I’m slamming on deadline on the moment, and this long-ish article is actually a bit too dense for me to give it the credit it deserves, so I’ll just call it to your attention. A “Big Think” kind of piece for the CTO at large enterprises to chew on.

My favorite quote, from Ross Mayfield:

“Social media builds relationships. Connection happens before conversation, but still, this is business. What you will not find on your balance sheet is an underlying value proposition of enhancing social capital.”

I admit, I have no idea what the hell he’s talking about, but I’ve spoken with him on the phone about this kind of stuff a few times, and he’s really, really smart and very compelling in context. Maybe I’m just too tired now….

Thanks once again to Olivier for the tip. (You guys don’t realize it, but Olivier sends me about half of what I blog here; it’s just too tedious to credit him every time. I’ve invited him to blog to the site directly himself, but he says he’s too busy. Yeah, you and me both, buddy!)

UPDATE:
Ross has more interesting commentary about this on his blog now.

Internet News: IT Heavies Lifting Dollars For Blogs

Yes, it’s cool what this political season is doing for blogs, such as that CNN now has a blog for the conference (and, possibly even cooler, a Blog Watch page), but why is it that major media companies think they need to re-invent blog software instead of just using MT or one of the other excellent tools out there, tools that include key blog features such as permalinks?

NOTE TO CNN AND ALL OTHER MAJOR MEDIA COMPANIES TRYING TO JUMP ON THE BLOG BANDWAGON: permalinks are a good thing. In fact, they border on being an essential ingredient of a blog (unlike trackbacks, for example). Without permalinks, no one can point to anything you write, which means much less traffic for you!

(As another example of this trend, USA Today’s otherwise excellent Today in the Sky travel blog by Ben Mutzabaugh has no permalinks, and it pisses me off when I’m blogging for BizNetTravel and want to link to him.)

If you know other examples of this trend, please do tell. Shame is the best medicine in such cases, I find.

Link

Yay!

Link

There was so much coverage of the BlogOn conference in Berkeley last week that BlogTalk, in Vienna, got short shrift. In fact, it almost snuck below my radar. I’d appreciate any links to others who covered this (in the comments).

Link

Stephen Yellin
16, high-school student
doing his part to
fulfill blogger stereotypes
(if only he were
named ‘Rantin’)

Get it while you can, this story is set to self-destruct for non-WSJ subscribers in about a week. A who’s who roundup among the bloggers covering the Democratic Convention in Boston, the blog story of the week (if not the century).

WSJ: Meet the Bloggers

Suw Charman

Suw Charman is indeed attractive (judging by her picture, anyway), and the way she spells her name is a bit strange (from a guy whose sister is named “Sue”), but I don’t think either of those help explain her blog’s name, a new entrant from the excellent Corante family of blogs. Once again, I am pleased to see a blog with a clear mission statement:

In Strange Attractor, Suw picks out patterns from the apparent chaos that is the blogosphere. She explores business blogging as well as adjacent territories such as social technologies, writing and storytelling, e-learning, digital rights and journalism.

Link

More optimism about blog advertising. My concern with this angle, which I’ve expressed to BlogAds CEO Henry Copeland before (who’s quoted in the story) is the current over-reliance among blogs on political advertising at the moment. Sure, pick the low-hanging fruit while you can, I suppose, but let’s not create the impression among advertisers that political ads are all blogs are good for. Otherwise, come November, and that’s it for another four years.

Mediapost: Convention Coverage Could Boost Blog Traffic, Ad Rates, and Awareness

LATEST UPDATE (August 4):
ATTENTION XBOX WEENIES: When I first created this post, I didn’t really understand what this blog was about. Whatever. Now I get it. I’ve since acknowledged that. Please stop posting comments on this thread to that same effect. Point taken. Get a frickin’ life already.

ORIGINAL POST:
It’s sad that consumer marketers think the best thing they can do with a blog is create fake ones. It was one thing when Sega did its Beta-7 blog, as that was actually really good and lots of people fell for it. But the stupid Be Tag-Free thing and now I Love Bees (from Xbox) are just lame. Michael O’Connor Clarke has the full story in his aptly named post Buzz Marketing.

FIRST UPDATE/CLARIFICATION:
A few commenters in my comments section on this post suggest that I’m not giving this its proper credit, that the blog is just one link in a chain of some kind of online mystery teaser campaign, and that lots of gamers who are following it think it is in fact a pretty cool campaign. I haven’t had the time (or inclination) to follow up on it further and judge for myself, so do take my cynicism with a grain of salt. May be I’m the one who doesn’t get it in this case, not the marketers.

What I think this does hightlight, however, is that it’s possible to come into a marketing event like this without the proper context, so marketers need to consider that. Like in the movies, you should be able to see a sequel without having seen the original and still enjoy it. If this works in its full context but looks bad if you find your way into it partway through, that is a problem. A link to this page from Instapundit would blow away the people are finding it from the start, and then more people could have a negative impression than a positive one. Like my annoyance at Big Blog Company the other day; so their “fuck you” comment wasn’t intended for outside eyes. Their mistake, however, was assuming it wouldn’t be seen out of context. Taken out of context, it wasn’t pretty.

Another Fake Blog: I Love Bees

MSNBC’s political commentary show Hardball with Chris Matthews has launched a blog to accompany the political conventions. A group blog, bloggers will include

• Ron Reagan (son of the late president)
• Willie Brown (former SF mayor)
• Dee Dee Myers (former press secretary under Clinton)
• Chris Matthews (Hardball host)
• Joe Trippi (Howard Dean’s one-time campaign manager and web/blog guru)
• Chris Jansing (MSNBC anchor and correspondent)
  Joe Scarborough (MSNBC host)
• Andrea Mitchell (NBC News chief foreign affairs correspondent)

It will be interesting to see whether the blog lasts beyond the conventions. My guess is it will.

Link

Various coverage about BlogOn conference, mostly highlighting the experiences of everyone’s favorite blogging business, Microsoft.

• CNET News: Blog’s the Word in Big Business
• Wired: The Empire Blogs Back
• Various blog posts via Daypop

Steve Outing, a columnist for Editor & Publisher and blog enthusiast, reports on Poynter’s site that the Spokane Spokesman-Review has started successfully selling ads on some of the paper’s blogs, recently recruited from among the paper’s reader community.

CORRECTION:
Ken Sands, managing editor of the new media division of Spokesman-Review, notes this (in the comments field, but I highlight here):

Slight correction: the ads are being sold on blogs that are produced by staff writers. The site also links to community bloggers, but doesn’t sell any advertising related to non-staffers.

Poynter: Newspaper Blogs and Making Money

VAR Business points out in this piece that blogs have done something quite remarkable for Microsoft: made it cool.

VAR Business: The Ogre’s New Voice: Can Blogs Save Microsoft’s Image?

Slowly but surely, the PR industry is starting to take blogs seriously. This long article, published originally in The Holmes Report, a newsletter for the PR industry, is reproduced on Steve Rubel’s site (a guy who does get it), Micro Persuasion. While the points made in the article are generally the right ones about how blogs really are something important for businesses to pay attention to, I can’t help but observing that The Holmes Report’s own “weblog” hasn’t been updated for almost two years.

Link

Daniel W. Drezner, assistant professor of political science at the University of Chicago and Henry Farrell, assistant professor of political science and George Washington University, have posted a new academic paper on blogs:

This paper addresses this puzzle by focusing on two interrelated aspects of the “blogosphere”: the unequal distribution of readers across the array of weblogs, and the increasing interactions between blogs and mainstream media outlets…
The skewed distribution of weblog influence makes it easy for observers to extract information or analysis from blogs – but the reason they are important is that journalists and opinion leaders are readers of blog.

Link

In yet another example of the impact that blogs have had on the media landscape, CNN has announced a blogosphere analyst to provide perspective on the Democratic National Convention coverage. And a better analyst they couldn’t have chosen.

While much has already been made of the number of bloggers given press access to cover the convention in Boston next week, CNN has just announced (see link in headline of this entry) that it will have David Sifry, creator of the blogosphere monitoring tool Technorati, providing blow-by-blow commentary about convention coverage from across the hundreds of blogs writing about it. As part of the coverage, Sifry announced a new feature to the site, politics.technorati.com.

Meanwhile, political sarcasm blogger Ana Marie Cox of Wonkette has been tapped by MTV to provide conference coverage for that hip media outlet.

UPDATE:
Not to be outdone, Feedster has launched politics.feedster.com offering blog convention coverage as well.

Sifry.com: Technorati and CNN

The latest blog from Microsoft, this one by the Internet Explorer team.

Link

Duly noting another business blog from a well-known firm.

Link

Just noting, as I should have earlier, a series of developer blogs from IBM.

Link

An anonymous blogger (as far as I can tell) at SciFiHiFi.com, who is apparently an Apple employee, makes a case against business blogging. His (? her?) jumping off point is a recent post by PR specialist and blog evangelist Steve Rubel titled “Why Apple Employees Will Blog in Revolt”. While Rubel suggests Apple should be blogging, as I also did recently, SciFiHiFi guy disagrees, suggesting that not blogging is part of Apple’s “Think Different” mystique.

Obviosly, I don’t agree, but the post is worth reading, if just for the contrarian argument. One point he/she makes is “I personally think that every official corporate weblog I‚Äôve ever seen (from Microsoft‚Äôs Channel 9 to the Google Blog) has come across as rather contrived and trendy.” True, that’s a danger of some blogs (though I happen to like Channel 9, even if I don’t often read it; Google Blog, on the other hand, is certainly a disappointment), but he/she conveniently overlooks some much better business blogs, most notably in the context of Microsoft being Robert Scoble’s, which is widely read and respected.

Anyway, SciFiHiFi’s implication is that there is a danger for a company like Apple, the success of which relies in large part these days on underpromising and over-delivering (according to its fan base, anyway), is that a blog would reveal too much. I never get this argument against business blogs. You trust employees to grant interviews to the NY Times and the WSJ and not to reveal too much in the face of touch questions from seasoned jouranlists, don’t you? Why then should some trusted employee not be able to keep their mouth shut about company secrets on a weblog? The blog could be about any number of things other than company secrets and new feature previews, such as a showcase of “Made on a Mac” projects around the web, or whatever.

Also, SciFiHiFi makes the case that corporations are not people and they shouldn’t try to sound like people, hence business blogs sound artifcial. But the whole point of a good company blog, like Scoble’s, is it’s clearly written by a person with an individual point of view, thereby humanizing the company, as we all know that companies are made up of individuals. Given that Apple all but invented the job title of “evangelist,” I think it’s conspicuous that they don’t have a blog. “Think Different” is fine when it makes strategic sense, but don’t go against the flow just for brand consistency even when it’s not the right thing to do.

(But don’t get me started on Apple; I’m a former Apple die hard who was eventually dragged onto the PC by an old job, and no amount of trend ads will ever get me to switch back to Mac. But that’s another story.)

Sci-Fi Hi-Fi: Redmond Blogs, Cupertino Codes

Kirsten Osolind

Kirsten Osolind writes:

Hi Rick: I don’t make your blogroll. Darn. If I told you it was my birthday, would you add me for a gift? Perhaps not ‚Äì you don’t know me.

Oh, heck, I’m a sucker for a pretty face. Happy Birthday, Kirsten! (Unless, of course, you’re just yanking my chain and it’s not really your birthday, in which case I refer you to the gist of this post.) Kirsten’s blog statement of purpose (I love those):

RE:THIS BLOG…a fun, flippant BLOG with points of interest about women & small business, from re:invention’s founder, Kirsten Osolind. Dedicated to all good women & men (and those sorely deserving a good thunk on the head).

Link