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.

While just about everyone in the blogosphere is reacting with some level of hostility or scorn to the Forbes Magazine cover article by Daniel Lyons entitled “Attack of the Blogs”, it turns out that there are many valuable lessons that we bloggers could learn by reading through the piece, and some ironic proof that Lyons’ isn’t too far off in his “attack” metaphor when the reaction of the blogosphere is considered.

It’s certainly a very different take on the article than what you’ve read online before, I’m sure:

    Forbes “Attack of the Blogs” is surprisingly accurate

You might not agree with my analysis and commentary, but take the time to read through what I’ve written anyway. The points I raise, whether you believe Lyons raises them too or not, are important discussions for the blogosphere to have nonetheless.

The latest incarnation of this debate in the business blog community revolves around the Def Perception weblog written, ostensibly, by someone named Tosh Bilowski on behalf of Panasonic Corporation. The tag line of the blog reads “Tosh Bilowski focuses on high-def pro video – brought to you by Panasonic.”

So far, the blog community seems to be enjoying some detective work (see for example Amy Gahran’s article Who Is Tosh Bilowski: Corporate Blogs and Authenticity and engaging in its typical criticism of any corporations trying to do something new with weblogs, at least in my opinion.

But I want to bring this topic to the Business Blog Consulting crowd because I suggest instead that Panasonic deserves some significant credit for having the courage to try something new and interesting. Yes, a quick Google of “Tosh Bilowski” reveals zero matches, which seems darn curious for someone who is a blogger, but I don’t think that’s really so important. Indeed, for Global PR Blog Week II I wrote an article on this very subject, entitled Fake Blogs: New Marketing Channel or Really Bad Idea?

In that article, I wrote:

“There’s no reason why a fake blog cannot be interesting, amusing and informative, while also having the desirous blog characteristics of credibility and authenticity within the context of the blog itself. Indeed, I don’t even like the pejorative “fake blog”, so let’s call it a “story blog” instead, to emphasize that everything about the weblog, from its premise and entries to the very persona of the author, are part of the fiction, of the story being told.”

I then observe that: “the real reason that story blogs aren’t better and therefore more popular is because it’s just darn hard to produce material week after week as a fictitious character.”

That’s the fundamental problem with the “Tosh Bilowski” weblog effort from Panasonic and its PR agency in my eyes, not that it’s “fake” or that they’ve pretty clearly created a fictional ‘video geek’ to write about their product line, but that it’s just boring and unengaging.

Even when “Tosh” acknowledges that there’s some controversy about the blog (as he does in the entry Oh Brother, Who Art Thou?) he doesn’t link to anyone, doesn’t acknowledge the controversy and doesn’t have anything interesting to say.

So I remain convinced that there’s an opportunity for companies to create “story blogs” that are interesting, compelling and effective at selling their products, but am still waiting to see an example of what this could be and how this could be done well. My kudos to Panasonic for making the attempt to further push the blogging envelope, but they need to find a better agency or blogger to work with. “Tosh” just isn’t going to make any headway in gaining visibility for their product line in the blogosphere.

In doing research for her book, The Corporate Blogging Book, my colleague and friend Debbie Weil asked a half dozen or so of her blogging colleagues if they wanted to comment on her proposed list of categories for blogs. As she explained it:

“I’m trying to be more creative than saying blogs can be used ‘for marketing and PR and thought leadership, as well as internally for project and knowledge management.'”

Her proposed list includes blogs as a complement to traditional PR, conference blogs, customer evangelist blogs (what today’s NYTimes calls branding blogs), etc.

Where this gets interesting is that I didn’t respond with a expansion of her categories, I responded quite differently, and the subsequent email offers some good insight into how blogs have evolved from a simple system to a proscribed technological communications platform with many specific requirements. I’ll let the email talk for itself.

Here’s what I wrote:

“But blogs are just content management tools, Debbie, so I believe it’s the case that they can be used for an infinite number of different corporate tasks, as many as there are tasks requiring online communication, archiving, or discussion. Anything from a shared discussion space for developers to a space where draft documents can be discussed in the pr group to evaluating logos for a new product in marketing, with the watchful eye of the VP involved.

“I understand your desire to categorize and “taxonomize” but the very act of trying to break it down into discrete parts inevitably changes the nature of what you’re writing about and your reader’s reaction to the material.

“Make sense?”

Rick Bruner then followed up with:

“I’m so glad, Dave, to hear you say “blogs are just content management tools.” I agree completely. I honestly think what’s most remarkable about blogs is the simplicity of the tool, not all the rules people apply to personal voice, whether comments are on or off, etc. At their heart, they are just a means for anyone to self-publish with little hassle.”

Toby Bloomberg offered an even more potentially controversial response:

“I agree with you and Dave; that was why I began talking about blogs to begin with… but then the marketers got their fingers in the virtual pie and the game hasn’t been the same.”

Sally Falkow agreed, with her comment:

“How refreshing to hear these comments. I have been taken to task many times for using blogs in odd ways – and not having all the things a blog is ‘supposed to have”

“I completely agree that a blog can be used for many different things. I have clients who publish news blogs – and now that Yahoo News is indexing blogs their content is being picked up.

“I am also using blogsites as a monitoring tool and it works very well. The RSS feeds are set up to monitor words and phrases and then the analysis is done in the blog so other members of the team and execs can access it. Internal use only, of course.”

Tris Hussey gave an additional thought and added a prediction about the next release of WordPress too:

“Expanding on the blogs as content management theme here … Blog platforms make great, cost-effective platforms for “websites”.  If you’re an SMB [small to medium size business -ed] with a limited budget you can get some budget hosting that includes MySQL and have WordPress installed in a few mins.  Since WP’s theme and style system is pretty flexible you can cut design cost and time incredibly.

“I’ve been advocating blogs as website solutions for SMBs before, but now even more so. Personally when WP 1.6 comes out I think it’s really going to shake things up in a huge way.”

I’ll let Debbie have the last word:

“Yes, yes and yes. I agree with all of you. I’ve been explaining blogs as a content management tool since 2001. But for the purposes of the book I can’t just say “Oh and you can do anything with a blog.” I need to give examples to make it make sense to readers. And I like to put examples into categories. It’s just a way of packaging the info.”

But what do you think, dear reader? Is a blog simply a tool for managing content on a Web site, or are there a specific and well-agreed-upon set of capabilities and features that it either must or should have to truly be considered a blog in the greater online community?

I work with a variety of different companies on business blogging strategies, but almost all of them are focused on how to get their message into their marketplace, rather than selling specific products or services. But there’s really no reason that a weblog couldn’t be used as a storefront, and with one of my clients, Waldorf in the Home, we’ve experimented with doing just that, as exemplified by the Waldorf in the Home Online Store.

The introductory section is obviously unique to this area of the site (and yes, it’s dynamically generated so that new blog entries cause the intro listing to change too). You can see the more traditional blog view of things by going to the blog store categories, like Online Store: Parenting.

Now I’m helping my sister out with her splendid Art Dolls.info site and she’s moving from just talking about how to make soft sculpture art dolls to actually selling them, based on reader demand.

My question is: who is doing innovative work in this area and what models are out there to help guide us in taking yet a further step towards what I’ll call blogstores (since everyone seems to love inventing jargon)?

To me, this is a logical evolutionary step in blogging. Most companies that have online sites either have catalog based software backends that are highly structured but expensive, or have everything built by hand, making it prohibitively difficult to add new products or services on a daily or weekly basis.

Blogging, of course, solves these sort of content management difficulties by allowing you to focus on the content, on what you want to say (or sell, in this case), rather than worrying about how it’s going to be formatted and displayed.

Admittedly, the features of a high-end catalog or online shop management system, features like cross-selling and up-selling, aren’t going to be easily rolled into a blogging backend, but I believe that there are many hobbyists and small businesses that could benefit from being able to use their blogging tool as a comprehensive backend for their store, main Web pages and more traditional weblog areas.

Back to my sister’s site, here’s the first doll she’s selling:

The first doll for sale at the Art Dolls site, as written up and displayed at Dasselrond Needs a New Home, is on a page that seems very busy. It’s very “bloggy” with all the recent postings, categories, archives, Google ads, etc., and probably isn’t the most effective presentation of something for sale.

What do you think of that page, though? Do you like narrative descriptions of products? Should the images be at the top of the entry? Should there be “buy now” buttons like you see at the Waldorf in the Home site?

The blogging system underlying Art Dolls is a piece of clay ready to be molded into whatever shape we want, so I’d be interested in your thoughts independent of whether they’re blog-centric or not. If we need to strip out all the extraneous material and just have the dolls for sale with their narrative descriptions and buy buttons, we can do that.

Thanks for your help, dear reader, and if you want to help Dasselrond find a new home, don’t hesitate to act quickly. He’s a beauty!

Over on my Ask Dave Taylor Q&A blog, I received a most interesting question that I believe is a good example of just what’s wrong with the state of RSS and, perhaps, is one of the great challenges facing the blogosphere too:

“I know this is a really stupid question, but how do I go about subscribing to your blog? Does subscribing to your blog mean that I would be subscribing to an RSS feed? If so, how do I get hold of an RSS feeder? I have Internet Explorer 6. Can I handle an RSS feed with IE6? Or does subscribing to your blog mean that I would receive an email from you every time there is a new entry to your blog?”

There’s a lot about this question that I find interesting, not the least of which is that it reflects the never-ending exclusionary aura of the tech savvy and “tech stupid”. But even in the more mundane world of the Web as it exists today there’s a lot here to chew on.

Those of us mired in the blogging space often forget how confusing and difficult most of the technology – and jargon – really can be for people who are coming into it without experience.

This is hardly a stupid question at all, actually, but a reflection of the fact that we, as bloggers, really need to do a better job of explaining what all of the buzzwords and confusing acronyms are to the general computer using community. And no, I’m not talking about some superficial renaming of RSS to webfeed; that won’t solve the problem either.

What I believe we really need is a strong, coherent, relevant and understandable metaphor for the entire concept of RSS feeds, syndication, subscriptions, and so on.

I’ve been trying to figure one out myself for a couple of years, truth be told, and the best I can come up with is the old AP “news wire” where there’d be a scrolling paper feed and reporters would literally “rip the story off the wire”. I can force the round peg into the proverbial square hole, but it’s not a great metaphor, I admit.

Part of the problem is that I don’t think that we, as a community, agree about what that means when we talk about “subscribing” to a site anyway. To me, the real value of RSS is the “subscribability” it offers readers, by the way, not its value to us publishers.

Remember also, RSS != blog, so any metaphor we’d come up with would need to encompass how the NY Times offers RSS feeds of its movie reviews, for example, even though it’s not a blog.

After all, conceptually, RSS is actually just a specially formatted version of a Web page that makes it easy for computer programs to “parse” and analyze. Just as we don’t “print to PCL5” even though that might well be the underlying language of the printer and just as we don’t buy “hot water poured over recently ground Arabica beans” but rather a cup of coffee, why are we still talking about RSS at all?

So, dear reader, where do we go from here? People are most familiar with magazines in this sense: what of the magazine subscription model is relevant to the Web and RSS? Business-folk are also familiar with newspaper “clipping services” but that doesn’t really describe the RSS subscription space either.

I can see the need. I just can’t quite capture that great metaphor that lets us truly communicate the essence, concept and value of RSS. Can you?

I’m privileged to be part of the Business Blog Consulting team, sharing weblog space with fellow experts Rick Bruner, Jim Turner, Debbie Weil, Tris Hussey, Paul Chaney, Rich Brooks, BL Ochman, Des Walsh and more. It’s a darn smart group.

Our shared weblog – and individual efforts – comprise much of the best thinking on the state and future of business blogging, but behind the scenes it turns out that we also have a mailing list where we volley about questions, ideas and our thoughts on specific topics (yes, it’s true. Even the most hardcore business bloggers sometimes don’t blog every thought in their heads).

Recently on our list we had a long, thoughtful discussion about the “Free Movie Blog” for A History of Violence, a new movie directed by David Cronenberg and starring Viggo Mortensen. Cronenberg has directed over twenty films, including eXistenZ, Crash, Dead Ringers, Videodrome and Scanners. For his own part, Mortesen was splendid in Lord of the Rings and many other films.

But our discussion wasn’t about the actor and director, it was about their ostensible blog and whether what they had up at the A History of Violence site really qualified as a weblog or whether it was co-opting the name and surrounding buzz unfairly.

With permission, here are some of the most cogent excerpts of our discussion:

Toby Bloomberg: From where I sit, David Cronenberg’s site is not a blog. He has no RSS feed, no comments, no trackbacks. New Line Cinema is using the platform of a blog to tell the story/create buzz. Perfectly valid but not a blog in the “traditional” sense. We really need more words in this new industry of “blogs.”

Jim Turner: I have to agree with Toby, when I looked at it I wondered if it had actually been written by David Cronenberg or perhaps a copywriter on staff. I didn’t get the transparent feel.

Rich Brooks: Even though it purports to be from the mind of Cronenberg, the writing is in the third person. Only the video clips are “from his mind.” … Is it interesting? If you find David Cronenberg interesting, perhaps. … But I don’t think it’s a real blog: The communication here is all one-way; there’s no interactivity, no way for a community to grow around this “blog.” This is not a blog, but rather a photo of a blog. It also seems to me to be a missed opportunity. [as blogged]

Rick Bruner: It’s an interesting, if contentious discussion as to what exactly is a blog. Frankly, when I first discovered this movie “blog,” I only glanced at it, and at first glace it appeared to pass the test. Now that I look at it more closely, however, I’d agree it’s more of a general website feature cashing in on the buzz of blogs than a genuine blog.

The biggest problem with it … is that it’s not really written by Cronenberg, although the blurb at the top of the page says that “Cronenberg shares his thoughts” (albeit via video clips, it seems). Reading the posts, references to Cronenberg are in the third person, so it’s obvious he’s not writing the posts.

I would take exception, however, to Toby’s objections. RSS, comments and trackbacks are all optional features. True, anyone not using RSS on a blog is stupid (unless someone wants to suggest a good reason not to), but I would hardly say that RSS is a definitional feature of a blog. Ditto comments and trackbacks, both of which can be a liability more than a benefit, particularly until someone really fixes the comment/trackback spam issues.

I’ve turned off trackbacks on several of my blogs because the spam was so bad, and using TypeKey has all but killed legit comments on my blogs where I use it, because that’s such a kludgy fix. Also, for really popular blogs, moderating comments for flamewars and the like is all-but a full-time job. Instapundit doesn’t have comments, and Gawker sites only recently implemented them, but to a closed community of elite readers. Are those not blogs? Not to mention, are you liable if someone slanders a company on your blog’s comment thread? I don’t know the answer to that.

Another feature the Cronenberg “blog” lacks is permalinks. Again, whether that’s definitional or not I think is an open discussion, but I’d say permalinks are more essential than comments, trackbacks or RSS. If you can’t even point to an individual post, you’re not really part of the conversation.

Toby Bloomberg: Good comments Rick; this topic would make a very lively discussion. I still maintain the heart of a blog is its ability to create community which can only be established with the ability to have a dialogue. Turning comments/trackbacks off becomes a monologue that turns the blog into an online newsletter. We need more words for what we’re morphing into!

Tris Hussey: Although I am loathe to dive into the whole what is a blog and character blog debate, I’m with Toby …comments and trackbacks are absolutely essential to any site calls itself a blog. RSS, well it should have, but I wouldn’t actually non-blog it for a lack of those.

Rick Bruner: Blog is short for “weblog” as in journal. Not forum. We have had bulletin boards forever online. What makes blogs different from BBSs
and forums is that they have a central editorial voice. So long as you have permalinks, other bloggers can engage you in dialog on their own blogs.

Are you saying Instapundit is not a blog? MarketingVox? MightyGirl? PaidContent? Romenesko? None have comments. (I’m sure I could find more; that was a quick search.)

Rick Bruner: One thing I’m sure we can all agree on is that “blog” does NOT mean blog post. It drives me crazy when people use “blog” this way, but novices do all the time. For example, in this Bloomberg News item on the Weblogs Inc. acquisition, the story says that Weblogs Inc has 85 “sites” and “publishes about 1,000 blogs a week.” Grrr.

Fabulous insight from a very smart group of people on the cutting edge. And now it’s time for me to come clean with my own opinion on Cronenberg’s weblog effort too.

To do that, I have to admit that my original working title for this discussion was going to be Behind the scenes with the blogging police because it had struck me quite forcefully how much of the early discussion seemed to be the purist “if it doesn’t have feature X it can’t be a blog”, but I was pleased by how it evolved into a much more interesting round-table about what really makes a weblog a compelling medium for communication.

Interestingly, none of us talked about the film community, talked about whether the History of Violence “blog” actually promoted the film or even enlightened any of us regarding the topic of the movie itself. If Mr. Cronenberg called me up and asked what I’d advise, I would have to say that blogging the production of a movie would be darn compelling, particularly interviews with gaffers, special effects people, set decorators, the script writer, and, of course, the lead actors and director, anything to let us get into the production of the film. Something deeper and more compelling than the banal “Making Of” advertisements that are the latest vogue in Hollywood.

The opportunity of blogging is to establish a dialog with your community, whether you’re a film director, an actor, or even a market communications strategist. And you cannot possibly have a dialog if you don’t allow some sort of comments. Does it mean that a site without comments is, perforce, not a blog? No, but it does mean that the opportunity is being missed.

Personally I don’t care about “permalinks” or “trackbacks” or any of those ephemera that are so near and dear to the blogger world. For techie geeks these kind of intertwined technologies are intellectually interesting, but to the average business person, to the typical blogger, they’re just more computer Greek and safely ignored.

An RSS feed, however, is something that, while not required, is just a smart addition to any site. Legitimate (see, there’s my bias coming through) blogging tools automatically produce an RSS feed making it a complete no-brainer for business bloggers. To not have one suggests that they’re not using a weblog system and aren’t interested in having people subscribe to their articles.

But the most important question is: do I want to go see the movie, having read the blog and seen the trailer?

Wait! Quick, go watch the trailer and come back.

Okay. What did you think? A pretty interesting plot line and a film that might be worth seeing in the theater. But does the blog convey the curious and thought-provoking story line? Does it make you want to go see the film or, at least, make you feel like you have some insight on what director David Cronenberg was thinking as he put the movie together?

Ultimately, I think that blogging is a toolkit for better and more engaging communications with your marketplace, your customers, your community. To use it as a broadcast-only “bully pulpit” might arguably be true to the original spirit of weblogs as diaries, but completely misses the potential for the blog to be something more, something much more, to the marketplace and to the world of ideas. And that, Mr. Cronenberg, is an unforgivable gaffe in your own marketing efforts for this movie.

Years and years ago I worked with the team that produced a very slick little downloadable application called Gator. Gator would watch what Web sites you visited and pop up contextually relevant adverts and coupons in its own window, along with easy form auto-fill and a digital “wallet” for payment information. Gator was vilified by the online community and paraded about as the ultimate triumph of commerce over information, of the evils of capitalism crushing the eager egalitarianism of the mythical “open network”.

Gator, the company, still exists today, and still garners controversy, albeit under its new moniker of Claria Corporation and Gator, the application, has spawned two progeny, Gator Wallet and Dash Bar.

Today my colleagues at LinkedIn told me about a new system, LinkedIn JobsInsider, and rather to my surprise it’s another standalone app that keeps track of where you surf and pops up useful information based on what you’re viewing in your Web browser.

At this point in the evolution of the Web, though, we don’t even think about these tracking applications. The Alexa toolbar, the Google toolbar, the Yahoo toolbar, etc. etc., all dutifully track where you go and report back that information to a central server, and far from people being upset by that violation of privacy, most are eager to download and install one or more of these toolbars on their computer.

LinkedIn JobsInsider is actually quite brilliant and worth a quick explanation, before I go back to the main theme here of software that tracks your surfing. I asked Konstantin Guericke about this new system and here’s his explanation, a day in advance of their demo at Web 2.0 in New York:

“The LinkedIn JobsInsider works with Monster, CareerBuilder, HotJobs, Craigslist and Dice. We noticed that those of our users who are currently looking for a position (between 5-10% of our membership) tended to flip back and forth between LinkedIn and these job boards. They would look for jobs on the major jobs destination sites, but then didn’t bother to apply there since the chances of landing a job without a referral are about as high as a chimp writing the next great American novel. Well, maybe a bit better, but the reality is that it’s really helpful to speak with people at the companies where you are applying, and you are unlikely to find people willing to help you if you just Google them.

“However, when you have the LinkedIn JobsInsider installed (and it takes no screen real estate unless you are on a job board) and look at a job, then it automatically fires off a search to find out if any of your contacts know people at the company that is posting the job.

“Even better, it narrows the results down to those people working at the location where the job is posted and who have indicated they are willing to help people land jobs at their company. With any luck, the person you contact will not only provide you with some good insights into the company’s culture, prospects and hiring process, but also pass on your resume to the hiring manager.”

I think that’s a brilliant intersection of professional online networking and the ingredients that produce a sucessful job search and would like to congratulate LinkedIn on this innovation.

But isn’t it doing the same basic thing that Gator did all those years ago? Isn’t it yet another application that watches what we’re doing, keeps track of the sites we visit and what we view on those sites, then does “something useful” on our behalf?

If I visit a site with the Google toolbar installed, I can instantly see its Google PageRank, a rough but interesting indicator of the relative importance of the site on the Internet. Another toolbar includes Alexa ranking numbers, offering a similar insight and letting me distinguish popular sites from new, unpopular sites.

So what exactly is still upsetting to the people who don’t like Claria’s tracking application? What differentiates a useful, valuable application like LinkedIn JobsInsider from a heinous piece of malware like a spyware application?

Perhaps it’s all in the definition of “something useful” in my earlier comment, after all. Surely something useful is measured on a continuum that inevitably varies for different people. Some are happy to report back information in return for discount codes, coupons, and highly targeted advertising that helps them find the best bargains possible, while others hate the very idea and wouldn’t install and enable a third-party toolbar if you paid them.

Yet in a lot of ways, it was the “reporting back to the mother ship” nature of Gator that caused so much controversy when it first appeared on the scene, a characteristic that is so pervasive now that we are blasé about it and don’t even worry that various companies have the (theoretical, at least) ability to track our every mouse click.

After all these years of Web evolution, after the breathless hype about combining existing technologies in new ways that goes by the moniker of “Web 2.0”, everyone’s just starting to get what I believe the Gator folk figured out a long time ago: tracking what sites I visit and utilizing that data in real time enhances my experience.

LinkedIn had another announcement at the Web 2.0 conference too, focused on a new partnership with America Online. Please read Alex de Carvalho’s cogent analysis for more details.

Welcome to the interesting world of business blogging, BSmith4664. I’ve had a chance to read your first posting to the Quickbooks Team Blog, entitled View from the General Manager and would like to offer up a few thoughts and pointers…

First off, whether you’re an executive or using a spade in the trenches, I do think that it’s quite helpful to tell us who you are. “BSmith4664” sounds a lot more like a Hotmail or AOL address than the General Manager of the Quickbooks team, doesn’t it? I realize that 60 seconds with Google reveals that you’re “Brad Smith” and that Intuit’s CEO Steve Bennett has said “We’ve been searching externally for a while and determined that Brad Smith is the best person – inside or outside Intuit – for the QuickBooks leadership role. He’s proven his ability to lead a team to win decisively in an intensely competitive environment.”

Very impressive. But why make me do the work?

A good metaphor for business blogging might well be having five minutes in front of a professional networking group or conference roundtable. Certainly your name, your title, your responsibilities, some comment that indicates you’re paying attention to the discussion and the interaction style that’s become the norm in the group, and so on. Bonus points for something amusing about yourself.

Since we aren’t in the same room, however, I’d really like to see a picture of you here, as part of your introduction, Brad. It really further helps personalize the weblog and helps us establish a foundation of trust for our future discussions. You can see my picture on this page, for example. Now you know what I look like. Something to think about.

Second, I like Quickbooks and your company. I like that you’ve quite successfully held off many competitive threats in the last decade, even from the 800 pound gorilla. You’ve got the industry leading product and produce something that thousands of business people use every day. So where’s the pizzaz, the visual design, the immediate visual feedback that you’re a leader in this marketspace? Surely your team could shanghai a graphic designer from elsewhere in the firm to help make your weblog more visually interesting?

In fact, there’s danger in having it be too bland: it doesn’t give me any confidence that you really are the Quickbooks team and so you lose out on the potential credibility boost that can’t but help you with your blogging mission.

Another point: you have a long, thoughtful article, but you aren’t offering me any visual cues to help navigate the material. You’ll do much better to have a few hyperlinks to other Web sites and even use bold and italics for some visual variety. I realize that there’s a niggling anxiety about pointing to a third-party Web site that isn’t vetted by legal, but if you’re going to be a business blogger, you need to take the plunge and point to other sites. You can always sneak in a disclaimer if you feel you must, but it’s widely accepted that someone pointing to another site doesn’t imply that they’re related in any manner.

Generously linking to other sites is a very blog-friendly philosophy too, and linking to other bloggers will frequently cause them to link back to you and perhaps even help you gain visibility in your target community. It’s certainly a ‘best practice’ for business blogging.

I also have a strong preference for long weblog articles, but expect that some people will shortly be complaining that frequent, short entries, even as short as a sentence or two, are the preferred style for the blogosphere. Ptoi on that. Write what you feel most comfortable writing!

Finally, I’m intrigued by your comment about the upcoming QuickBooks 2006 release. Trickling out feature lists, screen shots, and general tales of beta testing feedback and user stories (and testimonials) would be a splendid use of this weblog, and could also help increase product visibility further.

Again, welcome to the world of business blogging, Brad. Stay in touch.

David Cortriss of Revenue magazine recently interviewed me about the Streamlined Sales and Use Tax Agreement, a project that intends to make it easier to calculate sales tax in various venues, including online. While it’s not news that people are trying to simplify pieces of our incredibly byzantine tax codes, it’s worth noting that the Streamlined Sales Tax agreement is already winding its way through quite a few state legislatures.

David’s question to me about the Streamlined Sales Tax has led me to reconsider one of the sacred cows of the Internet, taxation of Internet purchases.

In a nutshell, I believe that it’s high time for us to reconsider the Internet Sales Tax with the triple whammy of the war in Iraq and the widespread devastation left in the wake of hurricanes Katrina and Rita. But there are even more important reasons why it’s time for us to enact taxation of Internet purchases…

Let me start by quoting myself, from the interview:

Q: Are Internet taxes a good thing or a bad thing? What will the overall impact be? Who benefits and who loses?

A: I’d like to see Internet taxes, actually. At this point in the evolution of the Web and online shopping, it’s hard to truly justify that online companies need special advantages to continue growing. A flat tax, perhaps at the 5% rate, that applied across all in-state and interstate commerce would be the most logical, truly simplifying the tax burden while generating tens of millions of dollars in city, county, state and national revenue.

Who will benefit? All of us. Not only will…

I just bumped into a splendid example of how at least one smart company in the senior healthcare space is monitoring the world of blogs and closing the loop with customer commentary.

My friend and colleague Jeff Miller runs the Senior Safety Blog which focuses on issues of dealing with health and safety for, you guessed it, senior “citizens.” While this could be just a litany of products for sale or a depressing series of updates on people who are slowly becoming more infirm and dying, in fact it’s interesting and worth reading for both seniors and those who are involved in senior care.

In a recent posting with the rather wordy title A walking cane helped Edie with her walking problem, wheelchairs helped…how about a Hugo?, one of the contributors on Jeff’s Weblog, Ellen Sacks, wrote:

“I don’t know about you, but I watch those shopping channels. I guess I don’t really watch, I flip the remote to a shopping channel during commercials. So, I’m flipping and I see the perfect walking companion for Edie. The Hugo. The Hugo is a small cart with four wheels, a padded seat with a basket underneath to carry your essentials. It also has hand brakes that lock so it’s steady when you sit down…”

This was posted back on August 24th, and about three weeks later here’s the comment that appeared on the weblog…

Quick: if you’re part of a mailing list and there’s a splendid discussion, a really informative back and forth dialog that transpires, can you copy and paste both sides of the discussion on your weblog without requesting permission?

This very topic arose on the LinkedIn Bloggers mailing list — a list that has some minimal member requirements and closed list archive — and generated what I thought was a surprisingly wide range of answers.

I spent some time on list trying to clarify my own thoughts on this matter, detailing where I believe it’s acceptable to quote others without permission and when I believe it’s imperative that you seek and receive permission before quoting even a single sentence. I’d like to include my thoughts here on my weblog too, for more general reference purposes and to hopefully spawn some dialog on this topic too.

The discussion started out with the following question…

“I presume everyone agrees that you have a right to post a conversation to a blog entry [where you were one of the participants]. How do you handle the other person’s part of the conversation? Do you ask permission? Do you attribute? Do you notify them?”

Here’s my response…

I’ve been trying to figure out all the mysterious jargon of the blogosphere, and one that’s got me stumped is blogroll. Dave, what’s a blogroll?

I’m with you, it’s amazing how many different bits of jargon have now invaded the world of the Web with the increased popularity of weblogs. Fortunately, blogrolls are pretty easily defined:

A blogroll is a list of other weblogs that a given blogger either subscribes to or recommends.

Pop over to my colleague Debbie Weil’s terrific Blogwrite for CEOs, for example, and down the right column Debbie has a list of “CEO Blogs”, her first blogroll, and then below it (and below her advert) is “Corporate Blogs”, a second blogroll. Then there’s “Other Blog Resources” and “Other Smart Blogs”, for a total of four blogrolls on the same Weblog.

Other bloggers approach blogrolls differently. Pop over to Paul Chaney’s Radiant Marketing Group site and you’ll find his blogroll is called “Recommended Sites”, and it’s, again, on the far right side of the page. Halley Suitt’s Halley’s Comment weblog has two blogrolls, this time on the left side, called “New Blogs” and “Blogs”. VC and blogger Brad Feld’s Feld Thoughts has “Blogs I Read” on the lower left of the page.

There are some tools that are popular for managing blogrolls, notably Blogrolling, but many weblog authors just manage their own as a simple list of hypertext references.

When asked why have a blogroll, most bloggers I know, whether business bloggers or casual, hobbyist bloggers, answer that…

Dave, I’m very excited! Finally, Google’s unveiled its blog search system, called, ingeniously enough Google Blog Search, and I want to learn all about how to use it. You ready to take on that challenge?

I’m also excited about this. Finally, we can sidestep slow and primitive RSS and Weblog search engines like Technorati and Feedster and instead tap into the amazing speed that is the underlying Google technology.

However, it’s still Google, so it’s still leaning on the complex side. Let’s have a look…

First off, basic searches are easy enough. Want to see where I’m mentioned in the blogosphere? Search for “Dave Taylor”: you can obviously make the appropriate tweaks to search on your name instead, if you’re so inclined. Want to see what parenting weblogs are out there? That’s particularly easy now, just search for Parenting. Curious about what the blogosphere is buzzing about Voice Over IP telephones? That’s another easy search: voip.

But this is Google, so now, finally, you can use more sophisticated search patterns too. Instead of just searching for “voip”, let’s try a more sophisticated OR search

I’m usually quite a proponent of LinkedIn, as readers of my weblog are aware, but I find it quite fascinating that the desire to have the LinkedIn site ranked highly in an influential BusinessWeek Best Of the Web poll is showing a bit of the seamy underbelly of online networking.

Four times in the past week I’ve received email from one of my LinkedIn connections asking me to pop over to the BusinessWeek poll and vote for LinkedIn to help it rank well in the results. The intention is splendid and the slightly questionable tactic of trying to either (depending on your viewpoint) encourage voter turnout or stuff the virtual ballot boxes is no different from many of the other nominated sites posting “vote for us” articles too (even Om Malik, one of my touchstones for professionalism in the business blog space, couldn’t resist when he added “Vote for GigaOM” to his busy weblog).

Ordinarily, receiving four messages like this in the never-ending tsunami of email I get every day wouldn’t be worthy of note, but I find it quite fascinating that…

After all the discussion about the lawsuit and legal liability that bloggers apparently have with the comments on weblogs (see my earlier piece on Blogger sued for comments on his weblog), I’ve decided to add a small disclaimer to this blog to help protect myself in case anything untoward might occur in the future.  Should you add one on your site? Maybe, maybe not.

To get the full scoop, and to help write a disclaimer that will actually protect me against potential lawsuits, I’ve asked attorney Daniel Perry to help with this particular entry. My prose is in black, Daniel’s is presented in blue.

Here’s my first stab at a disclaimer:

Daniel responds: First, a disclaimer: there is no such thing as a perfect blog comment disclaimer. Each blog may require its own individualized disclaimer. Moreover, a comment disclaimer should be a living part of your blog which might change as we learn how these disclaimers are treated by courts. 

Fortunately, there is a wide body of caselaw and law review articles concerning website disclaimers. It is not necessary to reinvent the wheel. Caution is appropriate when applying those case precedents, however. Blogging is…

Rick Bruner, a trusted business colleague, emailed me a pointer to an article on blog search engines published by the Wall Street Journal, with a caveat that the link would only work for seven days before the article was pushed into the paid member archive. I’m a paid subscriber, so I don’t much worry about that, but he also told me something I hadn’t realized that won’t mean anything to you unless you too are a subscriber: the “email this story” URL is actually a publicly accessible link.

When I cite the Wall Street Journal, I include the link to the story itself — not using the “email this story” URL — and simply add [members only] or [pay site] or similar.

Two ways to link to the story, but both have their limitations, problems that I really encountered when researching business articles recently for my upcoming IBM trade business book (whose name might well be changing, so I won’t list it her). Bloggers like to talk about permalinks, permanent page addresses that will always point to the article referenced, but I’d like to ask a different question: how do we link to ephemeral items or information behind a wall of one sort or another?

here’s something dissatisfying about linking to a temporary URL with a note like [note: this link will only work until 17 September, 2006] somehow. It seems to violate the whole spirit of the Web, somehow, particularly as a business communications vehicle.

Consider the reference section for my upcoming book: one of the unstated assumptions of any citation is that unless it’s a “personal interview”, someone else can always dig up the article, story, book or blog entry cited and see if they agree with the conclusions and derived facts and quotes in the new material. In academia especially, information is expected to be permanent.

But what happens if I have some outrageous claim about…

I had lunch today with an interesting chap who is between gigs (a fancy way of saying “unemployed”, I know) and we started talking about his deep and extensive knowledge of the medical and pharmacological industries from a marketing and business development perspective, and how it overlapped with his background and legal training too.

When he got around to explaining how he’s trying to find a job but hasn’t landed anything yet, I wasn’t surprised when he asked for my suggestions on how he might leverage the blogging phenomenon to help generate both visibility in his target marketplace and some income.

What stuck in my head, however, was that his background gave him a unique ability to tell an interesting story. After all, isn’t the best marketing and, yes, even public relations, fundamentally all a throwback to our days around the campfire trying to influence and sway people based on our ability to communicate in a more interesting and engaging manner than the next person?

Then I thought about how some work I’m doing with entrepreneur and gadabout Jeff Miller on his Senior Safety Blog really boils down to the same thing: while his company may sell emergency notification devices for the elderly and infirm, it’s the stories that…

If you’ve been reading my Intuitive Life Business Blog, you already know that it’s become a hotbed of discussion about the lawsuit that Traffic Power sent to Aaron Wall, and its implications about our responsibility as bloggers for comments left on our blog. That article is Aaron Wall sued over comments on his weblog. As it happens, I also just wrote about how adding comments on other people’s blogs should be a cornerstone of your own blogging strategy too: How do i get more traffic to my blog?

But lawyer Daniel Perry has the best testimonial I’ve seen yet about why commenting on other blogs is such a good strategy. In less than a week he went from adding comments on my blog to being quoted in the Wall Street Journal.

I’ll let Daniel explain what happened…

Dave, I have an executive placement, coaching and consulting business in the Chicago market. In an effort to market and brand myself better I have launched a blog, but I’m unclear what I need to do to get more traffic and exposure to my blog. What do you suggest?

Let me spend some time answering your question because it’s one of the top queries I get from other bloggers, particularly after listening to one of my BlogSmart! workshops…

First off, the core answer is actually pretty easy: the best way to generate traffic for your blog is to reframe the question. Instead of asking “how to I get more visitors to my site?” you need to be asking the question “how do I become part of the blogosphere discussion?”

Bloggers that don’t get this crucial point end up being tiny islands in a very big ocean. Some of them can gain a readership by being phenomenally good or astonishingly prolific, but that’s a very tough path to travel and for most ends up being the blogosphere equivalent of the old Web site complaint of “I’ve built it, but no-one’s come to visit.”

Instead, you need to get involved! Regardless of your topic, I bet there are…