Esther Dyson is truly a thought leader in the Internet and technology space. A consultant and venture capitalist through her firm EdVenture Holdings, her newsletter Release 1.0 has been an important read for technology executives for more than a decade. Release 2.0 is the title of her book, and Release 3.0 is the name of her fortnightly column for the New York Times Syndicate. So, it’s only logical that when she started a blog last year, it became Release 4.0. Dyson is also the host of the prestigious technology conference PC Forum.

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Rich Ottum

Rich Ottum runs the eStrategyOne consulting firm, focused on Internet marketing. He has been observing industry news and trends on this blog for nearly a year (as of this posting).

He recently wrote an article “10 Steps To Marketing With Business Weblogs” on WebProNews and on his site he also he also offers this (Word doc) white paper, “Marketing with Business Weblogs Primer.”

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Another article about how to blog for business, this time by Rich Ottum, general manager of eStrategyOne. Top five pieces of advice:

1. Make it New
2. Give it Voice
3. Say it Often
4. Ask for Feedback
5. Share the Wealth

This post led me to create another category for this blog, “How to Blog for Business.”

WebProNews: 10 Steps To Marketing With Business Weblogs

Once upon a time, The Industry Standard was the best magazine in the world, covering the Internet economy better than anyone. Then, evil bastards over at IDG pulled the plug on its financing at the first whisper of the economic downturn. Well, now the Internet is back, and, to a lesser extent, so is The Standard. Only this time, it’s just a blog. Mark Glasser, a former reporter for the publication, explains over at the Online Journalism Review, the back-story:

[F]ormer Industry Standard online honcho Matt McAlister — who is vice president and general manager of online operations at IDG’s InfoWorld — has decided to bring the site back to life as a moonlighting project. His plans are modest, with a rotating schedule of guest bloggers over the coming months, but he is clearly optimistic that the Standard still has a place in the media universe.
. . .
[F]ormer Standard contributors Jimmy Guterman, Rafat Ali, James Ledbetter and Mike Butcher have signed up to blog without pay. There will be no editorial oversight before posting, and bloggers will write to the style that suits them best — but mainly with links to news and comments.

Frankly, it’s a former shadow of its former self, but it was so great back when, I’m happy to take whatever reminders of that I can get.

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This site needs a blog. The site looks like it was built in 1997. I’d say it sucks, but then, the pun is too kind to them.

The postcards for your friends &0158; could the be lamer? The merchandise &0158; yawn. (When I was in junior high school, one of my favorite t-shirts (wishful thinking) said “Trojan Field Tester.” That was at least sort of funny. No one at this company has a sense of humor?) The arcade games &0158; pu-leeeaase! Were those ever fun or challenging for someone older than four years old?

The only half-way interesting and useful section of the site is the information center. But it is just crying for a blog. Imagine all the legitimate condom, STD and sex-related news they could report on, not to mention more interesting Fark-ish naughy, funny and incredible-but-true sex-related stuff.

Call me when you’re ready to have an interesting web site.

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Slightly geeky for what you’ve seen of this blog so far, but I’m a wannabe nerd, and this seems really cool to me. Paul Frankenstein innovates a simple way Movable Type users can assign different CSS styles to different posts using categories.

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Updating my earlier comment about the beta release of Movable Type 3.0, Six Apart’s president Mena Trott shares some details here about the philosophy of the 3.0 version of the software. Basically, it is more of an overhaul of the underlying platform, in terms of extensibility and support for outside plug-ins than it is a big update of new features. Sounds a bit anti-climatic, but probabaly better for us all in the long-run. She suggests that incremental 3.x versions will see new features added. In the meantime, you can probably expect to see more features popping up in the independent developer community.

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B.L. Ochman is right, this site needs a blog. It’s a product that actually has a lot to say, mainly in the form of user testimonial of all the great things they’ve used WD-40 for. But how tedious that you have to fill out a long form to sign up for a community just to be able to submit a use for consideration. How about an email address and a blog instead? I’m sure they’re losing a lot of people to that form. I filled it out only because I was determined to see the process so I could right about it here. An example of a product site that they have simple over-thought and over-complicated.

Blog me, baby!

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Yesterday I found this directory on Yahoo that seemed quite apropos to this blog: …/Computers_and_Internet/Internet/World_Wide_Web/Weblogs/Business/

For the hell of it, I submitted myself to the directory. My experience with Yahoo in years past is that it can take months to get approved into the directory. I’m delighted, however, to report that this site is already at the top of the directory with a shiny yellow “NEW!” lablel. That’s gonna be good for my Google PageRank!

🙂

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I realize I’m posting a lot about social network sites today, which is arguably somewhat off-topic for this blog, but this newest service, Multiply, I think is worth mentioning because it is the first of the many, many social networks I’ve seen that takes the obvious step of blending the benefits of social networks with other tools such as blog publishing and photo galleries. Duh. I’ve been banging at my friend Adrian Scott, founder of Ryze, about that for a while. I strongly suspect this will quickly become a matter of parity for all the social network services that survive a year from now.

Here’s the press release, and here is social network expert Judith Meskill’s comment.

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YASNS stands for “Yet Another Social Network Service,” I assume. Anyway, this is a comprehensive list of dozens of social network services compiled by one of the space’s leading experts, Judith Meskill. Eyeballing it, it looks like she’d identified well over 100 different services, in the follow categories:

• Business networking sites
• Common interest networking sites
• Dating sites
• Face-to-face meeting facilitation sites
• Friend networking sites
• Pet networking sites
• Social networking ‘plus’ and/or ‘edge cases’

thesocialsoftwareweblog: YASNS Meta List

I was surprised, last night to log into TypePad and see a new logo. And that wasn’t all — some new features (click link in the headline of this post for details):

• File management – Nice. Let’s you navigate all the stuff you’ve uploaded accidentally and now want to delete. Valuable, seeing as you don’t have FTP access to your account.
• New photo upload process – This I’m less thrilled about. I had my routine down, and the new default settings cause more work for me. I use a CSS class to format my photos so the text flows around them, but perhaps the masses aren’t so sophisticated. More clicks for me, but probably better for the average Joe. I wish, however, you could configure the defaults (or maybe you can, but I don’t yet see how).
• Moblogging support – Cool, I guess, though I don’t yet do it.

Anyway, it’s nice to see it’s a living application and that Six Apart hasn’t taken it’s eye off of TypePad in the midst of rolling out the new version of Movable Type (which I’m only too eager to beta test).

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I already noted Judith Meskill’s personal blog earlier and referenced this Social Software Weblog property there. But now that I’ve been following this blog more closely in recent days, I think it’s good enough to call separate attention to. If you follow this trend of social networks much, it seems to be the go-to resource.

I am also looking forward to posting the results of her The ‘Perfect’ Corporate Weblogging ‘Elevator Pitch’ Competition, which I missed when the competition was still accepting entries. Judges are currently (as of this post) evaluating the results. Stay tuned.

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With this entry, I initiate a new category: “This Site Needs a Blog.” Please feel free to nominate others for the category.

If it works for Clip-n-Seal, a blog should work for Banana Guard.

“Protect your banana!” (Yes, it’s work safe.)

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I can now die a happy man, having achieved a lifelong goal: a position on DayPop Top 40, thanks to this blog.

(You love me. You really, really love me!)

The next-closest thrill that compares to this was when I Farked Robert.

Meanwhile, I come up with a lot more links on Technorati

Laura Schneider

About.com’s marketing maven Laura Schneider maintains a list of marketing-related weblogs.

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BizNetTravel is one of the business blogs I created and do much of the writing for on behalf of a client. The company is a travel agency, and the blog offers links to a mix of travel destination features, travel news for travelers, quirky travel items and more. We also maintain a Special Offers blog page for this client, featuring original travel packages for customers.

The main purpose of the blog is as a service to the agency’s existing customers, but it also does serve to attract lots of new prospective customers to the site.

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Cheskin, a marketing and market research consulting firm, does a great job with their blog. Their essays are thoughtful and frequent. Most impressive, however, is how effectively the blog reflects a true team spirit. I’ve seen other companies try to rally a group of managers to participate, and it’s hard to do. Normally, one person dominates the blog and others drag along occasionally at best. The Cheskin team, however, seems to have challenged one another to all stay involved, and a quick browse of the archive shows a healthy rotation of names and personal posting styles.

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Daniel Weintraub

It will be a long list of blogs if I try to note every traditional media blog here, so I plan to pick off just some of the more prominent ones. Such a list should include the Sacramento Bee’s political columnist Daniel Weintraub, who has been blogging for a year, as of this post. He offers this comment on “Why Blog?” and E-media Tidbits also quotes him with some advice for media bloggers.

http://www.sacbee.com/content/politics/columns/weintraub/story/6414174p-7366437c.html

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Poynter Institute’s E-media Tidbits column has a blurb’s worth of advice from Daniel Weintraub, blogger and columnist for the Sacramento Bee. The Tidbits blurb offers advice for other traditional media bloggers, that includes this gem: “If journalism is the first draft of history, then the blog is the note pad that leads to it,” Weintraub said.

E-media Tidbits: Weintraub on Blogging