On Friday I received an email from my wife with the subject line “price,” a message of “February price” and an attachment called “price.zip”. A quick phone call confirmed that she didn’t send it. She didn’t send it again later that day.

On Saturday I received the same email from four other people. Intrigued, I Googled varients of the subject line, message and attachment. Nothing relevant. So I hit Technorati. There weren’t dozens of posts, but I did find one that led me to this post that discussed the bagle variant, along with characteristics, what it does to your system, and most importantly removal instructions.

Two lessons: One, the blogosphere is unmatched in staying up-to-date with buzz and breaking news when the news may not be of interest to the general public (or what Fox News and CNN deem to be of interest to the public, like Oscar nominations and high-speed televised car chases.)
Two, over the next few days those posts and ones like it will get a lot of traffic. What’s going on in or around your industry that you can blog about that’s going to capture a lot of searches? Blogging early about something of interest to your audience can be a great way of capturing the interest of new prospects.

I admit it, most bloggers seem to really like the blogosphere tracking site Memeorandum, but don’t count me as one of that group. I admit that the concept is interesting, in the same way that Google offers interesting results based upon its academic reference citation model, but there are some fundamental problems with any site that’s built around popularity.

The site’s referenced in a lot of weblog postings – indeed, I’ve linked to it once or twice myself – but the more I look at it and the more I think about the implications of its core premise, the less comfortable I am with it:

    Why I don’t like Memeorandum

Maybe I’m clueless about how it really works or misunderstand the implications of popularity based on relevance, but I don’t like it. Do you?

AdLand (or is it Ad-rag? I never know) is having a little Battle of the Ad Blogs voting contest going on, in case you case. Since we’re not technically an ad blog, I guess we shouldn’t have our feelings hurt that we were nominated for nothing. My buddy Steve Hall of Adrants is making a blantant appeal to readers to ballot stuff for him in the Best Commercial Ad Blog category (after VNU has apparently been lobbying its employees to vote for AdWEEK’s AdFreak; poor Steve, meanwhile, is on his own at Adrants). Steve’s battle cry seems to be working; he has regained a healthy lead in the category. Go Steve!

Gawker Media has launched Valleywag, a tech gossip rag, focusing mainly on the people and stories of San Francisco and Silicon Valley. The blog is edited by Nick Douglas who most recently was writing for Blogebrity. The Valleywag FAQ has the rest of the details.

The first few posts are a mixture of Photo-chop skills and inside-the-valley commentary. The site should get quite a bit of traffic from the left-coast folks and those wishing they were on the left-coast.

Marqui, the blogging and communications company, in conjuction with FreeRange Communications, the mobile RSS company, have released a great whitepaper on RSS entitled “RSS Rx: How Marketers Can Make the Most of RSS Technology.” The document is a quick read, at only 15 pages, but gives a really great overview of RSS for marketers in a conversational tone that is very much a Marqui thing. (I mean, really, look at their website and you’ll see what I mean)
The document cites nearly every RSS study done to date, and highlights some of the prominent RSS purveyors throughout the document. (Full disclosure: Pheedo is mentioned in the document)
There is also a fair bit of prescriptive content on ‘what do do next’ with your new-found RSS knowledge, such as the following:

Marketers interested in incorporating RSS into their activities should first take a hard look at their Web site. What content does it have that can – and should be – distributed? For example, does your site have blogs, forums, press releases, product information, support information, email newsletters, audio presentations or whitepapers? If not, can any of these items be added?

Even companies relying on third-parties to manage some of these items might be surprised to find that adding an RSS feed is an option. For instance, companies using a newsletter service to manage their newsletters should ask if the service comes with RSS feeds since more and more services are adding this capability.

Marqui has made the whitepaper available for download on their site in the downloads section.

Technorati Tags: Freerange communications, Marqui, RSS, whitepaper

OK, I know I’m stretching here, as this is a blog about business blogs, but hear me out.

Vernon Evans, Jr. is sentenced to die on Monday, February 6th. He’s certainly not the only person in America on death row, but he’s the only one I know who has a blog…a blog called Meet Vernon.

Vernon doesn’t have Internet access, so people email questions to him and he responds through an intermediary who then posts to his blog.

Whatever your personal feelings on the death penalty, this is an interesting approach to “personalizing” a death row inmate…something that has been done time and again through more traditional means in the past.

Is this what Marshall McLuhan meant when he said “The medium is the message?” Maybe. Or maybe it’s just the way in which many people may mis-interpret this famous line.

In any case, I first heard about this blog through the Wall St. Journal, although I’m sure it’s been picked up by other news media as well. What makes this story different than many others is the medium through which the story is being told.

Sometimes a message is important because of the way it’s delivered; as Vernon’s supporters have shown us, the blogging platform itself alters, enhances, and promotes the message.

While I’m sure (at least I hope) your blog serves a different purpose than Vernon’s, be aware of the unique attributes of blogging: its sense of community involvement, its immediacy, and its ability to be “news worthy” just because it’s a new medium.

Its newness and particularities make it a powerful method to disseminate your message.