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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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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