Whether it’s the debate raging in the online professional networking community of LinkedIn about spammy waves of invitations received by LI members from competitor Doostang, the breathless hype about Web 2.0 or even blogging itself, I argue that many of the discussions in the tech industry parallel the societal debate about evolution versus intelligent design. Do things evolve, does change beget improvement, or do we all just spin our wheels pointlessly, foolishly thinking that creation is a series of small steps?

Read my thoughts on this topic for yourself at:

    Intelligent Design, Evolution and the Tech Industry

I tried to remain agnostic, but you’ll learn more about my own theological and philosophical viewpoint as you read the article too. And, please, don’t hesitate to add your own commentary on this topic!

Here’s a topic that I know is of interest to many bloggers, both business bloggers and otherwise: how can you turn your site traffic into some sort of money stream, even a small one? It turns out that there are many different ways to make a few dollars, but one of the most popular is Google AdSense. The AdSense program offers every blogger a simple way to include contextually relevant advertisements on your very own blog pages.

Understanding exactly how AdSense works, what you do and don’t need to worry about as a participant in the program, and how they calculate payouts is a subtlety that most people skip, unfortunately. Further, it’s not easy to find a clear explanation of every step required to configure and track your own AdSense results from your site online either.

That’s why I just spent rather a few hours writing up a long and detailed article about Google AdSense, including many best practices and a critical warning that you should heed lest you get kicked out of the program before your blog can even make you that wonderful first dollar!

Rather than duplicate it here on the Business Blog Consulting site, however, I’d like to instead beg your indulgence and ask that you click on the following link so you can read all about Google AdSense for yourself:

      How do I get started with Google AdSense?

Questions about AdSense or even commentary on whether business blogs should be monetized are more than welcome too, of course.

A few months ago Technorati invited over 30,000 subscribers to its email newsletter to participate in a 18 question survey on blogging. There were 821 respondents.

The survey found that most bloggers blog to position themselves as an authority in their field and were fairly skeptical of corporate blogs, noting more trust in individual employee blogs.

You can view much of the raw results in tablular and graphical format on the Edelman site and some analysis on the Edelman blog. Technorati has published their own summary findings of the survey and eMarketer has published their take as well.

eMarketer is also offering a new report on business blogging:

The Business of Blogging report aggregates the latest data from Blogads,
Forrester Research, Gallup, Harris Interactive, InsightExpress, Perseus
Development, Pew Internet & American Life Project, Quris, Technorati, TNS
and many others—with eMarketer’s objective, unbiased analysis to give you the
information you need to make well-informed business decisions on the future of
online marketing.

Traditional media seems committed to sending out mixed messages about business blogging:
Fortune – No escaping the blog

Forbes – Attach of the Blogs

BusinessWeek – Blogs will Change your Business

Reports like “The Business of Blogging” seem more attractive to those looking for objective insight. But is it objective?  I have not purchased the report and if anyone else has, I would be curious about your thoughts on it.

GM’s Smallblock Engine blog shuts down tomorrow today after exactly one year, perhaps the first highly-publicized Fortune 500 blog to bite the dust. This sounds like a natural death. It was an event-driven blog, created for the 50th anniversary of the Corvette’s small-block engine. And the party is over. Makes sense. (Dave Hill, chief engineer of the Corvette, is also retiring which kind of wraps it up nicely.)

You could say it created a category for corporate blogs: event-specific and time-limited. It never got a huge number of comments from readers. But that’s OK too. Remember, a blog is just a tool. Use it anyway you want as long as you make it a good read, you’re honest and a bit of passion shows through.

Addendum: in April 2005, halfway through the year, the GM folks blogged about whether or not to turn the smallblock engine blog into a powertrain blog. A number of commenters said "oh, yes please do!" But one guy left an astute remark:

"Keep to one topic… don’t try to take on too much in one blog."

Here’s Rick Bruner’s Nov. 2004 post crowing about the launch of the Smallblock Engine blog:

"This is big: the biggest car company in the world now has a blog… "

According to a newly released report from Pew Internet & American Life Project teens are very blog savvy.  According to the report, 19% of teens are blogging, and 38% of teens are reading blogs. The number of teen blog readers translates to 8 million young adults.

Teens are adopting the use of the internet for many functions including downloading music, using IM, making online purchases, and more importantly to the blogosphere, they are deemed to be "content creators".  The study reflects

Today’s online teens live in a world filled with self authored customized and on demand content much of which is easily replicated, manipulated and redistributable.  The internet and digital publishing technologies have given them tools to create, remix and share content on a scale that had previously only been accessible to the professional gatekeepers of broadcast, print, and recorded media outlets.

What does this mean for the future?

Contuinue Reading

Would you believe that in 2005, employees reading blogs will waste the equivalent of 551,000 years reading blogs unrelated to their work, on their bosses’ time? No? Well, what about 2.3 million work years (calculated on the basis of a typical nearly 40-hour work week)?

These startling figures are in the October 24 AdAge story What Blogs Cost American Business (free subscription required to read the story).

Sprinkled through the story there are clues that the stated figures need to be taken with a grain of salt. For example, half way through, well after the shock of the headline, and under the sub-head ‘Wasted time’, we get "Hard and detailed data on blogging time is limited, so Ad Age’s analysis is a best-guess extrapolation …" Oh, really? Does that mean what it sounds like, i.e. "we have a fair idea but we can’t really prove it"?

And "strong evidence" of "workday blogging" (posting? reading?) is based on figures for spikes in business hours traffic for Blogads and Feedburner traffic. So what would “weak evidence� look like? What the taxi drivers are saying?

Yet whatever the weaknesses in the argument or the caveats on the statistics cited, business blog consultants surely need to recognize that business owners who are employers may be encouraged by articles like this (there will no doubt be more) to be super cautious about getting aboard the blogging train. They might wonder, for example, whether by being enthusiastic about blogging, CEOs were in effect encouraging their staff to spend a lot of time on activity which did not evidently contribute to productivity.

There are some significant human resources management issues here for businesses which make a commitment to blogging and even for businesses with the “not interested� sign out – for one thing, their staff may be very interested and some will be reading blogs and some of those will also be blogging, if not now, real soon.

Having a code of conduct on blogging could help.

Recently, to assist a client of mine, I did some research online to find such a code of conduct, a clear, unequivocal set of rules or principles which business owners could apply to cover blogging at work and in relation to work. I found a lot of opinion and a few attempts at a code, but not a clear-cut set of principles that business owners generally could be expected to adopt. And let’s face it, there’s probably a generational issue lying in wait here, except maybe for companies with CEOs under 35.

I was intrigued by one particular comment in the article, an observation attributed to Jonathan Gibs, senior research manager at Nielsen/NetRatings, that at-work blog time is "probably" done in addition to regular surfing. In other words, the people who have been doing non work-related internet browsing are now also blogging or reading non work-related blogs at work. If true, that would mean that more of the "boss’s time" is being wasted by the same people already doing unproductive internet surfing, rather than their simply substituting blogging and reading blogs for more traditional internet surfing. What does that say about, for example, marketing to readers of blogs?

Not exactly the Bullwinkle I grew up with, but Denali is blogging!  After visiting the main page, you may be confused about where to find the company’s blogs. From it’s main flash page, you are not directed to a link to any of its blogs.  On the other hand, the blogs are linked to the main site.  A bit of free advice to the people at Denali, please put a link to your blogs on your main flash page.

Apart from the confusion on how to find their blogs, they are doing well with the blogs according to a report from Heather Green at BusinessWeek’s Blogspotting.  She states in her report:

Apparently for all of $700, John Nardini, the company’s vice president of marketing, created four blogs to hit different consumer interests. Of course, this doesn’t include the cose (sic) of blogging time. But they say they’re having a positive impact on drawing people to Denali’s main Web site. According to Denali pr, site visits are up 25.7% while the total time spent on the site is up 23.4%.

The blogs that are under the Denali wing are:

• Moosetopia;
• Team Moose Tracks;
• Free Money Finance; and
• Denali Flavors.

  The latter of the four blogs is the corporate blog that seems to be Denali’s flagship.

Continue Reading

After a few days of snafus with this blog’s templates, I think I’ve got it sorted out and comments are working again. TypeKey is required now to thwart evil spammers (sorry, I know it’s a pain in the backside, but I don’t know of a better solution). Please feel free to test them out.