Jennifer Rice

Jennifer Rice, who runs Mantra Branding, has been blogging here about branding since December 2003. She writes me by email:

I recently got a project from a Fortune 50 company from my blog… it’s the best thing I’ve ever done for my consulting business!

Hell-yeah! If ever there was a reason to blog, for consultants, anyway, there it is.

One gripe — a nit I have with lots of business blogs — while she links to her business site from her blog, I don’t see a link from the business to to the blog. How are your customers going to know you blog if you don’t point it out? Hopefully just a temporary oversight and not an indication that bloggers don’t think that blogging is “professional” enough to link to.

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Gawker Media has just released its latest commercial blog property, Defamer, a Hollywood gossip site. Knowing Gawker’s style, the blog promises to be smart Hollywood gossip, which would really be something new. Remains to be seen, however, whether an industry that takes itself as seriously as Hollywood will be able to laugh at itself or will just devote all its energy to decrying the Defamer.

Publisher Nick Denton writes in an email announcing the site:

in so far as a city ever needed a gossip rag, LA is crying out for a Defamer. For a city that’s in many ways the cultural capital of the world, it’s woefully under-gossiped.
Sure, the celebrity weeklies give the latest tittle-tattle on the reality TV romance of the week. But the real stars of Hollywood are the producers, and agents, and PR flacks, and studio execs, and screenwriters. They’re usually behind the scenes. No longer.

Unlike the other Gawker media products, the author of Defamer, “a Hollywood peon” him- or herself, will remain anonymous (we’ll see how long that lasts before he/she is outed).

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Ari Paparo, of Everything NY, attended the NY Bloggers event organized by Gothamist, and reports here on a panel about commerical blogging by Nick Denton and Jason Calacanis.

Darn, I wanted to attend this event but felt I should really get caught up on some work, and then, needless to say, I didn’t get much done anyway…

EverythingNY: NYBloggers Publishers Panel

I’ve been a fan of Seth Godin‘s since his days running the one-time online marketing agency Yoyodyne, before it was acquired by Yahoo and he became a guru author of umpteen marketing books. (I even happen to know a piece of useless trivia that the name Yoyodyne comes from Thomas Pynchon’s novel The Crying of Lot 49.)

He recently sent me a review copy of his new book, Free Prize Inside. I haven’t yet had a chance to get into it, but the title and packaging alone are so clever I’m sure it’s destined to be another winner for him. Meanwhile, he also just released an unrelated free e-book BullMarket 2004, a long list of marketing resources (I’m pleased to say my ExecutiveSummary.com site was among them, although when Seth and I exchanged email a few weeks ago about it, I had hoped he’d also include Business Blog Consulting, but it seems he hasn’t; oh well).

But what I really wanted to note here was this: Just when you think the guy has got to be out of great ideas, I see he’s now on a virtual “Business Book Blogging Tour.” Details on the initiative are thing (Godin himself has only a short note about it on his blog), but it seems that for the next two weeks he’s blogging on various other business blogs as a guest blogger. [UPDATE: Todd S. of A Penny For.. notes that details of the program are here.]

First stop is at A Penny For… (here’s Godin’s last of several post today). Michelle Miller, who will also be hosting Godin next week, offers a schedule of Godin’s blog stops.

Michelle Miller

Michelle Miller, who works at the marketing agency Wizard of Ads, started this blog a few months ago focusing on the always hot (no pun intended) topic of marketing to women.

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Tim Bray, a technology veteran and long-time blogger who recently joined Sun Microsystem, has helped that company craft a policy for bloggers, not unlike Microsoft’s Robert Scoble’s Corporate Weblog Manifesto. Highlights from Sun’s policy include:

• It’s a Two-Way Street — The real goal isn’t to get everyone at Sun blogging, it’s to become part of the industry conversation
• Don’t Tell Secrets — Common sense at work here
• Be Interesting — Writing is hard work. There‚Äôs no point doing it if people don‚Äôt read it.
• Write What You Know — The best way to be interesting, stay out of trouble, and have fun is to write about what you know.
• Think About Consequences — The worst thing that can happen is that … someone on the customer’s side pulls out a print-out of your blog and says [to a sales guy], “This person at Sun says that product sucks.”

And more. Good stuff. (I only copied snippets here; he goes into more detail on all these points.)

Making this post even more interesting, Bray offers a short analysis of the process of how he and his colleagues fashioned this policy in a post titled Making Sun Policy.

Thanks to Olivier Travers for pointing this out.

Tim Bray: Sun Policy on Public Discourse

Tim Bray

Along with Microsoft’s Robert Scoble as well as the team from Macromedia, Tim Bray is one of the highest profile bloggers in the tech community, both for the quality of his commentary and the size of the organization he works for: Sun Microsystems, where his title is technology director. Bray, who has been blogging for a few years, just joined Sun two months ago (as of this post). He is a long-time Internet technology pioneer, having co-created XML and previously ran Antarctica, a maker of business intelligence visualization software.

Like many prominent bloggers with prominent jobs, Bray disclaims on his blog, "The opinions expressed here are my own, and neither Sun nor any other party necessarily agrees with them." At the same time, however, he recently helped craft the Sun Policy on Public Discourse, which, in fact, lives on Bray’s blog.

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Harold Jarche

Harold Jarche is a consultant specialized in helping organizations improve performance efficiency through combination of technology and education. He started blogging earlier this year on topics (recently) including tele-education, human performance analysis and university course management systems.

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One of the things about the whole blog trend that I find so exciting for business is effectiveness and power of these simple publishing tools to accomplish a great degree of what “content management systems” such as Interwoven and Vignette have required tens of thousands of dollars and months of training to match. Of course, give us an inch and we’ll take a mile, and with that in mind, I am taking notes on a long list of features I’d like to see introduced to the next generation of blog tools to make them that much more effective (risking contradicting, perhaps, the beauty of their simplicity today, but I’m willing to take that risk).

Meanwhile, the movement towards powerfully simple and cheap tools continues apace. The folks from 37Signals have now released Basecamp, a web-based project management tool with “blog simplicity” that includes features such as scheduling, to-do lists, file sharing, RSS, iCal, and Mozilla Calendar integration, among other features. Priced at $19/month.

Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing writes:

37Signals, a fantastic web-dev company, has produced a new project-management app called Basecamp that looks like a winner. Not only is it extremely pretty and easy-to-follow — I’d expect no less from the usability wonks at 37Signals — but it’s also open: information flows out of the app as RSS and can be bulk-exported in XML, so none of your precious project-management material becomes a lever to lock you into paying the (surprisingly reasonable) monthly rates.

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I know that blogs and XML syndication are not synonymous, but let’s face it, bloggers are leading the charge on adoption of RSS, Atom and related XML syndication protocols. This article by Wired suggests that there may be too much of a good thing in this regard, and that if XML syndication were to really catch on big (e.g., Microsoft is planning on releasing its own XML syndication reader built into its upcoming overhaul of the Windows operating system), the resultant demands on traffic may overwhelm the Net. Seems to me this could be overcome with some smart use of proxy servers or other work-arounds, but I’m not really a technical guy, so what do I know.

Wired: Will RSS Readers Clog the Web?

Robert Liodice, president and CEO of the ANA, has been blogging for a little over a month. The ANA is one of premier industry trade associations for marketing industry. I have to say, I’m surprised that “a suit” seems to really get blogging as well as Loidice demonstrates. For example, he links to Wikipedia to clarify concepts in his posts, which is a smart blogger thing to do. Not surprisingly, he uses the blog to boost for the industry (e.g., “Great (Not Just Good) Times Are Ahead for Marketers”), but he also uses it to comment on an initiative of another industry association (“NAB Responsible Programming Taskforce”) as well as to respond to how the press is clarifying ANA initiatives (“NUDG: What Really Happened”). A great example of why every industry association should adopt this handy communication tool.

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It has been quite surprising that Google has not yet started blogging, given their acquisition last year of Blogger.com, and all, not to mention their perfectly aligned sensibilities with blog culture, or at least one would assume.

Well, it looks like we’ll see something interesting soon. As of this writing, the google.com/blog page says only “test,” but it’s certainly cause for hope.

[UPDATE 5/6/04: This page now comes up as an error. Someone is obviously playing around with something, though. Stay tuned…]

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Be careful what you wish for — or what you blog about, anyway. This article describes that spooks have caught on to blogs and are using them to track trends and turn up interesting bits of information. The article also says China is trying to block blogs. All I can say is good luck. (I’m visiting China later in May; let’s see whether they can keep me off my blogs.)

Investor’s Business Daily: Blog-Tracking May Gain Ground Among U.S. Intelligence Officials

Lame. Not a real blog (yes, I realize she’s a doll), more of a journal (“Omigod, you’ll never believe the adorable pair of shoes I bought with Mercedes today!”). Pass.

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A great article by George Packer, a regular writer for the New Yorker, about the poltical impact of blogs and his own love-hate relationship with the new populist medium. In fact, his only negative attitude about blogs seems to be he finds them so fascinating that he gets sucked into them for hours at a time, which is, I believe, familiar to many of us.

I take strong objection, however, to the article’s headline. The revolution will so be blogged. In fact, that’s exactly the point. We don’t need it to be televised. TV is controlled by The Man. Blogs are all about The People, baby.

(Whoops, sorry, I forgot for a minute this is supposed to be a serious business-oriented blog.)

Mother Jones: The Revolution Will Not Be Blogged

Tony Perkins

Along with Nick Denton of Gaker Media and Jason Calacanis of Weblogs Inc., Tony Perkins is one of the early advocates for using a blog-like format to power a commecial web publishing model with AlwaysOn, which launched nearly two years ago (as of this post).

AlwaysOn has its critics among the old-school blogger community, many of whom question whether AlwaysOn is a blog (or network of blogs) at all. It does seem to have elements of a more “traditonal” online magazine, with many or most posts being longer essays as opposed to short blurbs like those of most blogs, and a broad team of contributing writers. It’s also unclear (to me, anyway) whether there is a traditional editorial hierarch to the site (i.e., posts get approved first by an editor) or whether every writer posts directly to the site in blog tradition. But it’s certainly blog-like enough to merit inclusion in this directory.

Like Red Herring, Perkins’s prior venture, the topic area of AlwaysOn is primarily the intersection of finance and technology.

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Dane Carlson

Dane Carlson, an entrepreneur, has started this blog seemingly just as a resource to other aspiring entrepreneurs, not as a promotion for his own business (in fact, it’s not even clear from his About page what his business is). He explains more of the blog’s mission:

Business Opportunities is a moderated list of legitimate of business opportunities for entrepreneurs. Its presented like a weblog with chronological archives and extensive outbound links.

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Jerry Michalski

Jerry Michalski is one smart cookie. For five years, he edited Esther Dyson’s reknowned tech industry newsletter Release 1.0. Since 1998, he has been operating as an independent consultant to leading Silicon Valley companies, and others. Sadly, he blogs infrequently. I’d be interested to read his insights a lot more often than he doles them out.

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Nick Usborne

I’ve known Nick for years from our time together on the Internet marketing speaker circuit. Not only a great speaker and consultant, but Nick is also the author of the popular book NetWords about online copywriting. He’s also been running a newsletter on the topic for a while, and, online wordster such that he is, a blog was only a logical extension, which he’s been doing since last August.

If I may be so bold, Nick, as to offer a bit of advice for the blog: 1) link to it prominently from your main consulting page, rather than making folks dig into your About Me page to find the link, and 2) fix your archives, so that you can navigate all the way back to the start more easily from the main site navigation.

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Nerve, a thinking-person’s erotic site (still, probably not safe for most workplaces), has lauched this weekly column on “sex in news, media + culture,” a blog-ish feature, if not perhaps a “proper blog,” whatever that means — e.g., no permalinks, written once a week in more of a column format than that of a blog, but it has something of a blog feel. Certainly, it is at best a poor-man’s Fleshbot (definitely not safe for work).

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