We added some new content to the Weblog Improvement website for the first time since it was launched in November 2004. The new information on that site includes:
This is the first in a series of enhancements to WeblogImprovement.com that begin to incorporate the design techniques that we first used on our clients' sites.
Dave Aiello wrote, "I'm planning to make some template changes to Operation Gadget soon. In doing the initial research leading up to these changes, I found a useful page of Movable Type tips on Charles Galgac's site."
"There's lots of good stuff in that list, including articles about moving existing Movable Type blogs with customizations from one web host to another. I thought there was some information about running and restoring backups, but it's just links to cPanel documentation. Bummer."
Dave Winer pointed to an article by Dan Farber of ZDNet called What's up with blogging, and why should you care?. In it, Farber names the leading weblog publishing tools but focuses on cutting edge uses such as political weblogs and technology-oriented weblogs written by people like Dan Gilmore of the San Jose Mercury News and Robert Scoble of Microsoft.
Farber also points out Feedster and Technorati, key Blogosphere infrastructure sites that have been around a while, but are still being discovered by a lot of weblog readers. This is an important service to the community, because a lot of ZDNet readers are corporate IT people who could probably use some guidance to sites like these.
Normally, ZDNet columnists like Dan Farber produce very high level pieces aimed generally at the corporate world. But, this article hits a sweet spot: lots of useful information for both insiders and newbies. It seems like he "gets it" with respect to what's going on in the weblogging community, and a lot of journalists coming from his perspective still don't.
Dave Aiello wrote, "I got up this morning and checked out our friends at Gizmodo. Looks like they've done a redesign that includes new graphics and a change in the way the archives are organized. It looks better than it did before."
"I checked a couple of links to content on their site, and it appears that they have not broken individual archive links. Seems like whoever did the redesign is on the ball."
"The most interesting development is that they have put each Movable Type category on a separate virtual web server. In other words the Home Entertainment category is at http://homeentertainment.gizmodo.com/. I bet this lets them serve more distinct Google AdSense ads to each visitor."
"Another thing they've done is put a Deals category up that separates information about good sales at on-line merchants from their straight news. We'll see how well they do with this."
"On the negative side, they've adopted the same home page layout that they are using on other Gawker Media websites. This reduces the amount of content that visitors get to see. Not sure people will like that."
"Most of the good design changes that they've implemented make their site look better in comparison to Operation Gadget, but, they still have a way to go before they reach feature parity."
Dave Aiello wrote, "Earlier today, Doc Searls talked about a discussion that he had with his son while riding somewhere in the car. Doc's memory of that discussion was prompted by his reading of Self-Reliance, an essay written in 1841 by Ralph Waldo Emerson."
"By conincidence, I picked up a copy of the 1967 edition of Self-Reliance published by The Peter Pauper Press when I attended the Friends of the Princeton Public Library used book sale a couple of weeks ago. I finally started reading it last night as my wife and I were going to bed. I remember saying to her that this book was too difficult to read without devoting my complete attention to it, because the vocabulary Emerson uses is difficult for my non-liberal-arts-trained mind."
"I find it interesting that an Emerson meme has made it around the weblog world this summer, finally ending up on CTDATA almost by accident. Chris Lydon delivered a spoken essay singing Emerson's praises in honor of his 200th birthday. Dave Winer pointed to Lydon's essay, bringing it to the attention of many in the weblog community. Doc Searls talked about the predecessors of weblogs possibly being the works of Benjamin Franklin and Emerson, and Searls mentions Emerson again today."
"I sometimes wonder about my own emotional maturity, stumbling as I do into the works of authors like Emerson or even Lance Armstrong. Their writings should begin with some sort of disclaimer: 'Don't start reading this unless you have the depth of character to adopt our principles.' But, I see titles like
Self-Reliance and Every Second Counts, and I say to myself, 'Yea, that's for me. That's the kind of person I am.' More accurately, that's the kind of person I want to be."
"I see why the weblog community has adopted Emerson as a sort of patron saint. Everyone who does this sort of writing has their own purposes in mind. Some are more successful than others. Most are talking to a world-wide audience, offering strongly-held opinions, and trying to make the world a better place. That's certainly the case with many of the things that I write."
"But, I'll go on wondering why I skimmed the writings of Lydon, Winer, Searls, and other webloggers this summer, never bothering to dig into what they were writing about. I'll puzzle over how I managed to buy a near fine copy of Self-Reliance for 50 cents as a used book sale was closing-- it having been picked over and left by far more literate people than me. And, I'll marvel at the fact that a prominent weblogger mentioned this specific Emerson essay again on the morning after I started reading the book."
"Maybe this is what they meant when they coined the term synchronicity."
Yesterday, Wired News reported that spammers are now targeting Movable Type-based weblogs by submitting comments containing links that are irrelevant to the original posting. These bogus comments are being inserted in order to fool search engine spiders into thinking that the sites referred to by the embedded links are hot topics in the weblog community.
For example, a spambot may place links to a site where oxycontin is available without prescription on several popular Movable Type-based weblogs simultaneously. If the comments stay on the weblogs and a spider from Google visits the sites, it may increase the PageRank of the site to which the spambot-placed links point.
The fact that Movable Type is the target of spammers indicates how widely this toolset has been deployed. This is what a lot of people who are not programmers would consider a "good problem". But, keeping spam out of Movable Type weblogs where comments are generally permitted is going to be tough until an effective solution can be developed.
Ben Trott, the primary developer of Movable Type, commented on the comment spam problem about two weeks ago. The bottom line is that third party solutions are under development, but it appears that an enhancement of Movable Type that will "prevent" this problem from happening is not likely to be released soon.
Lots of people in the weblog community have reported that Gregg Easterbrook has been fired by ESPN for using his weblog to make a prejudiced statement about Jewish entertainment executives in a negative comment about the Quentin Tarantino film Kill Bill.
The facts that:
... did not seem to concern Easterbrook before he was fired.
The most interesting recent development in this ongoing story is that ESPN.com has apparently deleted all of the articles that Easterbrook ever wrote for them. This is a violation of a cardinal rule of web publishing. Selective purges of website content written by a person no longer associated with the site owner often gives readers the impression that something Orwellian is taking place.
The other problem with pursuing a strategy like this is that search engines like Google maintain large caches of content from many websites in order to improve Google's performance, as well as to provide a second source for temporarily unavailable published information. So, many of Gregg Easterbrook's ESPN.com articles are still available in the Google cache.
ESPN is within their rights as an employer to fire Easterbrook. But, they undermine their credibility as an on-line publisher when they delete Easterbrook's articles in an atypical way. Even The New York Times handled recent staff dismissals better.
If you run a business weblog, you need to think carefully about the implications of a situation like that which ESPN faced with Gregg Easterbrook before it happens. What will you do if an employee who has written for your site embarasses the company, and he is subsequently fired? Will you systematically delete all references to him? We suggest that this is not the best approach in many cases.
On Saturday, Matt Haughey published an interesting article on a.wholelottanothing.org that describes how Google AdSense made his website PVRblog profitable. AdSense is a syndicated advertising service that allows small website operators to share advertising placement revenue with Google. PVRblog is a weblog about TiVo and ReplayTV personal video recorders.
The most interesting aspect of this article is the section labeled "Tips for a successful AdSense site", where Haughey outlines how to build a site that maximizes AdSense revenue. These are best practices for making weblogs pay for themselves. His suggestions are:
Earlier this week Editor and Publisher ran a story on how weblogs are changing the way U.S. presidential campaigning is done for the November 2004 Election. The article cites a number of weblogs that have been launched, including Howard Dean's so-called Blog for America and a blog covering campaigning in New Hampshire, called NHprimary.com.
It is hard to put these political weblogs into perspective, because the majority of the current activity is on behalf of those opposed to George W. Bush. A lot of commentary on Howard Dean's use of the Internet has been very positive, although a few hardcore bloggers like Dave Winer and Doc Searls have put his effort into perspective.
We are in the early days of the use of weblog technology for national political campaign purposes. So far, the most successful applications seem to be fundraising related. One day, the aides to political candidates are going to figure out how to harness the technology. Then, they will be able to get their message out without media filtration.
It's far more difficult to judge how long this relatively sophisticated, rapidly evolving technique for grassroots politicking will take to arrive at the state and local level. Based on what arrives in our mailbox and what we hear over-the-air in New Jersey, it may take a couple of years for weblogs to be effectively utilizied here.
Lost in the run-up to the anniversary of September 11 was an article in The Washington Post discussing the idea of using weblogs to increase business revenue. Earlier that week, a meeting had taken place in Tysons Corner, VA, where best practices were discussed. According to the article:
One theory tossed around at the New Media Society event Tuesday night was that e-mail marketing is dead and business blogs are rising up as the replacement. While the medium may not be in its grave yet, powerful spam filters that block out corporate e-mails have certainly limited its effectiveness. But some proponents of blogging say the new business-development tool can succeed in ways e-mail never could.
It's much harder to run a successful email marketing campaign than most business people think. The pitch has to be very focused, and mailed to a well-defined group of people-- preferably who have already "opted in". Email marketing should also be coordinated with additional information on a website, since people who are interested in the message will probably want more information.
Putting all of this information into a weblog is often a better alternative. Only one tool is necessary to post your information. Summaries of the information you provide on your website can be distributed to other websites using syndication technologies like RSS. Your website can collect information about current and potential customers, and that information can be funneled to salespeople at your company for followup.
Once you start telling a compelling story on a website, an audience for it can easily develop. Over the past year, people interested in business weblogging and web services have come to visit CTDATA.com again and again. But, the key to increasing our business has been to keep the pointing out that the technologies we use can expand our customers' businesses.
So, by adding a weblog to your company's website, you can develop new clients and sell more products and services to your existing clients. By using existing web services interfaces to businesses like Amazon.com and Google, you can increase the revenues generated by your company's website.
Dave Aiello wrote, "One of the longer, more thought-provoking, and link-filled articles that I've read recently has been published by Tom Coates on plasticbag.org. In (Weblogs and) The Mass Amateurisation of (Nearly) Everything, Coates goes a long way toward explaining how weblogging tools dramatically increase the ability of individuals and organizations to inexpensively create structured document repositories."
"Weblogging tools have not only succeeded in providing a well-understood means of adding new content to a web site, they have also given rise to a series of best practices that revolve around site layout and organization. Over the last two years, many people have reorganized web sites into a weblog format that lists the highlights of recently-created site content in reverse chronological order. This form of organization was found to work well with search engines like Google, but also gave rise to a host of information discovery tools that feed off the weblog infrastructure (such as Weblogs.com, Blogdex, and Technorati)."
"This article relates the development of weblog publishing systems to other revolutionary, computer-based knowledge creation tools that were perfected earlier: word processing and desktop publishing. It also correctly points out that the evolution of each of these publishing toolsets eventually led to an increased level of knowledge of their efficient uses. The ad hoc support communities that sprang up around word processing, desktop publishing, and weblogging led to an almost Darwinian evolution of state-of-the-art uses for each of them."
In the latest Stop the Presses! column at editorandpublisher.com, Steve Outing says that email is becoming an unreliable way for publishers to reach their audiences. This article is written to reach an audience of newspaper and magazine executives, but applies equally to the managers of companies who publish email newsletters.
Who'd have thought that things could get this bad? E-mail -- long touted as the "killer app" of the Internet and the best online channel for publishers -- is rapidly being decimated by spammers and virus writers. Yes, "decimated" is an accurate word. The evidence is quickly mounting that e-mail is no longer an efficient means for ethical publishers to reach subscribers....
Information design consultant Michael Fraase in a column last week wrote, "The spammers won. E-mail, for anything other than communicating with individuals you know already, is useless. ... Online publishers are struggling with the loss of the spam war, because e-mail was one of the best publishing tools the non-corporate media has ever seen."
Alternatively, Outing suggests summarizing information posted to a website by using RSS, the XML-based headline syndication standard. He says:
RSS allows potential readers of a Web site to view part of its content -- typically headlines and short blurbs -- without having to visit the content directly (unless they want to click through to it). Viewing is done with a piece of software separate from the Web browser, the RSS aggregator, which the consumer uses to subscribe to "feeds" produced by favorite Internet publishers. The feeds are constantly updated as the publishers add new content.
Of course, the easiest way to produce RSS feeds that summarize the content of a website is to use a weblog publishing tool to create the website's content in the first place. Tools such as MovableType, TypePad, Slash, and Manila are good choices, although their features and target audiences vary widely.
If you work for a company that produces an email newsletter, and you find that newsletter is generating less business recently, CTDATA can help. Contact us and we will be happy to discuss ways that you can migrate your message to a weblog-driven website.
Dave Aiello wrote, "Previously on CTDATA, I have discussed the problems that can occur when a weblog is migrated from one weblog management system to another. The biggest problem that I have identified so far is that the URLs for content pages often change when the new weblog software regenerates these pages."
"Last week, Brainstorms & Raves published an excellent roundup of information on this subject called Friendly, Lasting URLs. This article includes pointers to the information sources that we highlighted in our article Changing Weblogging Tools Can Be a Royal Pain, plus a number of new resources."
"I spent several frustrating hours yesterday trying to write a CGI program to redirect visitors to our sites from the old URLs to the new URLs, once the new weblog tool is up and running. It should not be as hard to write this program as it has been for me, particularly because I have made extensive modifications to our existing Slash-based content management system which is far more complicated than the redirector."
"Here on CTDATA, I will provide updates on my progress toward completing a URL redirector. If you are interested in the issues I am dealing with, feel free to contact me at dave_aiello at ctdata.com."
Yesterday SixApart started started accepting signups for the Preview Release of TypePad. TypePad is a new hosted personal publishing service based on SixApart's widely used system called MovableType. TypePad adds several new features, however, including integrated site statistics, photo albums, and wireless updating (moblogging).
One site that has already been implemented on TypePad is PVRBlog, a weblog about personal video recorders such as TiVo.
A lot of bloggers have been watching the development of TypePad closely. It will be interesting to see how quickly the service builds a client base.
One of the banes of a weblogger's existence is the lock-in you feel to the weblogging tool that you currently use. This is a serious issue for CTDATA. We have over 1,500 pages of content spread over three weblogs currently.
While we can quickly move the text of articles from two of our Slash-based weblogs to Movable Type, the URLs of the article pages would all be different when the site is regenerated. This would have the effect of breaking all of the external links to our weblogs, as well as most of the internal links on each site.
The reason we are talking about this openly is that this sort of problem can be avoided or at least minimized with careful up-front planning. When you start your weblog, make sure you think about the future value of your content, and what you will do to preserve that value if you ever have to change weblog tools or migrate from one server to another.
Mar Orlygsson has published two really useful articles that talk about this issue from the perspective of the Movable Type web publishing platform. His first, Movable Type's Non-permanent Permalinks, talks about the problems with the URLs that Movable Type chooses for individual archive entries by default.
He followed up that article a couple of weeks later with Howto: Future-proof URLs in Movable Type. This article discusses the idea of using the posting date as the key portion of the URLs for archived entries.
One of the more interesting articles we stumbled across this week was published on a.wholelotofnothing.org, explaining how to use Movable Type templates as static pages on an MT-driven web site. According to the article:
The secret is simple: create new templates that hold your static content. Although templates were designed to feature output by the MT weblog content engine, there's no requirement for that, and this is a easy tweak of the system.
The article goes on to demonstrate how to build an "About" page for a web site in this fashion.
While it's a slight bit tedious to setup each static page in this way, you will gain the convenience of being able to update any page on your site directly within MT. You can continue creating as many pages as you need, such as a page for your resume, a page linking to your photo galleries, a contact page, a search page, and/or a links page.
This is a powerful idea and a slightly different approach than we have used here on CTDATA.com (which is, at the moment, not powered by Movable Type). We have made every content page on this site an article in our content management system. This means that all of the pages use the same page template. We will consider adopting the approach proposed in this article, when we migrate this site to Movable Type.
Dave Aiello wrote, "Everyday I find more evidence that a single weblog cannot serve multiple purposes well. The latest indication of this is the huge traffic spikes that CTDATA.com has experienced around its stories that mention Lance Armstrong during the running of this year's Tour de France."
"At the time I started talking about Lance Armstrong on this web site, I had no idea how relentlessly people would seek information about him. I began to realize the strength of this phenomenon at the beginning of this year's pro cycling season, but, I kept posting information that I found interesting. This past week, the article Lance and Kristin Armstrong Working at Marriage Reconcilliation passed my resume and became the most requested article in the history of our website."
"The popularity of our Lance Armstrong articles actually has no bearing on the accessibility of other articles on this web site. It's still easy to find my resume via Google. The problem is that potential customers who access a site like CTDATA via a search engine might be confused as to the nature of this site."
"Is CTDATA.com a personal weblog? Is it a site about cycling, or the War on Terror, or politics? Not really. CTDATA.com is actually a corporate site, and CTDATA builds database-driven web sites and weblogs."
"This is the reason that I announced that CTDATA.com would be refocused on business topics and later said that I would start a new weblog called DaveAiello.com. I intend to put the postings of personal interest on my personal site, and reserve CTDATA.com for business purposes."
"There is little point in deleting the articles that already exist on CTDATA.com. One of the most valuable parts of running a weblog, after all, is its archived content. But, we can always refocus and fine tune the content mix of the site as our business focus changes. This is critically important in order to maintain the relevance of this site to its audience, and something I would strongly recommend to anyone who is running a weblog for business purposes."
Dave Winer of Scripting News pointed out an article on MarketingProfs.com by Debbie Weill called 5 Key Questions (You’ve Been Dying) To Ask About Business Blogs. This is a good introductory article for businesses who are looking for justification to add a weblog component to a corporate site. Weill says:
... just maybe, blogs are the next killer app of online marketing. Technology evangelists like Chris Pirillo are saying that “email marketing is dead.” Killed by spam and clogged inboxes.
Will business blogs replace e-newsletters as the most powerful, cost-effective tool for communicating with customers? Should every company be adding a blog to its site—or replacing a static site with an ever changing Weblog?
She then goes on to ask and answer five good questions that any business person who does not yet understand weblogs would ask.
Art Iger of J.P. Morgan Chase pointed out a New York Times article that appeared in the Monday edition called Blogs in the Workplace. This article, written by William O'Shea talks about successes that certain companies have made using weblog technology as internal corporate communications vehicles. The article cites companies like Community Connect, Google, and Verizon as successful users of the technology.
The article talks about how companies that successfully implement internal weblogs use them to improve the flow of communication among employees. Here is an example:
At Community Connect, Mr. Tang's engineers use a service called LiveJournal to post updates about tasks like fixing server computers or configuring software. Hitting the upload button sends the text to a private site, viewable by the authors and their managers, including the date and time of the postings and, often, links to relevant Web pages.
O'Shea goes on to talk about tools such as LiveJournal, Userland Manila, and TeamPage that are a few of the possible choices for software with which to manage blogs.
The two major newspapers in the Twin Cities areas of Minnesota have discovered that businesses are using weblogs. The St. Paul Pioneer Press ran an article on Friday called "Blogging for Business" that says that area entrepreneurs and politicians are using weblog technology to keep adding new and interesting content to their web sites. The article talks about the weblog being run by Ray Cox of Northfield Construction Company where Cox says:
It is good that the general media is picking up on blogs.... I really like the easy format that I can {use to} "talk" to folks and get information and opinions out quickly.... {The} main reason I started using a blog was because it is easy to use and allows me to update information in a timely fashion. I find regular webpages that have outdated information very frustrating.
The Pioneer Press article goes on to quote Andrew Eklund, a web marketing consultant, as saying:
Most corporate Web sites are still annoyingly dull.... Essentially, most are outdated repositories of unkempt content (without a) compelling voice. A blog can help change that.
For some reason, the Minneapolis Star Tribune published a remarkably similar article in their Sunday edition, quoting many of the same people. It's hard to fathom why they chose to do it. Whether they began working on their story and got scooped, or they felt that this was a particularly hot topic in the area is not clear.
The important aspect of using weblog technology on a corporate web site is that it increases the authenticity of the information. By attaching a name to each piece of information, potential customers see who works at the business, what they know, and the things that they think are important. You get even more bang-for-the-buck by writing in first person.
If blogging is done properly, the frequency of content updates is dramatically improved. The technology makes it easy to add things to the site, so why not update it on a daily or at least a semi-weekly basis? At CTDATA, we post things on our site almost every weekday. As a result, the site has a regular audience that communicates with our company and comments about what we post.
Whether you want to completely makeover your site using weblog technology or simply add a weblog to an existing site, CTDATA can help. Get in touch with us and we'll start making suggestions.
atNewYork.com has done a nice roundup of an emerging controversy over the Google Toolbar 2.0 Beta. At issue is the so-called BlogThis button which allows users to automatically start a posting on their weblogs about the web page they are currently viewing.
The problem with this feature, from the perspective of competing weblog tool developers and users, is that the BlogThis button only works with Blogger. Google purchased Blogger back in February. As Dave Winer noted on Scripting News yesterday, the BlogThis button could have been implemented with the Blogger API.
The Blogger API has been implemented by several competing weblog developers to facilitate the development of user-level publishing tools. If Google had chosen to build the BlogThis functionality atop the Blogger API, it would have allowed users of Radio Userland and Manila from Userland, Movable Type from Six Apart, and P-Machine to leverage this new feature as well.
There's nothing stopping Google from modifying the BlogThis button in subsequent betas of the Google Toolbar so that it works with the Blogger API. But, by releasing it without true API support, they have raised suspicion in a community that has been one of the keys to their past success.
Last night, PaidContent.org reported that Andy Bourland, founder of ClickZ, has formed a new company and purchased two business-oriented on-line services, MarketingFix.com and Adventive. The new company called Up2Speed will apparently focus on on-line advertising and marketing.
MarketingFix.com is a business-oriented weblog covering on-line marketing. According to PaidContent, it was launched in March of last year. For some time now, people following the business weblog / nanopublishing space have been saying that weblogs with a business focus and a measurable audience might be acquisition targets under the right circumstances. It looks like MarketingFix.com is one of the first proofs of that.
Adventive is the operator of about a dozen of mailing lists on topics as diverse as copywriting and wireless technology. PaidContent suggests that Adventive is the less valuable of the two companies, but, its mailing lists have tremendous reach. One of its smaller ones, I-Wireless, reportedly has 12,000 subscribers. A service like Adventive could be a driver of more business to Up2Speed's other on-line properties in the future.
Dave Aiello wrote, "A number of prominent webloggers are writing about a proposed new standard for syndicating weblog content to replace the current format, called RSS. RSS began as a simple mechanism to allow one website to display headlines from another, complete with a link to the body of the article on the original website. It has evolved into the basis for a whole host of information management tools, including search engines, news aggregators, and statistics services that track weblog popularity and interlinking."
"Use of RSS began at the grassroots level, and this is part of the reason that there is some effort to replace it now. It is considered a fragmented standard, with numerous versions that are not logically evolved from each other. Some people say that a big reason to move away from RSS is that a few early webloggers have undue influence over its status as a de facto standard."
"I'm not in a rush to jump into the fray that is going to take place if another content syndication format is developed. Back in the Year 2000, this type of dispute took place over the creation of the so-called RSS 1.0 standard. That debate turned out to be largely a waste of bandwith. RSS 1.0 failed as a standard is that it was considered too complex by many people who were running weblogs back then."
"I am sure that the creation of a new standard will be just as ugly as revisions to RSS have been. Any new syndication format will have to be much better than what exists today, because tens of thousands of weblogs and dozens of infrastructure applications will need to be upgraded in order to support it."
"I encourage anyone who is primarily interested in running a weblog for communications or public relations purposes to stay away from the debate over new content syndication formats. Only true gearheads will be interested until after the dust settles."
Padawan.info reports that a beta test of TypePad is apparently underway because some weblogs have received trackbacks from a server that appears to be TypePad.
TypePad is a forthcoming service from Six Apart that incorporates the features of Movable Type in a fully-hosted environment. This service has been talked about extensively in the Blogosphere because it is expected to lower a few technical barriers that sometimes cause people to choose Blogger over Movable Type. As such, the TypePad service can be thought of as an analogue to BlogSpot.
On Sunday, The New York Times reported that weblogging is catching on in corporations among senior executives. Examples of cited in the article include Alan Meckler's weblog for Jupitermedia, Halley's Comment by Halley Suitt of Yaga, James Horton's weblog at online-pr.com, and Tim O'Reilly's weblog on oreillynet.com.
The article focuses narrowly on CEOs and other senior executives, mostly at large companies. In a brief discussion of legal considerations, it mentions Groove Network's corporate weblog policy articulated by Ray Ozzie, along with the comment that "some experts suggest allowing only trusted employees to engage in the activity".
But, the article leaves out any mention of more broad-based efforts like Macromedia's weblogs. As such, it's showing a subset of the blogging activity in Corporate America. However, it's a coherent presentation, free of any apparent bias. This article is a good introduction to weblogging as a new business process.
Update: Rick Bruner of MarketingFix.com made a couple of interesting points in his coverage of this story. Many of the blogs cited use non-standard software, some lack permalinks, and one is ugly in his opinion.
Thursday, Feedster announced that it merged with rssSearch and that a new company called Feedster, LLC was formed as a result. Prior to the announcement, Feedster and rssSearch were competing weblog search engines.
Both Feedster and rssSearch were developed shortly after an article appeared on CTDATA called The Internet Needs a Search Engine Driven Off RSS Feeds. As the press release announcing the merger implies, Feedster had "first mover advantage" in the market, while rssSearch had technical superiority. Most people who thought that an RSS-based search engine was a good idea will probably consider the merger announcement a win for the weblog community.
In many ways, it is truly astounding that a free-standing company has been formed to operate a search engine for weblogs. This is an indication that innovation happens quickly in this market, in spite of otherwise difficult economic conditions.
Dave Aiello wrote, "A new political weblog called Watchblog: 2004 Election News, Opinion, and Commentary was recently launched by Cameron Barrett of Camworld. Watchblog has already attracted a lot of attention in the weblog community. I think this is appropriate in light of Cameron Barrett's status in the weblog community and the novelty of the layout of the site."
"Camworld is one of the most successful weblogs in history, and was one of my early favorites. It went silent for about six months beginning in the Fall of 2002, but it never really lost its status in the weblog community during that time. I used Camworld as the example of a weblog that was popular in spite of its lack of freshnness in my essay The Long Shadow of Past Blogging Prowess written in late March. This essay was a critique of the blogrolling policies of many A-List weblogs, but may have seeemed like a rebuke directed at Cameron Barrett himself. Camworld made a fairly strong comeback in May and has been interesting since then, although I am just catching up with it after having removed it from the CTDATA blogroll and deleted my browser bookmark for it."
"Getting back to Watchblog, the big question in my mind when I look at it is: Will it work as it is currently designed? It's got a couple of novel design elements worth thinking about:"
"Other issues that will play a key role in on-going interest in Watchblog are:"
"Several months ago, I decided to move CTDATA.com away from politics, and I'm staying with that policy. Watchblog is worth mentioning, however, because of its unique design and the attention it's getting in the weblog community. It will be interesting to see if Watchblog continues to enjoy the amount of interest that it has initially attracted."
Dave Aiello wrote, "On Tech Central Station, Glenn Reynolds talks about what he thinks are the key differentiators between good and bad weblogs. In short, he thinks that good weblogs have personal voice and rapid response times. By personal voice, I think he means that most articles on the site are written in first person."
"Reynolds goes on to talk about the typical differences between weblogs written with personal voice and those written with institutional voice, and why personal voice may be a better choice for weblogs. He sees a direct relationship between the use of personal voice and the speed at which new content is posted to a weblog."
"He seems to be getting at the sense of ownership that an individual has in a weblog written in personal voice. However, it's hard to say that group weblogs like Slashdot and Marketing Fix are less timely, simply because they are not written by an individual."
"Some business people think that their entire web sites must be written in institutional voice. At CTDATA, we have tried to mix institutional voice with personal voice, and we have achieved some success. Strongly opinionated articles on our website are often written in personal voice, so that it's clear that these are the opinions of one person. Other articles are written in institutional voice, generally because they are more news-oriented. In the future, we intend to deepen this distinction by creating personal weblogs for some of our employees."
"It's important to understand that either approach is fine as long as there is some consistency to the style of the site. However, the more weblog-oriented the overall site is, the more likely it is to be written predominantly in personal voice."
In the latest Alertbox, Jakob Nielsen says that the key to success in operating a small website is to focus on a very specific topic, and to dominate it. He says that this is particularly true for weblogs, and provides a number of statistics to back this up.
This article suggests that the range of information and opinion on the Internet creates many opportunities for web sites that have a unique point-of-view. And, carefully focused sites can attract an audience that becomes a committed user community.
Nielsen also points out that a lot of successful small web sites get a significant percentage of their traffic from search engines. We talked about this same idea in an article that appeared on CTDATA.com in May, when we said:
It's clear from reviewing our referer logs that upwards of 25 percent of our daily traffic comes from casual Internet users using these search tools to locate information... that interests them.
This is where the importance of focus comes into play. Read on to learn why....
Continue reading "Useit.com Says Specialization is Key to Success in Weblogging" »
Dave Winer pointed out an article by Hiawatha Bray in The Boston Globe called Companies Get into the Weblog Act. This is an excellent article focusing on the evolution of the weblog concept from a hobby into a methodology that can be leveraged by serious businesses. Bray says:
An idea this useful can't be left to mere hobbyists. Companies have begun to recognize the potential power of what buffs like to call ''the blog-osphere.'' Consider: Every business needs to know what its employees know. Companies are crammed with experts on various topics whose knowledge goes to waste -- because nobody knows what they know. Now give these workers an internal corporate blog, and encourage them to use it. Let them natter away on every topic that intrigues them. Harvest and index the results. You've mapped your workers' brains. With a few keystrokes, a manager can find out who's been blogging about skiing or bowling or restoring classic cars -- just the thing when you're trying to sell something to an avid collector of '64 Mustangs. The company's hidden experts will cheerfully reveal themselves, and the firm's institutional memory gets an upgrade.
The key to successfully harnessing this movement on an Intranet is to allow it to evolve from the ground up. Trying to implement it from the top down, a process known as knowledge management, has been a hot idea in some large companies for years. The problem with knowledge management is that it has never achieved the potential that its evangelists expected.
The weblog movement, on the other hand, began modestly and is growing by leaps and bounds. Blogs can be great sources of information within a company, or a great channel of communication to a company's customers. The key success factor, more often than not, appears to be focus.
Bray cites Rock Regan, CIO of the State of Connecticut, as someone who knows how to get value out of blogging in his organization, and quotes him in the article.
On Saturday, The Sydney Morning Herald in Australia published an article comparing several of the leading weblog authoring tools including Blogger, Radio Userland, Live Journal, Movable Type, and Greymatter. The author, Nicole Manktelow, carefully categorizes the tools discussed in the article as hosted services, do-it-yourself server-based tools, and desktop weblog authoring products.
Mankelow chooses one of the tools she mentions, Radio Userland, as her favorite. It might have been better to have chosen a tool in each category, and then designate a "best of the best" solution. Nevertheless, this article is quite valuable to people trying to understand the weblog market space, or people who have decided that they want to start a weblog, but haven't chosen an authoring tool yet.
Dave Aiello wrote, "Last night I attended the Intro to Business Blogs panel discussion put on by the E-commerce Special Interest Group in Manhattan. I had mentioned this panel discussion on CTDATA yesterday."
"This was a good presentation, with material relevant to the stated subject, and panelists in substantial agreement about the fundimentals of blogging. If you know a thing or two about blogging already, you know that basic agreement on the later is sometimes difficult to achieve, particularly among veterans of the field."
"I think Rick Bruner of Executive Summary Consulting did a great job putting the panel together. Andrew Calimano of Integrated Direct Marketing deserves a lot of credit for asking Rick to recruit the panelists and moderate the session. Read on for further comments...."
Continue reading ""Introduction to Business Blogs" Presentation was Worth Attending" »
Dave Aiello wrote, "I should have posted something about this event when I first heard about it, but.... I'll be attending the Intro to Business Blogs panel discussion being put on by the E-commerce Special Interest Group tonight, June 12, in New York City. A number of A-list bloggers are on the panel, including Rick Bruner, Anil Dash, Elizabeth Spiers, Aaron Bailey, and John Lawlor."
"I've been thinking to myself that there is something wrong if I am not attending events of this nature in New York City, given my relatively close proximity to the city. I was unable to attend the dinner in New York that Doc Searls organized at the beginning of May, and this is the first thing I've seen far enough in advance that I still had time to RSVP and attend. So, I'm going."
"Sorry I didn't post this sooner, for all of you CTDATA readers. It would have been fun to have several friends there. Instead, I'll have to mingle...."
Yesterday, Doc Searls pointed out that Microdoc News has done some interesting research into the dynamics of a story that is widely reported in the weblog community. Microdoc analyzed 45 different stories that appeared on several weblogs, and found several different evolutionary patterns. These patterns show the ways that weblogs influence each other.
The degree of influence that weblogs have upon each other is definitely the most interesting feature of the community, from the perspective of many analysts. It is obvious and well documented because the weblog community is entirely on-line, and meaningful statistics can be gathered both by automated means and by human observation.
Influence of one "traditional media outlet" over another is harder to measure in this fashion. It is argued by some media analysts that the national news programs on NBC, ABC, and CBS often broadcast stories that are derived from articles that appeared in The New York Times earlier in the day. But, such conclusions appear anecdotal because the Times puts a lot more of their best current content on the Internet than the broadcast networks. Also, broadcast news sites do not generally link to the New York Times or any other media outlet to show an explicit relationship between their story and what appeared in print elsewhere.
Doc's article points to the Microdoc research piece in the context of a continuing thread on mainstream media complaints about the influence of weblogs on results from search engines like Google. In order to appreciate what he is saying, it may be necessary to go back to several previous stories, including the aricle called "Printwash", where he discusses the possible loss of influence by major print publications like The New York Times because they place recent news stories in archives that are not accessible unless a fee is paid.
Dave Aiello wrote, "I noticed that CTDATA was listed on Blogshares.com, a fantasy stock market for weblogs. So, I joined and claimed the site as mine. As a result, my virtual net worth rose from $500.00 all the way to $786.87."
"In case you hadn't noticed, Blogshares assigns a theoretical value to CTDATA.com of just over $1,400. In times like these, it's nice to know that this site has a positive net worth by some public measure."
"Anyone can join Blogshares and get in on the speculation. I'll try to look at it from time to time, and report back on whether it's added some fun to my life."