More of the same about politics and blogs. Leads like this just bug me:

Forget direct mail solicitations and pleas made in person or on television. Savvy politicians trying to raise campaign money today are turning to the Internet.

No, don’t forget direct mail, TV and in-person politicking, for Pete’s sake. Why must journalists reduce everything to such simplistic binary choices. Blogs are good, but they will replace nothing. That’s just something new.

IndyStar: Savvy politicos turn to Web logs

A decent general overview piece about blogging (when is this kind of “What’s a blog?” story going to run it’s course, do you suppose?) that includes several examples of business blogs along with political and other types of blogs. Starts with a short profile of the Air Conditioning Contractors of America’s blog:

“Our members may not be your typical bloggers, but this works for us,” said Kevin W. Holland, the trade group’s vice president of communications and membership.

Deb Weil, who is featured in the article, provides behind-the-scenes elaboration on the story.

Washington Times: What’s all the blog about?

Interesting piece Reuters apparently wrote for Billboard about the impact that blogs are having on the music industry. On the one hand, hip new indie bands such as the Killers, Scissor Sisters, Fiery Furnaces and Franz Ferdinand have all benefited from blog-fueled buzz. On the other hand, record companies predictably don’t know what to make of the copyright implications of MP3 blogs such as Fluxblog, Scenestars and TofuHut, the likes of which have scooped the record companies recently with previously unreleased material from new works by Fiona Apple, Interpol and Bjork.

My favorite quote is Chiore Sicha, editorial director of Gawker Media, calling 18-35 year old “this shocking demographic.” Egad!

Reuters: Blogs Build Buzz, Raise Copyright Questions

Kind of a ridiculous, over-the-top piece of hype article — the likes of which ultimately doesn’t do a lot of favors for business blogging being taken seriously — that suggests blogs are going to make marketing departments obsolete, confusingly conflates RSS, blogs and social networks and otherwise paints a rather muddled picture of things. For examples:

The question by some is, “Do companies need a full-blown marketing or PR department when the employees themselves and the conversations they have on these blogs are getting the corporate info out more effectively?”

Who exactly is asking that? Crazy McLiealot?

InternetNews: Blogs: The Marketing Killer

While I’m in the process of commissioning detailed reviews of many blog publishing platforms, Olivier points me to this feature comparison chart of many of those same publishing platforms from Asymptomatic.net. I remember having seen this some time earlier, but I had forgotten about it. Not that it’s a replacement for what I’m undertaking, but it is a good compliment.

Asymptomatic: Blog Software Breakdown

Okay, this isn’t really a business blog as far as I can tell — in fact, it’s a post much better suited for Adrants — but it is a blog about women’s underwear, and I’m a man, and it’s Saturday, so there you go.

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If we’re going to go for prescriptive descriptions of what makes a blog a (good) blog, I prefer this one (link in headline) to this one.

Asterisk: A successful blog (or blogger) isÖ

Anil Dash notes that Raging Cow has an Amazon Wish List.

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Paul Chaney of Radiant Marketing asked me and a few other prominent marketing consultant bloggers what we thought was the future of blogging. Part I of the post is up today. Part II is supposed to come tomorrow. In typical fashion, my answer is longest.

🙂

Radiant Marketing: The Future of Blogging, In Their Own Words, Part I

Keiko Groves

Another example of a commerce blog. 19-year-old student Keiko Groves is selling her original clothing line through her LiveJournal weblog where she mixes updates of her funky modified thrift-shop clothing with pictures of her boyfriend and puppy. According to this Orlando Sentinel piece, She makes just about enough to pay for her college tuition and cell-phone bills and the blog has brought her to the attention of more established designers. Steve Rubel calls her the future of marketing, which may be a slight overstatement, but if she’s what the future of marketing looks like, it is a welcome sight (the fact that she serves as her own model for her clothing probably doesn’t hurt, in her case).

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I want to commission reviews of the following blog publishing systems:

• WordPress
• pMachine
• ExpressionEngine
• GreyMatter
• iBlog
• Blosxom
• Manila Userland
• Radio Userland
• PHPNuke

UPDATE: Based on your feedback, I’ll also include the following platforms for review (what the heck, it’s only my money, right?):

• Drupal
• Blogware
• b2Evolution
• Textpattern
• Traction
• Slash
• Nucleus CMS / Blog CMS

That is, of course, presuming I can find folks out there willing to write about all of these. (NOTE: Movable Type, TypePad and Blogger aren’t on this list because I am prepared to write those reviews myself.)

I am ready to pay the princely sum of $25 per review in real cash money (of the PayPal variety, anyway) for a worthy review according to specs outlined below. Sure, it’s crap money, but how much do you get paid to blog now? Besides, if you’re interested in getting paid to help anyone set up a business blog on your chosen platform, this may be a decent lead generator.

If you’re interested, here are the conditions of the deal:

• You should NOT send me a review unsolicited. This is an important test of your ability to follow directions. You should instead send me an email describing why you are the best person to for the job of writing such a review
• You should have at least a few months’ of experience blogging on the platform you intend to review
• You should have no close affiliation with the company that produces the software in question or other potential conflicts of interest
• You must adequately address all of the review points I note in the review guide below.
• You should be at least technically literate enough to address all of the questions below.
• You can also post the review to your site, but for my palty $25 I can repurpose the review however I see fit, including packaging all these reviews together in a report for sale or other creative uses.
• If I accept your review for publication on this site, I won’t edit it except to correct spelling, grammar, etc. though I may add bracketed editorial comments, if I’m so inclined.
• You need to have a PayPal account, as that’s how I plan to send reviewers payment.

There may be other qualifications I haven’t thought of yet that I’ll explain in private correspondence if we get that far.

If you’re interested, keep reading below the review guide:

Review Guide

Reviewers should address all of the following points in their software review:

• General performance. What makes this different/better than other blog publishing platforms?
• What are some of the best advantages about this platform?
• What are some of its disadvantages?
• What’s the killer feature, if there is one?
• What features does it lack or need fixing?
• Where does the publishing engine reside? On its own hosted servers, like Blogger or TypePad? On your own web server, like Movable Type? On your desktop, like Userland Radio? Other? (Outerspace?) What advantages/disadvantages do you see in this approach?
• What’s the geek factor on this? How comfortable can non-technical people be with it?
• What’s the learning curve? Totally intuitive? Lots of features, thus requiring more time to familiarize yourself with all of it?
• What’s involved in setting it up? If you’re not technical, do you need help?
• Are there platform restrictions? (E.g., PC/Mac, APS vs. Linux servers, SQL Server, etc.)
• Who produces it? Is it an open-source community, a labor-of-love by some programmer, a company with financial backing? What is the likelihood this development team is going to still be at it a year or two from now, providing new features, etc.?
• Where is the software developed? How is language support in English (the web site, the manual, the support communities, etc.)? Other languages?
• What’s the pricing of it?
• Is there tech support?
• Is there a good user manual?
• Is there a third-party developer community? If so, how active?
• Is there a vibrant user/support/forum community? If so, what are the URLs of such?
• Is there support for photos galleries?
• Is there a built-in Blogroll/Link List kind of feature to manage blogrolls?
• Can you post via email? Mobile phone/moblog?
• Does it email posts to subscribers who so choose?
• Anything notable in the archive features?
• Does it support comments? Comment-spam filtering? If so (the latter), what’s the approach?
• Does it support trackback?
• Any idea how well it works on a Mac, with Mozilla or other non-W2K IE platforms?
• Does it pioneer any other new blog features that other platforms don’t have?
• Does it support multiple authors? If so, does it have decent permission controls? (E.g., can you limit authors to publish only to draft?)
• Does it support a simple modular design for page elements? (E.g., when editing templates, are things like blogroll lists, sidebar elements, headers, etc., managed as separate entities, or are they all just in the HTML of a single template?)
• Is it well suited for public corporate blogging? Why or why not?
• Is it well suited for internal corporate blogging? Why or why not?
• What other blog platforms have you used that you can compare this to?
• What else do we need to know about this system?

UPDATE:
These additional questions have since occurred to me:

• Does it let you publish in XML syndication? If so, in which formats? RSS 1.0? RSS 2.0? Atom? Others?
• Does it have a spell checker?
• Does it have a wiki-publishing component?
• Can you easily set up multiple weblogs from one account or instalation of the blog publishing software, or must you create multiple accounts or installations?
• Does it support categories? If so, how about hiearchical categories (e.g., Movies / Horror, Movies / Comedies, Movies / Thriller, Books / Fiction, Books / Biographies, and so on)? What about surpressed categories? (That is, in the monthly archive, publish all except the “Breaking News” category)?
• Does it let you easily create a “remaindered links” blog-within-a-blog, a la Anil Dash‘s Links Blog? (Obviously, you can kludge this in most systems, but I’m wondering if some blog software has it off the shelf.)

If you have other points you think I should include in this review guide, please recommend them in the comments field. Also, if there are other blog publishing platforms you think I should add to this list (excluding TypePad, Movable Type and Blogger, which I plan to review myself), please also note in the comments section. If you are interested in writing such a review for me, please send me an email making a case for why you’d be the best person to do so.

It’s late and I’m tired so I haven’t looked over this carefully, but this may or may not be interesting.

Elise.com: An Overview of the Weblog Tools Market

Intelliseek, an online market intelligence firm that includes a blog analysis service, is hosting a free webinar on August 25 (times given without time zone context, so call first).

Intelliseek: Marketers Must Understand Blog Behavior

Don’t Panic: the greatest book ever now has a movie under production: The Hitchhiker’s Guid to the Galaxy is currently in production and is due out in theaters next summer. I am literally all atwitter with anticipation. Meanwhile, there is a blog to tide us over, including production photos, QuickTime clips, cast/crew interviews and references to towels.

Why every movie in and after production doesn’t have a blog is a mystery to me.

Link

I have no idea what the headline of this story is supposed to mean, but it’s a decent piece on the PR power of blogs.

Guardian: The Blog Busters

This story prompts me to add a new archive category: “Blogs as Intelligence.” I know lots of companies are doing this, but this is the first time I’ve noted it.

Autoblog’s David Thomas notes “In an otherwise innocuous story about marketing and designing the new 300 sedan Chrysler executive Jeff Bell said ‚ÄúWe do a lot of monitoring of blogs.”

Let me also take this opportunity to say, on a personal note, I hate this car. It is so piggish looking. I imagine its drivers must be nouveau riche guys with thick necks who made their money in construction or something. Just an opinion (but isn’t that what blogs are for?).

Autoblog: Chrysler watches blogs for buzz

Another good example of a non-profit blog, Earth Share of Washington is an information hub for 65 member environmental education and charitable organizations in Washington State.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy has a profile of the organization’s blog and how it has helped it drive a lot more traffic and attention to the web site’s other resources.

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Good lord, just what we need, another ridiculous blog-related acronym: LoMoSo (location-based mobile social networks).

More on this dubious trend from ITBusineses.ca.

News.com: Has cell phone blogging found its place?

Sensible words of warning: don’t blog about your sex life or your boss’s dirty laundry without considering the impact it could have on your job security. At some jobs, it doesn’t really matter what you blog about; you boss or your boss’s boss just might not like blogs, or, more likely, understand them. Bottom line is unedited self-publishing online is threatening to some people. In which case, it comes down to which you like better — your blog or your job. Or, blog anonymously.

As if there weren’t enough examples of this sorry phenomenon already, here’s the latest: Penny Cholmondeley fired from her job working for Nunavut Tourism in the Arctic region of Canada due to one anonymous complaint about her blog Polar Penny.

STLToday: Blog slog can get you in trouble in the workplace

Another great example of a business blog from software maker Intuit for its accounting software QuickBooks. The archive categories for posts say it all about this blog’s business value: Client Stories, Development News, Events, For Accounting Professionals, Product Features, Resources for Small Businesses, Stories from Our Clients, Tips & Tricks, Training and more.

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