SEO Book’s Aaron Wall was sued today by Traffic-Power.com for alleged inaccuracies and lies appearing in comments other people have left on his blog. If this case goes to trial, it’ll set an important precedent in the blogging community and the Internet at large, answering a critical question, particularly for business blogs: are the comments others leave on your blog a legal liability?

Some background: Aaron Wall runs SEO Book.com, a site focused on search engine optimization strategies and on selling his smart ebook of the same name. In a discussion venue of that nature, it’s no surprise that community members talk about different SEO firms, positively and negatively, and one company that’s been the frequent recipient of negative comments on Aaron’s blog is Traffic Power.com.

Today Aaron was surprised by a certified letter from a Nevada Attorney’s office notifying him that the parent company of Traffic-Power.com was suing him for the content of his weblog.]

With Aaron’s permission, I reproduce some relevant sections of the notification in question:

“Plaintiff undertakes rigorous and extensive measures to safeguard information about its business. Internet placement optimization is a highly competitive business, and if Plaintiff’s trade secrets are revealed competitors can gain a prejudicially unfair advantage over Plaintiff. Accordingly, Plaintiff’s trade secrets are provided to a limited number of people, only on a need-to-know basis and subject to strict confidentiality agreements.

“An unidentified individual, acting alone or in concert with others, has recently misappropriated and disseminated through web sites Plaintiff’s confidential information. This information could have been obtained only through…

Though I’ve written this article focused on professional networking sites like LinkedIn, it’s exactly the same set of questions you need to consider when you’re thinking about how many sites to include in your blogroll or exchange links with. Read on, you’ll see what I mean…

One of the discussions I’ve been watching with great interest in the greater LinkedIn community and with professional networking sites in general is whether it’s a better strategy to have a small number of quality connections, or a large number of relevant but varied connections.

This discussion is so common, in fact, that some people have started to abbreviate it as QvQ.

But what are the pros and cons of each strategy? Let’s have a look…

First off, like much else in life, the connect / don’t connect decision is one that you have to consider anew for each potential professional connection, regardless of your individual connection criteria. Specifically, even if you decided that you’d only link to very high quality people (that is, people who you have know for at least X years, or worked with on at least Y projects) you’re still placing yourself on a continuum of networking connection restrictions where one extreme is that you won’t connect to anyone and the diametric opposite extreme is that you’ll connect to everyone, their Mom and their dog.

Clearly both of those are pointless strategies, the former because you quite literally don’t have a network at all if you only have a single node, you. It’s the “no man is an island” revisited for the digital age. The latter strategy doesn’t work either because if you have no method of screening potential contacts then you might as well pick up a phone book or randomly dial your telephone hoping to make a good connection.

To understand the relative value of different points on the continuum, then, I think it’s important to understand why you’re networking in the first place…

After my well-received Business Blogging 101 workshop at the Blog Business Summit in San Francisco last week, my strong exhortation to the audience that PR is Dead was the buzz of the Summit. Even publications like the San Jose Mercury News and InfoWorld were talking about it, even though I’m certainly not the first to propose that the traditional job of public relations has been supplanted by the blogosphere.

The most interesting discussion I had on the topic, however, was with Doug Free, Group PR Manager for Microsoft and Lynann Bradbury, Senior VP of Microsoft’s PR agency Waggener Edstrom. To set the scene, Lynann greeted me with “Hi. I’m not dead yet!”

But as we talked about the impact of blogging and, more generally, findability and the online world on traditional public relations, something became very, very clear…

What we agreed upon is that there are two types of public relations firms and that any informed public debate about the impact of the blogosphere and Internet on the profession of public relations must take these into account.

Large companies like Waggener Edstrom offer companies counsel on how to present themselves and their message to the public and their market segment. They are truly focused on, quite literally, public relations. But they’re in the minority.

I contend that there are in fact a significant number of so-called PR Agencies who believe – and their clients believe too – that PR stands for…

This isn’t directly about business blogging, but it’s the kind of posting that begs the question: if you were a blogger at Merck, how would you respond to a blog article of this nature? Also, there’s another observation that some of my fellow business bloggers can make about the dissemination fo infomration in the blogosphere versus the mainstream media, perhaps? In any case, this is just the teaser for the article itself… there’s a lot in the media today about this Merck settlement. How long until it’s got the blogosphere abuzz?

A staggering verdict was found in Angleton, Texas against pharmaceutical conglomerate Merck & Co. when the jury today handed back $24 million in actual damages plus an additional $229 million in exemplary, punitive damages for the widow of former Vioxx patient Robert Ernst.

The background story is that triathlete Robert Ernst had been on the prescription heart drug Vioxx and then died of what the coroner later described as “arrhythmia” or an irregular heartbeat. Ernst’s widow’s attorney argued that Vioxx had led to a heart attack that had caused the arrhythmia, not the direct death.

While Merck voluntarily removed Vioxx from the marketplace last September after studies linked Vioxx to a higher rate of heart attacks and strokes after taking the drug for 18 months, it was too late for thousands of potential victims. Ernst is the first of over 4000 lawsuits alleging injuries from Vioxx.

If this one case produces a verdict of almost $255 million, then even if only 10% of the 4000 cases already filed were settled in favor of the plaintiff, not Merck, it could theoretically cost upwards of…

In addition to my other volunteer efforts to help Global PR Blog Week 2.0 be a valuable discussion and event for both public relations professionals and anyone else interested in the present and future of business blogging and PR blogging, I’m also contributing two articles of note:

Why CEO’s Shouldn’t Blog

Fake Blogs: New Marketing Channel or Really Bad Idea?

I have some thoughtful opinions on both topics, and have already started to draft up notes and some specific points I want to make, but in the spirit of an open dialog, I would like to invite you, my faithful readers, to add your own thoughts on these two topics too!

You are welcome to agree with my position, disagree vehemently, or even just point to weblogs that you think are fascinating or wicked cool examples of the specific topic.

In a week or two I’ll begin pulling my articles together and will hope that I can quote at least a few of you therein (with links to your own sites, if you’d like: indicate as such in your comment if that’s something that appeals to you) either supporting my position CEO blog-wise, or offering a smart perspective on so-called fake blogs.

So…. what do you think about CEO blogs and fake blogs?

Note: to keep things organized and coherent, I’m requesting that you add your comments here: CEO Blogs and Fake Blogs: an open discussion at The Intuitive Life Business Blog. Thanks!

Less than two weeks from today, some of the brightest and most successful business bloggers will be meeting in San Francisco to both share what they’ve learned — good and bad — about business blogging, and to explore future directions for weblogs and how blogging can benefit companies large and small.

Speakers at the Blog Business Summit include DL Byron, Molly Holzschlag, Robert Scoble, Jeffrey Zeldman, Darren Barefoot, Rebecca Blood and Anil Dash. Oh yeah, I (Dave Taylor) will be speaking there too, and debating best practices with Robert Scoble.

If you’re just coming up to speed on business blogging then you already know that reading Blog Business Consulting is a superb way to get involved, but for many people, a more focused workshop is a better strategy. If that describes you, then you’ll be quite interested to learn about the dynamite Business Blogging 101 workshop I’ll be leading on the 16th of August too.

There’s no better way to spend three days learning about weblogs, business blogging, and how to keep track of the blogosphere buzz than to make plans now to attend the Blog Business Summit at the historic Palace Hotel in San Francisco, August 16-19. Register now while there’s still space.

We hope to see you there!

Everyone likes to wax poetic about the million reasons why a business should get into blogging, and why a weblog is the cornerstone of a smart Web site. Heck, even I’m not immune, I’ve been writing – and lecturing – about this for years now.

But sometimes, truth be told, there are businesses that shouldn’t be blogging, and there are people in businesses who shouldn’t be writing entries for the company weblog, and even specific topics that just are not appropriate for a corporate weblog. Let’s have a look, shall we?

First off, let’s agree that the goal of a good business blog is to raise your visibility in your customer community or market segment, to increase your credibility as an expert and to humanize your company and present yourself in the best possible light. Reasonable?

Are you a gardener? You could blog about taking care of gardens, flowers, plants, fertilization, smart techniques for mowing lawns, winterization, etc. A funeral director? Oh, that’s an industry rife with con artists and shady businesses, so talking about funerals and how to ensure that you have the death ceremony you want would be a terrific weblog subject. Maybe you’re the gal who drives the ice cream truck around the neighborhood? Write about children, play, and the changes in our society you can see as you get a unique glimpse into children, parents, and guardians (not to mention children’s manners!)

So, seemingly, there’s not a business you could be in where a blog wouldn’t help you gain visibility and credibility. But there is an assumption in what I’m saying here: that there’s a story and that you can figure out how to tell it online.

Imagine two opticians. One says “I take care of eyes. There’s lots of medical info on eyes out there, so my Web site will be a digital brochure, and that’s good enough for me” while the other says “I get the same questions from every patient, and there’s so much confusing information online, I’m going to try and shed some light on eye care and eye health by writing about it. But not with a newsletter, how 90s!, but with a blog.”

Now, a slight aside: I believe that the future of business is findability, and if your business doesn’t appear when your potential customer looks for you online, you’ll eventually wither and die. Given that, you can guess which optician I think is going to be more successful in 24 months.

Let’s be frank, though. The first optician above should not blog. They aren’t going to be engaged, interesting, or informative, and they’ll find that the exercise of setting up a weblog and having a blank “input box” staring at them each morning will be more than they can handle, and they won’t stick to it and work on their blog for at least six months before they ask “am I getting results?” Better for them not to start at all.

I actually encounter a lot of businesses that have this philosophy, what I call the “let the customer come to me” approach to business. They’ll pay for an 800 number, they’ll print up a newsletter, but the level of their engagement with their market is fairly minimal. Many of them are also hourly professionals — think psychologists, acupuncturists and massage therapists, for example — and their response is “I’m already booked, why would i want more customers?”

If their goal is to fill up their appointment calendar, then they’re right, and they certainly shouldn’t blog or, perhaps, even have a Web site at all.

But what if they could be selling their expertise rather than their hours? What if they could be blogging about their profession and upselling high quality, professional ebooks that cost them time + $500 to produce, and net them $25k annually? That’s a smarter way to look at these professions, isn’t it?

Being completely honest, there are also people who lack coherent writing skills. They may be delightful in person, but put them in front of a computer (or a podcasting mic) and they freeze up, become dreadfully boring, or simply have nothing interesting to say. That’s a real problem, and is one of the rarely mentioned downsides of the entire blogosphere. Put frankly, most bloggers stink as writers. If your company has these sort of communicators, keep ’em far away from your blog! After all, it’s more trouble, more cost and certainly more ineffective to have a boring, dull, tedious blog than to just have a regular old “brochureware” Web site.

Finally, there are specific topics that I believe you shouldn’t blog about, even if you’re the most zealous and enthused of business bloggers. Personnel issues? Customers suing you? Spouse just ran off with someone else? Kids thrown in jail? Have a strong partisan reaction to political news? All of these are topics that should stay far, far away from any sort of business blog. (this isn’t to say that you shouldn’t blog about them, but please, keep it separate. I blog about parenting at The Attachment Parenting Blog, but it’s kept quite separate from my business weblogs The Intuitive Life Business Blog and Ask Dave Taylor, for example)

Some blog experts believe that you should follow the digital version of “let it all hang out”, writing about any and everything that strikes your fancy, but I think they’re wrong. But then again, maybe they aren’t, and maybe I’m wrong!

What do you think?