it looks as if blogging will be very good for our brains. There, dear reader, and you thought it was all such a waste of time…

Now, read this and tell me advertising industry isn’t in deep, deep trouble. Ageless Marketing on Neuromarketing:

...the rising tide of interest among marketers in how brain science might offer powerful new insights into consumer behavior is too much driven by raw exploitive motives to find new ways of manipulating consumer behavior. Too many marketers are being seduced into viewing brain science as a high tech source of revelation about consumer behavior.

A study by Jupiter Research found out that nearly 40 percent of Internet users delete cookies from their computers at least once a month. If this is true, it might be a big problem for marketers relying on cookies to track visitors and visitors behaviors.

The trend challenges the notion that cookie-based methods produce accurate measurements for marketers. Measurements affected by the deletion of cookies include the number of returning visitors, unique visitors, multi-session campaign conversions, and lifetime value. Techniques like behavioral targeting and personalization are also highly dependent on cookies. Eric Petersen, the lead analyst on the report said:

Advertisers using lifetime value metrics need to reexamine how accurate that data is. The further away you get from the date the cookie was set, the less likely that the information is completely accurate.

He also says:

For some reason, consumers have identified cookies incorrectly as spyware. Consumers don’t understand what cookies do.

You don’t say. How dreadful. Yeah, Consumers are so dumb - they are no longer content with being tied to their chairs, head back, eating ‘content’ and crapping cash.

This is what agencies consider interactive. Nothing wrong with that notion - it’s just another world… Enjoy.

via Adverblog

Most bloggers aren’t being fired for blogging.  Bloggers are being fired for doing something stupid on their blogs that violates some policy of some description within their respective employers…

Send dirty emails, get reprimanded, make lots of personal calls, get fired.  Blogs are just another way for employees to get themselves in hot water by not heeding corporate policy. Memo to bloggers:  Check your corporate ethics, conduct, and media relations policies and just ‘keep it between the lines.’
- Dana VanDen Heuvel, Business Blog Consulting

The blog as business tool has arrived.

Some eight million Americans now publish blogs and 32 million people read them, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project. What began as a form of public diary-keeping has become an important supplement to a business’s online strategy: Blogs can connect with consumers on a personal level—and keep them visiting a company’s Web site regularly.
- Riva Richmond, WSJ, Blogs Keep Internet Customers Coming Back

It must be the time of year - the spring is upon us, Easter round the corner, rebirth, growth and all that. And so we Sifry’s Alerts’ report on the State of The Blogosphere. Part 1: Growth of Blogs:

We are currently seeing about 30,000 - 40,000 new weblogs being created each day, depending on the day. Compared to the past, this is well over double the rate of change in October, when there were about 15,000 new weblogs created each day. The remarkable growth over the past 3 months can be attributed to the increase in new, mainstream services such as MSN Spaces, and in increases of use of services like Blogger, AOL Journals, and LiveJournal. In addition, services outside the United States have been taking off, including a number of media sites promoting blogging, such as Le Monde in France.

But not all is well in blogland and the Spam Squashing police have been busy:

There is a dark underbelly to these numbers, however: Part of the growth of new weblogs created each day is due to an increase in spam blogs - fake blogs that are created by robots in order to foster link farms, attempted search engine optimization, or drive traffic through to advertising or affiliate sites. We have been battling the spam situation in a significant way for about 2 months - prior to January, spam wasn’t much of an issue. All of these charts reflect Technorati’s databases after spam blogs have been removed…

Henry Copeland summarises this years blog reader survey:

This year’s survey continues the trajectory of happy surprises.

Last year, we got 17,159 responses. This year, 30,079 blog readers responded.

Last year, 61% of responding blog readers were over 30 years old. This year, 75% are over 30 years old.

Last year, 40% had family incomes greater than $90,000. This year, 43% exceed that figure.

So we are talking adults with income. Good news. And it gets better:

The most interesting news comes in section 8. Aficionados of PR-speak will recognize these questions as benchmark tests to identify who is an opinion maker, a member of the ten percent of Americans who are believed to set the agenda and steer the opinions of the other 90%. To qualify as an official “influential,” RoperASW, the leading firm consulting in the field, you have to answer 3 of those questions (excluding a petition) in the affirmative. Clearly the blogosphere is crawling with certified grade A opinion makers.

Before I rush off to advertising, branding and marketing agencies clutching the survey to my chest, I shall read on:

How much credence should you give this survey? The survey was designed as much to provoke as to prove. I’ll paraphrase what I wrote last year: the survey’s responses are a fragment of a sample of a subset. There are millions of bloggers.

And then rush off… clutching the… you know the rest.

But remember also that the blogosphere is all about biases and conversations and boot-strapping and not waiting for some authority-- a newspaper editor or university dean or foundation officer or venture capitalist or government agent—to tell you something but figuring it out yourself, and, finally, about sharing fragments of imperfect data with peers to arrive at some useful collective knowledge.

As Trent Lott and Howell Raines learned, the blogosphere’s numerous voices can capture and amplify ideas that are too complex or contrary for traditional organizations to see or speak. (This year, we can add Howard Dean, Dan Rather, George Bush, Eason Jordan and Jeff Gannon to the list of public figures rerouted by bloggers.)

Amen to that. And here are some pretty numbers.

It’s alright, it’s only a Dyson. Dyson first to use blogs in major ad campaign, sayz the headline.

Dyson has selected Shiny Shiny and Tech Digest, the flagship blog sites for publisher Shiny Media, to run its latest teaser ads. The deal represents the first time that a UK blog has been chosen for a major ad campaign. The teaser features a branded “Pong-style” game, which runs on skyscraper banners either side of the page.

But wait, what it this?

The exact nature of the new product is being keep secret, but will be revealed in a new ad on Monday, appearing on both Shiny Shiny and Tech Digest, alongside a series of lifestyle and shopping sites.

That’s just so blogosphere, dahlink, I mean, nobody really knows or cares about anything there and you can talk about stuff for days on end without anyone coming up with details. I mean, really, teasers ads is the way to go…

Congratulations to Shiny Media for being treated like a media. 

A blog tagline:

the unedited rantings of a fat 42 year old menopausal ex -talk show host -married mother of four- read at your own risk - my spelling sux

belongs to a blog by Rosie O’Donnell, called formerlyrosie who:

...apparently got the hang of the Web’s approach to discourse fairly quickly. She once had a cuddly relationship with millions as the warm and hilarious television personality with a visible crush on Tom Cruise, but she complicated her public image by quitting her show, announcing she was a lesbian, starting and then quitting her eponymous magazine before producing a Broadway musical starring Boy George. In the end, O’Donnell ended up with a measure of privacy, but she began to drive her friends crazy with all of her opinions. One of them finally said that she should start a blog.

Would you consider that a recommendation for blogging?

via CNET News.com

CNET has done a good job thinking about various problems blogging can cause to those who do so ‘on the job’.

Many of those questions have been already dealt with by other articles and blogs but it is good to see CNET to note that not all is legal minefield:

Has blogging helped anyone land a job?
Yes. Robert Scoble said blogging helped him land a gig at Microsoft a couple of years ago. A Microsoft executive became a fan of Scoble’s tech-focused blog and eventually hired him from NEC. Scoble said the blog’s honest observations, including some criticisms of Microsoft, helped win over his future boss.

Are there some examples of high-profile workplace bloggers?
Yes, some companies have embraced blogs as a powerful communication tool, and some top executives now publish blogs. Examples include: Jonathan Schwartz, president of Sun Microsystems; Mark Cuban, Dallas Mavericks owner; Bob Lutz of General Motors; and Microsoft’s Scoble.

Indeed.

An informed friend and obviously a journalist with a sense of humour (unless it was a sarcastic laughter) sent me this cartoon about a dinosaur blog…

Love it!

Ephraim Schwartz writes about his impressions from the annual Demo conference and notes that this year’s show heightened his awareness to one trend in particular:

...high anxiety over what employees can publish in both e-mail and blogs. There was a slew of products that monitor employee communications in one way or another, mapping them to corporate policy on everything from offensive language and sexual harassment to outright prohibition of personal e-mail.

He finds OutBoxer probably the fairest to employees. As soon as an e-mailer hits the send button, if there’s a dirty word in there, a notice will pop up explaining which rule was broken so the writer can reconsider.

Another one, IPLocks’ Information Risk Management Platform, doesn’t give employees a second chance. It tracks employee access to sensitive company data and sends alerts to appropriate managers when employees step outside of normal usage patterns.

There are several more such as Fortiva Archive that monitors emails after they have been sent and the WhatCounts Appliance Series which monitors and evaluates blogs and e-mail before they are published or sent, routing posts to HR managers and/or legal when necessary.

I agree with Ephraim Schwartz that these products point to a disturbing trend and no amount of justification based on the combination of privacy issues, new government regulations, and a litigious society can convince me that this is the way to treat your employees and get the best out of them.

For example, can you imagine a legal department reviewing every blog post? If you’ve ever waited for legal to approve a document, you already know that you might as well give up now and forget corporate blogging. It’s probably not worth the aggravation.

Between lawsuits and regulations, I wouldn’t be surprised if, spearheaded by legal departments everywhere, all employees will someday soon be sent to class to learn a new, neutered, corporate-approved written language. Of course, companies may want to revamp their job descriptions for their vice presidents of corporate communications. May I suggest a more classic title — something like “Minister of Truth”?

Hm, where have I seen this before...?

It seems that blogging is gaining some traction or at least some coverage. This time it is Bobbie Johnson in the Guardian (no surprise there) writing about the business potential of blogging.

There are now millions of bloggers creating a network of interesting voices. Despite the grassroots “free” ideology, the hype has expanded further ever since it became clear that some people were making money out of the medium.

There are some who are making a fortune from blogging. Belle du Jour was a blog by a London call-girl, who has recently published a book and signed a deal for a TV series.  Nick Denton is also mentioned as a king of commercial bloggers. I am not sure about that but yes, Denton is using the blog trend to ‘re-invent’ online nano-publishing, which is an old model by new means. But that is not the point. Gawker media stock is high and the company’s business model is profitable. His latest blog, Lifehacker, attracted sponsorship from Sony and demonstrated how weblogs are inching towards legitimacy with the traditional business community.

But as a ‘blogging expert’ points out:

“It’s possible for an individual, skillful blogger to have income from a blog,” says Adriana Cronin-Lukas, a consultant for fledgling firm the Big Blog Company (www.bigblogcompany.net), and a serious weblogging evangelist. “But ultimately it is the communications aspect of the blog that brings money in - by blogging about a company or expertise.”

Hey, I am a serious weblogging evangelist! Shucks.

Bobbie draws attention to the budding industry that caters for bloggers:

In fact, for all but a select few, this city of gold will always prove elusive. Instead, it seems the real way to make money from weblogs is not from producing the final product, but in delivering services to bloggers eager to live the dream.

There is Blogger.com now owned by Google, and Movable Type and Typepad created by Six Apart. The company got £5.8m in funding and now has 80 people with offices in the US, Japan and Europe.  Last month they completed the buyout of LiveJournal, with a user base of more than 5m people. Now the company has three products aimed at three markets, and a good profile among a business community that is providing them with income.

Then there is Technorati that is fast becoming

...one of weblogging’s most innovative applications, searching the web in real time to let bloggers track who is speaking about them. The team - and many users - see it as a vital part of the interconnecting ecosystem that forms the heart of what is termed “the blogosphere”.

And do you remember our metrics, schmetrics attitude? Well, here’s me caught with some numbers down!

Cronin-Lukas points out what the bean counters want to hear: blog readers are desirable consumers. “A recent survey by US-based ad network Blogads revealed 61% of blog readers are over the age of 30, and more than 45% spend five to 10 hours reading blogs each week.”

With figures like that, it will be hard to persuade some eager beavers not to jump on the bandwagon.

So, c’mon eager beavers… get a-blogging.

Another article about ‘blogging’ in the UK mainstream press (and not in the Guardian!), this time about the tendency (if a few cases can be called that) of bloggers getting fired for blogging about their work and employer on personal blogs. It is written by a journalist blogger from the position of whether bloggers have any say in this. Michael Pollitt has a pleasant looking blog disconnected jottings and blogs about the article himself:

Careless blogs cost jobs looks at what happened to two bloggers when they wrote about work. They were dooced. In case you’re wondering, the word dooced was first used by American blogger Heather Armstrong who lost her job in 2002.

Joe Gordon of the Waterstone’s firing fame. He had been making remarks about his employer on his blog Woolamaloo Gazette for some time when things came to a rather shocking (for Joe) finale:

Shortly before Christmas, he was called to his manager’s office and informed of an investigation for gross misconduct. “I was suspended on pay and escorted from the premises of the bookstore I had worked in for 11 years,” Gordon wrote. He was dismissed in January for bringing the company into disrepute.

There is also this bit in the article:

It’s also important for employers to devise blogger strategies. Adriana Cronin-Lukas, a partner in The Big Blog Company, is an ardent blogger who also helps companies set up blogs. “I want employers to understand that employees are individuals and they have their freedoms,” she says. “If the company doesn’t have a blogging policy, it’s very hard for employees who have personal blogs. If an employer has a very strong opinion about blogs, then they should have a policy and give bloggers a chance to decide for themselves.”

They print anything these days, I tell ya.

Michael reveals on his blog that the Waterstone affair continues:

Joe Gordon contacted me on Monday afternoon to say that there was a settlement offered by Waterstone’s following an appeal with the help of his union (The Retail Book Association) against his dismissal in January. In lieu of reinstatement, Waterstone’s was now coming to an amicable agreement involving compensation.

Waterstones should be officially commenting in the next few days and Michael will blog about it on his blog. By the way, doesn’t it look so odd nowadays for a company to take a few days(!) to comment on something that happened weeks/months ago? This is not going to be possible for long as those companies who refuse to communicate will be confined to their PR controlled oblivion…

The final twist in the tale is that Joe will be running an official Forbidden Planet blog as part of his new job.

The company will be using the blog to communicate with customers, says Joe, as well as sharing new book titles they are excited about between issues of a quarterly magazine (Joe will write for that as well).

The message of the article is that both bloggers and companies should take note:

Blogs are growing in influence within and beyond the “blogosphere”. But most bloggers are not aware of the dangers they face when casually turning in what they think is a harmless account of their day at work. No matter how well intentioned, the blogger is usually the loser. And bloggers and employers clearly need to understand each other better before the word dooced is heard more often.

This was something we expected all along and hence our ‘bloglaw’ development. It did not take long to work out that if we tried to get companies to open up and let their employees communicate on their behalf (as it should be in the first place), the concern will be that of control of legal implications and reputation. Our position so far is that the benefits of blogging far outweight the risks, which although there, are also managable. Forewarned, forarmed…

The reason you’ve heard of podcasting is because no one first “demo’d” it at a conference and no corporate marketers were involved: No offense to VCs and the people who try to get their ideas in front of them. And no offense to big corporate marketers who are somewhere creating the next great gizmo. And no offense to the bloggers and journalists who serve as the acolytes of VC-funded start-ups and consumer electronic marketers…

But, when something is going to be big. Really big. You rarely see it demo’d.
- Rex Hammock

Another late-found gem, which has now given rise to neo-Noonanites in the blogosphere. I will join them in saying that Peggy Noonan’s essay is the best explanation of blogging in one piece so far.

When you hear name-calling like what we’ve been hearing from the elite media this week, you know someone must be doing something right. The hysterical edge makes you wonder if writers for newspapers and magazines and professors in J-schools don’t have a serious case of freedom envy.

The bloggers have that freedom. They have the still pent-up energy of a liberated citizenry, too. The MSM doesn’t. It has lost its old monopoly on information. It is angry.

In great detail, the power of blogs is described. Well, I might add. And a few predictions are made.

Finally, someday in America the next big bad thing is going to happen, and lines are going to go down, and darkness is going to descend, and the instant communication we now enjoy is going to be compromised. People in one part of the country are going to wonder how people in another part are doing. Little by little lines are going to come up, and people are going to log on, and they’re going to get the best, most comprehensive, and ultimately, just because it’s there, most heartening information from . . . some lone blogger out there. And then another. They’re going to do some big work down the road.

When computers (people) are networked, their power multiplies geometrically. Not only can people share all that information inside their machines, but they can reach out and instantly tap the power of other machines (people), essentially making the entire network their computer.
- Scott McNealy, 1996

The name is RSS, sir. Despite proliferation of RSS feeds outside blogosphere, it is still difficult to explain to people what it is, which is probably one of the reasons most people regard it a geek thing. Well, here is a good description of RSS and its uses, aimed at journalists and written by Jonathan Dube for Poynter Online.

I would love to have been a fly on the wall. As it is, reading about it on Scoble’s blog is the next best thing:

Yesterday I ripped the head off of a coworker. He works in marketing on a major Microsoft product. I’m not going to identify it or him.

He called me yesterday and said:

“Hey, Scoble, we’ve done a fun site but no one is linking to it.”

My first question?

“Do you have an RSS feed?”

“No, this site is for non geeks.”

At that point I just lost it. I think I swore a bit. I am so mad 20 hours later that I can’t even remember what I said.

And then it got worse:

This site, which probably cost $100,000 (ahh, that’s where our towel money went) has great graphic design. Lots of streaming video.

But it’s fake. All of it is actors. No real people. No real point.

Aaaaaaaggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhh.

Oh, but it gets even worse. “Can I download the videos?”

“No, the whole point of the site is to get people to visit and stick around.”

So, let me get this straight. You don’t have RSS feeds. That means I won’t be able to build a relationship with this site. You have a fake site so even if I tell my readers to visit it they’ll get there and feel dirty (and they can’t interact or do anything there either). You won’t let me download the videos to pass them around virally. Or remix them in fun ways.

Oh, and there’s no permalinks so even if I wanted to link you directly to a piece of content there I couldn’t.

Actually, this sounds like many conversations that we have with some marketing people. If they ever get that far… Sigh. But at least we are not alone.

I couldn’t tell you if this page has the proper meta-data-- or any. My search engine optimization method is: get a lot of links by writing something original and useful that people will elect to recommend at their own sites. It works. And links to PressThink don’t expire.

- Jay Rosen, Press Think

Greg at Social Twister, has a good link to Seth’s Godin’s analysis of the movement of the tectonic plates of marketing.

Seth Godin talks about the new middle:

Marketing dollars are also moving from magazines (stagnant) to adwords and online media (skyrocketing). Marketers are busy building viral campaigns, funding blogs, and yes, by the way, investing in products that are cool enough to actually blog about. But who’s deciding?

My guess is that this is not an organized, top down effort led by the fancy CMO or VP of Marketing. I think it’s all happening around the edges while the middle (TV etc.) implodes. This is accidental and random and it’s going to get ugly, fast. I wonder how long before smart marketers realize the new middle of the marketing department is all that extra stuff.

Greg takes it a step further, extrapolating to other areas that are affected by a similar trend:

It makes me think just how many middles are feel pressure inwards and that could be fighting implosion. We’ve got blogging going after traditional journalism, podcasting going after radio, and maybe even vlogging going after TV on one level or another. We’re also seeing greater and greater disintermediation of the production process, beyond the actual creational efforts. Amazing times indeed.

I have been very busy lately and neglected my RSS aggregator. Today, I will be trying to catch up on what I missed and so you will see some stuff that may have been noted by others but I think they are worth pointing out here too. So bear with me.

One of those is the McDonald’s Fake Lincoln Fry Blog, found via Business Blog Consulting.

Not much to say - it’s fake and does not work. Why? It’s not credible, there is no point to it and it links to a flash site with an ad. A marketer’s wet dream, but no customers in sight.

Indeed, it does not seem to be a favourite with other bloggers either. 

BusinessWeek online sums up the two powerful messages from the Business Blogging Summit that took place last month.

1. Blog feeds are rapidly replacing email as a form of proactive marketing communications.
2. Marketers wishing to post their own blogs should not approach the form as another one-way communications medium, but should plan for their blogs to offer two-way dialog.

Chris Pirillo, a vocal advocate of RSS as an alternative information delivery argues that spam, which is the 800-pound gorilla responsible for most enterprise email blacklists and whitelists, is impossible via RSS.

Because the user controls his or her subscription, RSS subscriptions imply confirmation that he or she wants to receive your message.

Pete Blackshaw, of Intelliseek stressed:

Blogging has become a new form of one-to-one marketing, but one not always dictated by brand. It has concentrated more power in (customer) ‘influencers,’ and thus requires a new targeting mindset.

See, we told you so. Well, I would not say that email is dead as a communication tool although I admit that it is considerably hamstrung by spam to be the medium of choice for PR and marketers in a corporate environment. For marketing, RSS is the best channel as it replaces the push (by the marketer) with pull (from the customer/reporter). I have stopped reading email newsletters from people in my ‘industry’ since if they do not know by now about blogs, that means they are rather behind. (And I do mean in my ‘industry’ i.e. online communication, self-publising, marketing, expertise building etc.)

I loved the headline so much I had to reproduce it here, I mean, the words trophy, bloggers and hunters in one sentence does stretch the imagination somewhat. Unlike pyjamas and geeks and cats, words frequently associated with blogging. By the uninitiated that is.

The news by CNET.com is that bloggers have laid claim to a prominent media career for the second time in five months.

On Friday, after nearly two weeks of intensifying pressure on the Internet, Eason Jordan, the chief news executive at CNN, abruptly resigned after being besieged by the online community. Morever, last week liberal bloggers forced a sketchily credentialed White House reporter to quit his post.

I have been outrageously busy in those two, for the blogosphere glorious weeks and I haven’t noticed anything until today.

Jordan, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in late January, apparently said, according to various witnesses, that he believed the United States military had aimed at journalists and killed 12 of them. There is some uncertainty over his precise language and the forum, which videotaped the conference, has not released the tape. When he quit Friday night, Jordan said in a statement that, “I never meant to imply U.S. forces acted with ill intent when U.S. forces accidentally killed journalists.”

This may be good news for visibility of blogging in general (especially if you subscribe to the school of thought that there is no such thing as bad publicity) but I would give ear to Jeff Jarvis’ call to bloggers to keep their real target in mind.

I wish our goal were not taking off heads but digging up truth.

Well, for me the truth is out there, sure, but the way to get there is to first communicate openly.

Wired News reports that Ask Jeeves bought Bloglines, a web log index and internet news funnel popular with serious readers of online journals, in its latest bid to gain ground on heavyweight rivals Google and Yahoo.

Ask Jeeves is counting on Bloglines to become a significant drawing card. The company has been trying to lure traffic from the internet’s search engine leaders, Google and Yahoo, as well as two of the web’s other biggest drawing cards, Microsoft’s MSN.com and Time Warner’s AOL.com.

Hm, let’s see what comes out of the wash…

Yesterday FT had a very interesting and well researched article by Scott Morrison on the ‘power’ of blogging. The aggregating and networking prowess of blogs, that is, this time used to the detriment of a large company that ignores complaints from its customers.

It started with a simplegripe posted on a weblog - the blogger was unhappy that his new mobile phone did not work as advertised. It was not long before other angry bloggers chimed in with their own stories, flooding the “blogosphere” with a stream of complaints that culminated last month in a class action lawsuit against the second-largest wireless network operator in the US. The lawsuit against Verizon Wireless - and the way it came about - highlights the challenges that weblogs pose to corporations.

It picked up on the most interesting aspect of blogosphere:

Tech-savvy people have for years shared their views through obscure internet chatrooms and bulletin boards. But easy-to-use blogging software and powerful search engines are now creating vast and efficient “word of mouth networks” on which tens of millions can compare information.

Yes, and the trusty Scoble (thanks to him for doing such a splendid job in explaining blogs to corporate world) appears:

If companies don’t understand that and don’t learn how to track what people are saying, they are going to be hit violently with PR problems that they don’t understand or know where they are coming from.

And, funnily enough, it is blogs that would help companies with crisis management. The case of Verizon PR disaster signals that companies cannot hide more or less successfully behind a wall of press releases, PR spin and market power:

Hundreds of disgruntled Verizon Wireless customers took to the blogosphere to trade stories, swap hints about ways to adapt their phones and tell of their efforts to make the carrier correct the problem. Several posted letters in which the company tried unsuccessfully to mollify its angry customers.  Verizon Wireless, which declined to discuss the lawsuit, found itself conducting a crisis-management exercise in full public view.

Blogs are clearly credited (or blamed depending on where you are standing) with providing a sufficient reason and critical mass for the plaintiff to bring action against Verizon.

“Blogs were very instrumental in him being able to, in a relatively short time, determine that nobody was going to give him any relief,” said Michael Kelly of Kirtland & Packard, the law firm representing the plaintiff.

There are more examples in the article of cases when blogs caused headaches for corporate America but there is also sound advice from Mike Masnick, chief executive of Techdirt. Most companies are oblivious to blogs and those that are aware do not know how to respond and believes that:

… the best strategy is to engage bloggers openly and honestly in their realm. Any whiff of insincerity will be picked up and turned against a company.

Remember Mazda ‘blog’, for example?

I guess it’s appropriate to end with Scoble’s quote whose blog managed to humanise Microsoft.

It’s the new world and you want to be part of the conversation

For the whole and true story, click on the image. There is not much to add to it apart from restating the Big Blog Company’s ‘hidden’ (well, not really) agenda. Apart from evangelising about blogging, educating the world about blogs and getting companies blog, we also believe that employees are the most important components of most businesses. The assumption is that the basic unit of a company is the individual, not a department, process or even a team. Creativity and innovation comes from individual minds that can collaborate and cooperate to make good ideas happen. Blogs are the perfect tool for the individual and by introducing them to business, they have the potential to influence the way employees interact not only with the outside world but also inside companies.

What Sun is doing, with its ‘eval system’ is short-sighted at best and very wrong at worst. The manager who not only allocated the Exceeded Expectations quota but also had the audacity to argue when reminded of Kathy’s sacrifice that:

That’s not the point. This is simply about numbers. My hands are tied.

was as confused as the donkey who kicked her face. And I don’t think it’s difficult to guess which one felt worse.

Oh, and don’t get me started about companies that use ‘eval systems’ rating their employees according ‘meets expectations’ and ‘exceeds expectations’. Yeah, we are all individuals…

An interesting panel discussion as relayed by NevOn: The discussion was moderated by Dan Forbush and addressed the impact of blogs on their work, their general view on the value of blogs as a communication channel, and how best to promote their blogs. It's worth a read and here are a few juicy quotes:

Blogs are an incredible medium and will change the economic dynamics of whole sectors of industry. You don't know until you've tried it. Blogs occur naturally; you can't force people to read blogs. If you create value, people will find you and talk about you. It's an automatic feedback mechanism.

...

For a monthly print magazine, a blog offers great ways to share new and fresh content more frequently with readers. Involve and engage the readers. Help readers better connect with us and other readers. We have tremendous Google juice. Our site uses cascading style sheets which has given us high respect by web developers. Starting to see articles created for the blog make it into the print magazine. Open blog up to the readers, don't worry about editorial controls.

...

'Blogging' means different things to different people. The technology that enables it is the fascinating thing, and that is what will change things completely.

Firefly is one of my favourite sci-fi series. It is not very long and so I was pleased to hear that they are making a film based on the characters, called Serenity. As I clicked through to the movie site, there is was, a link to Serenity blog in the middle of the page. My heart leaped and I followed…

But alas, although the web page looks cool enough, in a kind of understated, couldn’t-be-bothered way, the blog is a blog only in the name. It has been set up in June 2004 and the last entry (there are five in total) is from September 2004. Shame since the content is interesting. But the worst crime is no permalinks - a major omission and so the jury says this ain’t no blog. Further, no comments - how are the fans supposed to engage? Also, no links to other movie blogs or site - how is the blogosphere to get a look in? But it’s got RSS. I wonder what for…

Tom Reynolds - a pseudonym obviously - writes a popular blog called Random Acts of Reality, which is about his experiences as an emergency medical technician (EMT) in the London Ambulance Service. He explains his blogging muse:

I realised that with the work that I do, I had a wealth of stories that I could tell, and that maybe some people would be interested in what happens in the ambulance service. I quite enjoy writing down the things that happen at work - whether it is a form of therapy for me, I can’t say – but I do get enjoyment from it.

There are more blogs of this type, which is the anonymous work blog. Employees in the NHS (National Health Service), police officers, magistrates, call center employees, teachers, fast food industry employees are blogging about their experiences under the cover of hidden identity.

Tom Reynolds opines:

I suspect that for many, the reason why they blog is much the same as mine. It gives me a chance to tell people about the ‘real’ NHS, that ambulance work isn’t like ‘Casualty’, and perhaps highlight some of the strengths and weaknesses.

Also, by letting people know what I do, I get some gratitude, which is something that I seldom get at work. There might also be partly some subtle form of ‘whistle-blowing’.

It is also the ability to be able to say things without a complex publishing infrustructure and access to channels of distribution. A blog is a one man’s publishing house and the implications can be (and are) immense. It did not take Tom Reynolds long to work out the power of a blog:

I believe that blogging within the NHS should be encouraged. Blogging represents an added value to organisations. If there is a staff blogger then that organisations ‘brand’ is going to get linked to, and spoken about, more-so than a more traditional website.

...

It [blog] would increase communication, boost morale and ultimately a half hour a day blogging would improve the way that people think about their job. At the end of the day a blog is just another form of content management. ...Which is easier, calling up a website and firing off an email, or posting a quick comment to a blog post? Put the blog on the system that you are installing, or send it as an RSS feed and invite people to submit suggestions or comment on problems. There would be a bigger feeling of community, and thus let people ‘invest’ in the IT project.”

It’s good to hear someone else to say nice things about blogging, and from an NHS employee!

Earthlink, a large ISP has a blog whose goal is to provide people with information and help that enables them to evaluate the tools and resources to better protect their computers, themselves and their families while online, Earthlink Protection blog. The contributors are managers with responsibilities such as Privacy Officer, Product Manager for EarthLink’s Spyware Blocker, Director of Product Management for Communication Applications etc. They write well about stuff they understand and work with. The blog will provide some useful information to their customers and others.

The only thing that confuses me slightly is the categories. I can’t see any categories on individual posts and clicking on any of the categories in the sidebar just gives me a very similar selection of articles for each category. A structure for a blog where most people might be looking for specific information is important and categorisation should be the main tool, as should be a search option. Most people might not read it everyday, but will check it when they have a question, problem or simply are interested in what experts have to say. And that’s when they need to get to the information fast and easy.

And, I put it to you, ladies and gentlemen of the blogosphere, no comments or at least teensy-weensy trackback...?

Adam Curry of the podcasting fame is having problems with his broadband connection in little Britain.

On January 4th 2005, BT installed wiring inside our house to accommodate a new line that will only cart ADSL directly from EasyNet’s gear at the Guildford exchange. Since easynet is providing everything on this line, BT is only responsible for the actual copper connection from the exchange to our house.

To date, the wiring terminates at the curb, waiting for the wires to be connected (via underground cabling) to the new wiring at the house. A distance of no more than 15 meters.

This is where everything has broken down. For whatever reason, the paperwork after the inside wiring was completed, didn’t make it to the next step, which is a ‘surveyor’ who would connect the last 15 meters. The job was closed in error and no one knows how to get BT to complete this final step, which is clearly their mistake and every BT engineer who has come to the house admits this freely.

As someone who lives and does business online, I have total sympathy for Adam and if anyone reading this has any ideas or suggestions, feel free to make them. The commenters on Adam’s blog suggest taking the complaint as high as possible making lives of the BT and/or Easynet people a misery until they sort it out. There is an edge of desperation in these words and I hope the matter will get sorted soon.

The entire service, copper wires and all, is a business installation, and I am paying business prices. I put both British Telecom and EasyNet at fault for this clusterfuck. It is damaging my business and I won’t stand for it any longer.

I am at my wits end, and will accept anyone’s help, even if it literally means busting open the wiring box at the curb to complete the last connection myself.

Good luck and show’em!

Update: Hm, he is planning to do just that: ...now I’m recording all calls and will be airing them in the Source Code, starting today.

Tell me and I forget. Show me and I remember. Involve me and I understand.

- This sums up the power of blogging.

Unlike earlier promises of self-publishing revolutions, the blog movement seems to be the real thing. A big reason for that is a tiny innovation called the permalink: a unique web address for each posting on every blog. Instead of linking to web pages, which can change, bloggers link to one another’s posts, which typically remain accessible indefinitely. This style of linking also gives blogs a viral quality, so a pertinent post can gain broad attention amazingly fast—and reputations can get taken down just as quickly.
- Fortune article Why there’s no escaping the blog.

Shel of the Red Couch has an excellent post that echoes pretty much what we have been thinking and observing about the evolving blogging phenomenon. This is one of the best descriptions of its impact so far:

I believe, blogging will fundamentally change communications from what it is today to something less controlled and more credible. It has already begun to do so, at a phenomenal rate, and at a time when many industries are dealing with broken business models. For example, traditional publishing--newspapers, magazines and books are all dealing with issues of reduced profitability. Blogging didn’t break their models--the Internet contributed by fragmenting news distribution and by siphoning off ad revenues.

Indeed. As I tried to explain to anyone who will listen, blogs are not changing things/industries/world by themselves, they are merely the first that are using the infrastructure (internet) that has always had the potential to do so. The fundamental shifts within particular industries such as publishing, journalism, PR & marketing are to do more with the very same factors that gave rise to blogging. The ability to communicate, produce and shift large amounts of information has shown up those industries for what they are - industrial era throwbacks forcing old methods onto a changed landscape. Their lack of credibility is not new, we have learnt not to trust adverts and marketing campaigns and regard PR as synonymous with bullshit. It wasn’t blogs that made that so, but they provided a networked platform to spell this out.

“Blog or Die,” someone has charged, represented the same bubble-headedness of the dotcom era, when businesses were told that if they didn’t have a website they would go out of business. Personally, that was sound advice, but too limited. Companies who didn’t have an internet strategy, they were likely to succumb… Companies that wait too long to adapt to fundamental change die. Or, at a minimum they get boxed in. Look at what Amazon.com did online to Barnes & Noble.

Blogs are becoming an increasingly effective alternative that has the potential to replace many traditional communication methods or at least force them to adapt and evolve. Such an alternative is very powerful, as it represents the tipping point for those industries that have boxed themselves in.  If the only way to present yourself to the world is to have that glossy brochure, flashing-banner website or 30 second commercial, companies will pay up or they risk not showing up on their market’s radar at all. This can last only as long as there is no other way. And so, the most revolutionary aspect of blogging seems to me its ability to offer an alternative, not as easy, sleek and packaged, but far more effective and far more affordable, than traditional marketing. It is early days and there is no need to jump into far-reaching and potentially embarassing conclusions. As long as there are companies that are fed up with the traditional marketing and have desire to communicate with their customers and markets, blogs are in business. Let’s keep blogging and see what comes out of the wash…

Or as Shel concludes:

Businesses today need to rethink how they communicate with people who make a difference to them, particularly customers and prospects. How do you feel when you have an important question, and go to the Web site and have to scroll ad nauseam through FAQs, without find an email link or phone number? If you do call, how do you feel listening to the 659 options you need to navigate before you get an actual human who speaks in a language you do not understand? Which do you believe more--an official press release, composed by a committee of mid-level tacticians, or a blog posted by a team of mid-level technicians building products that interest you? Which management team do you trust more. Companies who ignore blogging will die. Blogging will not kill them directly, but companies that ignore blogging will die from linked factors like lost customers and credibility.

It’s always fun to see what uses people put blogs to. I just came across Boomer blog on which an ”old media” person is making the transition to new media. I want to use the Internet as a way to by-pass the gatekeepers of traditional media and tell the stories of people like me who are facing transitions in their lives and doing it with grace and a sense of adventure.

The person behind the blog is Nancy Fernandez Mills, a writer, producer, and yoga teacher. She was impressed by the grass-roots internet campaign for Howard Dean and decided to look into this blogging and podcasting thing. These are her reasons for blogging:

I’ve worked in network news and I’ve run a video production company. I joined an Internet start-up that raised venture funds only to have the funding pulled a few months later. I’ve created Flash movies for corporate clients. Now I’m hoping that the Internet is ready for those of us who are storytellers at heart.

You bet. If you have a story to tell and an internet connection, you should be blogging before you can say permalink. Love the banner, pleasant writing, charming people, but… why Blogger, if they are trying to go professional?!

via Dan Bricklin

Note: Hm, Dan’s blog does not have trackback, which is rather annoying. Especially since they want feedback… Oh well, can’t have everything.

I just returned from a fast and furious session about blogs with two accomplished journalists and great audience to boot (no pun intented), Anne Thompson and Jeffrey Wells. Both of them are already on the net, understand its implications and have created their individual ‘brands’ building reputations over the years.

As always, when we get together with people who are interested in blogs, there is much to discuss and the race against the time commences. At this session, I tried to cover a multitude of topics, from the larger picture of internet as a network and how that affects those who try to use it as a channel, how content evolves and is not finished by publishing it, how blogs are tools and nodes that can be used in many different ways, what are permalinks and why they are the most important feature of a blog, what is creative commons licence and how it is especially relevant to those who publish their writing on the net trying to reach their audience, how you can reach audiences using the network effect to showing them how a blogging back-end looks like and how easy is to post, link and comment on a blog.

Talking to a US audience that is usually far more blog savvy than the UK one, as they have been surrounded by the blog buzz for some time, I was a bit nervous. I feared that I will not have much new or revealing to say to them. This turned out to be an unfounded concern as there are so many aspects to blogging and the dynamics of the blogosphere are constantly evolving, allowing ongoing pontification. As a result, there were many good questions and not enough time to cover all that was of interest. I hope this was just a beginning of a beautiful conversation… I guess we have to do some more bootcamps here in LA.

Without permanence you slip off the search engines. Without permanence, bold ideas like ‘news as conversation’ fall away, because you’re shutting down the conversation before it has barely started. Without permanence, you might be on the web, but you’re certainly not part of it.
- Simon Waldman in guest article for PressThink

Last night I arrived in Los Angeles. Yes, I am here because of blogs and blogs will be the flavour of the day. It is a quick visit - I am leaving on Thursday - but I hope to meet some interesting people. Will keep you posted. The only hint is that the journalist bootcamp scheduled for tomorrow in London is not the only one the Big Blog Company will be doing that day. Oops, gave it away, didn’t I?

Another interesting report on blogging, by Pew Internet & American Life Project, this time with pretty numbers…

The Pew Internet & American Life Project began asking about blog creation in the spring of 2002. In June of that year, 3% of internet users said they had created a blog or web diary that others could read. By the beginning of 2004, the figure had grown to 5% of internet users. Our survey in late November showed that the number grew to 7%, which represents more than 8 million people.

And a pretty picture:

On a sad note though apparently 6 million Americans get news and information fed to them through RSS aggregators But 62% of online Americans do not know what a blog is. Oh, well, nobody’s perfect.

Hugh Hewit has a book out called Blog. It’s about understanding information reformation that’s changing your world. Whatever next...?

via Instapundit

To all those who read our blog and to all those whose news readers we clutter:

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Each time lucky! Today was the third and the last session on blogging for journalists before Christmas and a good time was had by all again. It is such a pleasure to have varied and intelligent people coming to have a chat with us and no two sessions have been the same. We learn much about their perceptions of blogs and online world as well as motivation to investigate the blogging trend. One of the journalists was asking more about the mechanics of self-publishing, such as domains, servers, backing up the content. He saw his blog more as a structured online archive of his articles that he would use to build his reputation as a financial journalist. Another one did not worry about the software and its trick, he was wondering about what to write about and the oddness of people knowing about him more from his blog than he’d know about them…

All in all, it was a good series of ‘bootcamps’ and we are going to carry on doing them. The next one is on 30th December (for the keen and free) on that day and then 10th January looks a likely date. The sessions, originally scheduled for an hour, do take much longer because we try to address individual concerns and perspectives. In any case, those who attended know that they are welcome to come back with suggestions and more questions.

Forbes asks What’s Your Involvement With Blogs? and polls the readers. The results are 98% percent update their own blog daily. People, you need to get a life!

via BL Ochman

Marvellous news - somebody actually reviewed a blog! Stephen Pollard’s blog, that is, which is getting a lot of attention due to Stephen’s role as David Blunkett’s biographer. So Journalistic.co.uk decided to ‘review’ Stephen’s blog and in the good tradition of the blogosphere, let’s fisk it:

As of today, the blog is getting an average of 514 page views a day. Is that good, is that bad? I would have thought with the amount of publicity that the book is generating that it would be a bit more than that.

Well, more hits is always good, I guess, but size is not all. As I keep pointing out, what is astonishing to me about blogs is that people come and read them everyday. That is the notable metric to me. This clever ‘deflection’ nothwithstanding, yes, I would expect Stephen to get more traffic, which has been increased since last Friday’s 500 to today’s 700. Some of it will stick but ultimately, building traffic is a fine art that takes time and effort.

Next the reviewer takes on Stephen’s style:

As blogs go this is a good and gives some extra insight into the biography he wrote of David Blunkett. Where it’s a let down is the sheer number of words on the page, just a little too wordy.

A fair cop. But it’s Stephen’s style and that’s the main thing. I don’t find it wordy but I guess I am used to blogger’s rambling style.

Most people tend to scan on screen and maybe print out to actually read. With a blog, or indeed any online publication it’s important to strike the right balance between what people may wish to read online or print out later.

Print?! Did I just read print? With a blog you read the damn stuff or you move on. The blogosphere moves with blinding speed (and not in a good way sometimes) and printing is for whimps. But seriously, you either read it, blog it or furl it. Blogs like Stephen’s are not online publications, they are persistant conversations. And conversations can be wordy. That’s kinda the point, isn’t it? Next…

While there are line breaks between paragraphs in entries, the blog does need some images to break up the text and make it easier on the eye to read. Also, Pollard needs to consider changing the colour scheme as the green background just doesn’t work.

Well, pictures are good but why put them in there for the sake of making it easier on the eye… It is certainly true that pictures speak a thousand words but I am not sure I would like to see Stephen’s blog littered with pictures of David Blunkett, for example. I recommend putting pictures on the blog, but not just for ‘breaking up the text’. Oh, and do not touch the colour and decorations - it’s Stephen’s front room and it’s up to him how he furnishes it.

Finally, the reviewer is spot on with this one:

And he might like to update his own biography. Pollard says of himself:

He is currently writing the biography of the British Home Secretary, David Blunkett, which will be published in the spring of 2005.

Stephen, your book came out earlier this week.

Indeed. So all in all a fairly balanced review offering an interesting perpective on blogs by someone with experience in other media. Other than the print reference faux pas and the comment about colours, the points were well made.

Yep, it’s that time of the year. Predictions everywhere. Let me start with a list I understand. Well, it might have to do with the fact it mentions blogs…

Michael Gartenberg of Jupiter Research peers into his crystal ball for Computerworld:

2. PDAs will become passe. Disconnected ones, that is. Over time, the real action will be moving core PDA functionality, centered on personal information management, to other devices such as cell phones. This will cause major IT headaches, since few cell phones are controlled by IT these days.

So, Tomi Ahonen was right about the mobile winning the battle of the most ubiquitous gadget. Which is good news for us since Tomi also thinks (mo)blogging is the future.

3. More people will lose their jobs over their weblogs. It’s happened already, and it will happen again. If you’re posting about your job or employer without consent, you’re taking a lot of risk with your future.

And more people will gain jobs over their weblogs. But essentially right, there are legal issues as well as cultural that will make it likely that some blogger may loose a job. This is why we set up the Big Blog Company, so businesses do not have to fear blogs but embrace them. In which case, you’d better change from pyjamas into something more suitable… And guidelines. Guidelines help. And treating your employees as intelligent agents and explaining to them why writing about some things may not be a good idea.

4. But more corporations will create official blogs. Corporations have seen the weblog light, and blogs will become common for business use. Unfortunately, far too many of these efforts will just be marketing fluff disguised as weblogs.

I like this prediction. A lot. Have corporations seen the weblog light? Certainly not in the UK, but we are working on it. But I too expect to see more faux, marketing fluff blogs with ‘jumped on the bandwagon (that we don’t really understand or care to understand)’ written all over them…

6. Wi-Fi will be ubiquitous, but not in the workplace. Wi-Fi is readily available in public places such as coffee shops, airports and hotels. IT shops, however, will slow deployments a bit over fears of security. End users will take matters into their own hands, so expect to see lots of ad hoc networks springing up.

Good news, more wi-fi everywhere enables me to leave the house, which has got to have a positive influence on my well-being. Also, good for meeting people in a cafe and being able to show them the blogging marvel live over a cup of coffee. Priceless.

7. VoIP will be a mainstream technology for business users. Voice over IP is perhaps the hottest technology in the telecommunications industry today. VoIP-based services will grow even more as a mainstream technology for business use. Expect a lot of competition for the trillions of minutes and billions of dollars’ worth of voice calls that business users make each year.

Marvellous. Where would we be without Skype...?

Oh, and there is some stuff about Longhorn, Moore’s law and Linux. 

Jim Bursch is onto something here:

Currently, advertisers and I are mediated. We’re mediated by network television; we’re mediated by newspapers and magazines; we’re mediated by the Media.

I want to disintermediate advertising.

They say that the pen is mightier than the sword and now some say that blogs can be mightier than the big media. Neither of the statements is entirely true but both contain a point worth considering.

Over the last few months we have had many conversations with journalists/writers and discovered that there are recurring themes and questions asked by this particular profession about blogs and the blogosphere. In the meantime, a debate about journalism and blogging is raging (at times) in the blogosphere…

It seemed a good idea to us to gather a few journalists who may want to learn about blogs and show them how they work and why perhaps they should care. As things move fast in the blogosphere, we would like to do a few practical hour-long blogging sessions before Christmas, starting Friday 17th, then Monday 20th December and Tuesday 21st December.

All sorts are welcome:

• Those who feel that they should be looking into blogs and would like to have a chance to ask some questions, try basic blogging tools and see RSS syndication at work.
• Those who already blog themselves or read blogs or are on the verge of blogging, to get started and get some tips from veteran bloggers.
• Those who are just interested in the internet - the technological and social aspects of blogging - and see it merely as one of the many evolving online phenomena.
• And especially those who think that blogging may just be the best thing since sliced bread and will become ardent bloggers in no time.

The aim is for you to leave with a live and functioning (and simple) blog set up for you, as well as an RSS reader to manage your online and blog sources via news feeds. A laptop to connect to our wireless network would be useful to bring along. If this is not possible or convenient, we will find an alternative way to get you set up here.

There will be only 4-5 people per session, and it will be first come, first served basis. The series of ‘boot camps’ will culminate in a blogging evening with/for journalists planned by Six Apart, the Big Blog Company and other ‘blog players’ in the second half on January. This will be a larger affair, so for individual attention use the opportunity to ask all the awkward questions about blogging well before then.

For more information on these sessions, click here.

Journalist bloggers are no news in the US. And last week, French journalism made a huge leap into the blogosphere with Six Apart introducing Le Monde journalists and readers to blogs. There is already a handful of journalist bloggers in the UK too and they are listed below.

(Updated 14th December) UK journalist blogs (if you know of any others, please let us know)

Andrew Brown, Guardian, Helmintholog

Ben Hammersley

Caroline Westbrook

Charles Arthur, technology editor at The Independent

Clive Davis, The Times

David Smith, economics editor, Sunday Times

Dot journalism

Graham Holliday, Noodlepie

Guy Clapperton, freelance journalist and editor

Ian Stobie, freelance journalist

James Bartholomew, The Welfare State We Are In

Jeremy Wagstaff, Loose Wire

Jonathan Oatis, This is My London

Journalistic.co.uk - the UK digital journalism blog

Mike Butcher, mbites

Neil McIntosh, Complete Tosh, Guardian Newsblog (and others)

Oliver Kamm, columnist for The Times

Sandy Starr, of Spiked online

Simon Waldman

Stephen Pollard, freelance

Stuart Hughes of Beyond Northern Iraq

Suw Charman, Strange Attractor (Corante blog) and Chocolate & Vodka

These are our little helpers for this occasion:
Suw Charman is an established blogger who write about blogs, social software and related issues on the Corante.com blog, Strange Attractor. Along with Stowe Boyd and Greg Narain, she is working on Corante’s seminar series, True Voice: The Business of Blogging. A freelance journalist, Suw has written for The Guardian and the BBC as well as specialist publications such as Design In-Flight.

Alistair Shrimpton is the UK representative of Six Apart Ltd, the company behind the Movable Type publishing system and the TypePad personal weblogging service. Six Apart creates tools that enable hundreds of thousands of individuals, organizations and corporations to participate in the Web’s full potential by publishing their ideas on the Internet with simple, yet powerful software and services. Users of Six Apart publishing systems include The Guardian, the BBC and Le Monde.

Business Week reports:

Now advertisers are realizing there is a market emerging in the blogosphere. Already, the growth in regular online advertising, estimated to be about 35% this year, will far outpace the spending increases for any other sector of the media world. Add to all this the fact that about 11% of Internet users today are inveterate blog readers, and the blogging scene starts to get mighty compelling for marketers.

There is much written about how bloggers can make money. From BlogAds, to Nick Denton and Jason Calacanis blog-empires, to sponsorship by big brand names. I still believe that there is no sustainable business model in one’s blog without a supporting business somewhere else. In the meantime:

Clearly, the business of blogs is in its infancy, with lots to be worked out. But that’s not stopping marketers, entrepreneurs, and writers alike from diving into this newest form of New Media.

Adrants rants:

The only reason natural word of mouth and viral distribution of information, which is nothing more than the forwarding of information from one to another - a behaviour which has occured since living beings learned to communicate - has been commercialized is because the advertising techniques of today and yesteryear no longer work. Marketers are grasping at straws, fighting to keep their heads above water as consumers submerge them in an in a growing effort to shut them up and out of their lives for good. It’s all simply an ongoing, multi-billion dollar battle of wills between marketer and consumer. Marketers want eyeballs. Consumers want to tear marketer’s eyeballs from their sockets. The model is broken and it is just getting worse. We are in the pre-orgasmic throes of the Great Advertising Flame Out - a dynamic period just prior to the next great model which, perhaps - though unlikely, will rescue us from the capitalistic mess we are in right now.

In a strange coincidence I had a couple of people who I know from outside the blogosphere and work that said that we are too harsh on marketing and PR on this blog. Reading the above paragraph, I think we are nowhere near harsh enough. We leave that to the pros…

I have noticed a recent(!) proliferation of individual ‘business’ bloggers who are offering their services to companies, mostly consulting and coaching style. Interesting development, as it suggests that the market is becoming more aware of blogs and the benefits of business blogging are perceived clearer, at least by those who are selling their blogging expertise. BLM Business Blogs, The Mobile Technology Weblog, Jeremy Wright’s auction on eBuy… and many more, I am sure.

To share some of our insights into the life of a ‘professional blogger’ - we discovered very early on that the hardest part of our job is to explain to people just how versatile and wondrous a tool blogs are. They are not “just online journals” or “just funny web-sites” or some form of online ego-trip but a flexible and potentially powerful communication tool that companies no longer have the luxury to ignore. This point has been most difficult to make in the UK, where people with titles such as Head of New Media or even Head of Interactive Media in large corporations, never even heard of blogs. Without our constant interaction with the US blogosphere and our contacts there, we could have been disheartened in no time.

Nevertheless, the perception is changing even in the UK. There have been a few articles in the mainstream press about blogs and although most of them missed the point entirely (i.e. couldn’t get out of the ‘blogs are just online journals and not very good at that either’ groove), people are starting to wonder whether there might not be something to this… er, blogging thing. Also, next year should see a number of conferences on blogging and once a large or influential UK company breaks the ranks, the rest will follow.

To that end, we are planning a series of sessions to assist those who are wondering about blogs to get a clearer idea what they are making their minds up about. The first one will be a blogging bootcamp for journalists where they can learn what blogs are, how they work and why perhaps they should care. The mysteries of posting on a blog and using an RSS reader shall be dispelled and they will issue forth enlightened in the art of blogging. Well, that’s the plan anyway. A similar training session for PR and marketing people is next. In the meantime, of course, we are here to explain, demonstrate and coach anyone, regardless of their profession.

I just returned from a conference called Online Information (they must be from the early net days when the combination of these words must have seem revolutionary) where I was speaking at a session about adding value to intranets. My spiel was about blogs in general and internal blogs in particular. I have been asked to step in for someone else only a couple of weeks ago and I am glad I managed to rally and put something together.

My main point was that all the projects whose objective is to stimulate information sharing, collaboration, creativity and innovation within companies have to be aware that they are working on a human solution, not a technological one. The implementation and the format of the solution has technological aspects but these will amount to nothing is the basic unit of a company, the individual, is not taken into account.

I enjoyed talking about blogs and what they are capable of to an audience consisting of people who can actually put them to good use and make a difference. I got a chance to have a quick chat with a few of them afterwards and look forward to hearing from those who found my talk interesting enough to get in touch. There is a lot more, where that came from!

Oh, one of the people who approached me handed me a little leaflet saying: You’ve been blogged! Marvellous! There is a blog covering the conference, Infotodayblog.com and it’s a good one. (But no permalinks, as Christina’s LIS Rant points out.)

Update:  Here is the presentation in full. It’s PowerPoint, so hold your horses. 

With a title meant to titilate AdWeek asks: Blogs: Fad or Marketing Medium of the Future? We haven’t done a decent fisking on this blog for a while so here it goes:

In the past few years, blogs have gone from a quirky vehicle for expression to a political force to, now, a quirky marketing tool for corporate America.

Quirky, indeed. How about more human and personal, free of advertising copy (so far) and marketing shill?

This year, Nike, Dr Pepper, Mazda, SBC and others have staked claims in the blogosphere. They’ve found blogging (short for “Web-logging") an easy, cheap way to appear hipper and keep customers engaged with the brand.

You go, you hip ad agencies! Engage the customer with the brand! That’s the way to go! Screw conversation and all that cheap ordinary, dull, non-creative, unhip (gasp!) human voice!

“It’s a relatively small investment and can elicit a lot of information because it’s such a democratic medium,” said Matthew Cross, brand consultant at Interbrand, New York. “Compared to the millions companies spend to create or revitalize a brand, and then do TV spots and a print campaign, it’s pennies to the dollar to do a blog.”

Democratic medium(!), my foot, what they see is just another channel that will deliver to us, the consumers “tied to our chairs, head back, eating ‘content’ and crapping cash”. In any case, revitalising brand, TV spots, print campaigns are just so 90s, dahling.

And then, there are the obligatory mentions of Microsoft blogs and Sun’s COO Jonathan Schwartz blogging…

Sun Microsystems is also leading the blogolution. Many of the top dogs at Sun are blog auteurs. Even president/COO Jonathan Schwartz contributes.

Contributes? More like has his own blog. And blogolution and blog auteurs? Give me a break.

Finally, a safety warning:

But there’s a downside to blogging. Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, found that out when he made a sarcastic comment on his blog about how “brilliant” it was to air the playoffs opposite election coverage.

Mazda also got spooked by a “HalloweenM3” blog, which was ostensibly created by a twentysomething but seemed to be a way to shill Mazda TV spots. The site disappeared and Mazda reps could not be reached. J. Walter Thompson, San Francisco, handles.

Exactly, so don’t do fake blogs, you naughty AdChildren, but do try this at home, instead of at your hip, iPod-esque offices…

But this quote is spot on:

“If you do anything wrong in the blogosphere, you are in deep doo-doo very quickly,” said Michael Tchong, consumer analyst at Iconoculture, Minneapolis.

Yeah, it’s that kind of a day. It’s probably because I have been catching up with the whole Lovemarks-Cluetrain Deathmatch earlier today, which reminded me of the rubbish spewed at us by the industry for decades.

via Steve Rubel

This is just too good to miss. Doc Searls lets rip:

< RantOn >

See, the manifesto is a @#$%^&*()+!!{{{{{FUCKING}}}}}!! .pdf. Have I made it clear I hate .pdfs? I do.

Says here “our PDFs don’t suck.” Because they’re beautiful and “a joy to read.” Excuse me, they do suck if what they contain isn’t also on the Web in relatively ugly but open, unowned, nonproprietary, standard and non-infuriating HTML (or its more modern and no less standard successors and derivatives). PDFs, no matter how beautiful, are not a joy to quote (how about all them line breaks you have to edit out?), or to link to.

Forgive me. I’m in a bad mood today about people breaking the Web.

One way they do it is by taking writing off the Web and offering it only as a .pdf “download”. AAARg.

A prime example, to me at least, of not knowing when to leave money on the table. Think where we would all be now, including Adobe, if the company had opened up the .pdf standard and Acrobat, way back when the Web was young. Perhaps there are millions (or billions?) Adobe might not have made. But I’m sure there are many more that they could have made because of the .pdf standard (rather than with it, which is what they chose to do). But alas.

< RantOff >

Do you get the impression that Doc hates pdfs?

Great news - the bottomless resources of the Internet have just got more...er, bottomless. But seriously, it is good news that HighBeam Research (of the former e-library name) together with Christopher Locke (of the Cluetrain fame) are creating new tools specially for bloggers. Yay, we made it.

The idea is to make it easy for bloggers to enhance their blogs with information found on the HighBeam Research Engine by enabling them to

search more than 3,000 newspapers, magazines, journals and transcripts on HighBeam Library; meta-search the entire Web on HighBeam Web; fact-check using encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauruses and almanacs on HighBeam Reference; and use HighBeam Executives to research more than 20 million profiles of business people.

In addition to advanced searching options, e-mail alerts and folders for organizing articles, HighBeam Research now offers a tool that allows bloggers to easily link to the full text of a relevant article from their blog. That is marvellous and I look forward to trying it.

Now for the fine print:

While full text articles are usually only available to HighBeam Research Full Members who pay a subscription, as part the HighBeam Research Bloggers Program, bloggers will be able to provide their readers with time-limited free access to full text articles in their blogs.

I do understand that they still need to make money from their content but hey, does it mean that my links break after the time-limit on free access expires?

via Doc Searls

This blog post by Tim Oren of Due Diligence is a must-read for anybody in the media and/or interested in the internet as another ‘channel’ of distribution of old style content. Or for journalists and bloggers and for anyone wondering how to make money from all the ‘content’ sloshing around in the cyberspace. Jeff Jarvis sums up Tim’s article:

What’s so fascinating about Tim’s post is that he takes a social issue - news and trust - and measures it through a business perspective. I have always said that in the news business, our only asset is credibility. Tim is now measuring the declining value of that asset in the midst of scandal and in the face of new, trusted competition.

Note: This was published some weeks ago, eons ago in blogosphere time, and I came across it during my RSS reader clear up. But better late than never...

Update: Wired News: Newspapers Should Really Worry

Don’t think for a minute that young people don’t read. On the contrary, they do, many of them voraciously. But having grown up under the credo that information should be free, they see no reason to pay for news. Instead they access The Washington Post website or surf Google News, where they select from literally thousands of information sources. They receive RSS feeds on their PDAs or visit bloggers whose views mesh with their own. In short, they customize their news-gathering experience in a way a single paper publication could never do. And their hands never get dirty from newsprint.

via Roland Tanglao’s Weblog

Simon Waldman relays an interview experience that helped him formulate a wonderful and fitting metaphor that captures what bloggers have realised but are struggling to explain to non-bloggers. This is because, as I often argue, bloggers experience the online world as internet deity, if there were any, intended it.

The real danger for newspapers - and indeed all traditional media - when venturing online, isn’t these detailed questions about who charges for what, or what an individual site’s impact is on an individual publication. It’s that the media owner involved fails to understand their role in the online universe, and fundamentally fails as a result of it.

Too many media owners - especially newspaper publishers take a Ptolemaic view of the universe: with themselves right at the centre.
The truth, of course, is much more Copernican. We are simply a small planet spinning around. We’re an important part of the net, but we’re not a critical part, and we’re certainly not in control of it. The sun is that swarm of millions upon millions of people using it: browsing, linking, writing, communicating and generally bringing both energy and order to the online world.

It is sometimes impossible to explain the point of blogs and blogging to somebody without shifting their view of the online universe. On the other hand it is rewarding to watch them arrive there, which means that in the meantime, we perform more of an educational than commercial role. Sigh.

By the way, I really don’t understand why the press thinks there’s a browser war underway. The real war is between RSS and HTML. At the recent Gnomedex conference about 80% of the attendees said they were using a news aggregator. That’s a HUGE shift in behavior and has far deeper consequences than a browser choice does.
- Scobleizer

And now our broadcast for metrics fetishists:

The size of the blogosphere has doubled every five months over the last year and a half, according to blog analysis firm Technorati. According to David Sifry, Technorati’s chief executive, the current number of blogs is now over 8 times bigger than the 500,000 blogs it measured in June, 2003. The company tracked 3 million blogs as of the first week of July, and has added over 1 million blogs to its stable since then. Meanwhile, Pew Internet & American Life reports a new weblog is created every 5.8 seconds. That roughly translates into 15,000 new blogs every day.

Brought to you by ClickZ stats Traffic Patterns. Our normal broadcast will resume shortly.

Blogger for Hire - Start or Improve Your Blog
No Reserve! - Hire a Succesful Blogger for your Company

That’s the name of the item on eBay. The image of getting a blogger wrapped up (presumably in his pyjamas) and delivered to your door is too distressing to dwell upon so let’s move on to the idea itself. This is what a press release (oh my, he is organised) says:

Prominent blogger, Jeremy Wright, is auctioning himself on eBay. The move is designed to raise the profile of blogging as well as to provide companies with an industry expert to guide them.

Apart from the question of which industry, it is a sound proposition executed in a novel idea. This is the blurb from the eBay entry.

Blogging gives your customers a real view into your company in ways that newsletters and seminars simply aren’t able to do.” says Jeremy Wright, who writes the popular Ensight business and technical blog, which is read by more than 60,000 readers a month, and is up for auction on the internet auction site eBay as a professional blogger for.

The winner of the auction will be able to have Jeremy Wright work for them for three months. He will produce between 5-10 posts a week. In addition, Mr. Wright would work with the winning bidder to see what potential there is for blogging for them and their company - in effect acting as a blogging consultant for the period.

Obviously Jeremy believes that he has found the holy grail of blogging - his blog recently made national news by being the first blog to ever be sold. Good luck!

Lemme see how might our entry on eBay look like:

A gaggle of veteran bloggers, whose combined audience must be in the region of… er, how do you measure that?… well, in any case lots and lots of lovely sticky eyeballs, will visit you (not in their pyjamas) and talk to you about blogs and blogging and other cool stuff you can do in the blogosphere for hours. Will shut up for lots of money.

Mr Rather’s passing does not mean that the liberal orthodoxy is about to give way to a new conservative one. It means that all orthodoxies are being chewed up by a voraciously unpredictable news media, which is surely all to the good.
- Lexington, Dropping the anchorman, The Economist