Recently I was meeting with a couple of blogging clients and one asked me, “How do I get the most out of Technorati?”

I thought that was a great question, and worthy of a few posts. Although I’m sure there’s more than what I’ve written below, this is a good start for any one who’s interested in driving more traffic to their blog and finding like minded business bloggers. I’ve even included a couple of how-to movies.

• Technorati: Business Blogging Tools for You
• Technorati: How (and Why) to Claim Your Blog
• Create a Watchlist at Technorati (movie)
• Tagging Your Posts in TypePad (movie)

If you have any Technorati specific questions or issues leave a comment below, and I’ll try and add them to this list.

Malcolm Gladwell, author Blink and The Tipping Point, (two of my favorite books that I read last year,) has started blogging over at http://gladwell.typepad.com.

This only makes sense, since Gladwell has long been providing bloggers, especially business bloggers, with fodder for their posts.

What I love about Gladwell (and Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner and Seth Godin) is how he makes you reflect on your own world view. You won’t always agree with these guys, but it does cause you to examine your own preconceptions that you might be holding onto out of sheer laziness.

BTW, I had never visited Gladwell’s home page before today, but I’m pretty sure he stole the idea from us.

Welcome to the blogosphere, Malcolm. Glad to hear your voice in the first person!

If you’ve been in this industry as long as I have (and what’s that? five minutes?) you’re probably dead tired of mainstream media articles that either promote blogging as the next coming or dismissing it as so five minutes ago.

Jason Fry of the Wall Street Journal has an article today called “Blog Epitaphs? Get Me Rewrite!” (Read it quickly; this link will expire faster than a Mission Impossible recording.)

One of my favorite lines:

My bet: Within a couple of years blogging will be a term thrown around loosely — and sometimes inaccurately — to describe a style and rhythm of writing, as well as the tools to publish that writing.

Although I’ve been saying for a while that blogs will probably become invisible in the future, I prefer Fry’s prediction that it will be a “style and rhythm of writing;” it makes it sound like jazz: full of improvisation and promise.

Many blogs offer email subscriptions to their blog, usually via Feedblitz or Bloglet. As I mentioned in a previous post, now AWeber, more well-known for its autoresponder service, is also offering an email broadcasts of RSS feeds.

What I like about service is how customizable it is; you can create an HTML template that complements your blog design. AWeber also offers a series of predesigned templates for you to choose from. HTML and plain text versions are automatically generated. Confirmed opt-in is required, so you’ll only be sending these emails to people who really want them, keeping you safe from charges of spamming.

There’s no additional fee for this service for people who are already AWeber members, but membership is $20/mo. (AWeber memberships also offer powerful autoresponders and the ability to publish email newsletters.)

I especially like the flexibilty you have with the layout and the ability to add messages to outgoing emails. In the example above, you can see that I created links to articles on my Web site. Through the admin system these messages are easy to change, even if you’re not comfortable with HTML. There is also the ability to track clickthrus and view other reports. You can also choose how many posts will appear in a single email broadcast.
Two things I don’t like about the current AWeber offering, however:

1. You can’t choose between full text and excerpt; the system automatically limits your email with a “Read more…” link.
2. Images and links you may have created in your feed do not carry into the email version.

Tom Kulzer, the CEO and Founder of AWeber says both these features are being considered for a future release.

One other thing that may work against AWeber is the fact that Feedblitz now offers many if not all of these feed related services, plus others, for just $4.95/mo. Although I haven’t yet tested Feedblitz, it appears to offer a compelling alternative.

Although I’m not much of a yachtsman myself, living on the coast of Maine I have a lot of friends who own boats, and I’ve learned a lot through osmosis.

One thing I’ve learned is that they can’t get enough of pictures of boats; they refer to it as “boat porn.” It takes an especially tight hold of them when they’re ready to buy their next boat.

Which is why I think it’s such a great idea that Sabre Yachts, (a client of mine,) is telling the story of the construction of a yacht in the Sabre Yachts Blog.

Bentley Collins, their resident blogger, has been taking photos from the factory floor and telling the story of one Sabreline 34 Hard Top Express. (Unlike humans, boat builders usually know the type of boat beforehand.) It’s only two posts in, but Bentley says he’ll blog this until the boat leaves the factory. (Maybe we can then track the boat to its eventual owner and convince him/her to continue blogging!)
Having taken a factory tour, I have to say it’s quite a cool adventure.

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.

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.

For the past couple of days I’ve been playing around with a trial version of Blogbeat, a real time blog traffic reporting system. So far I’ve been really impressed.

You can drill down to find out what your most popular posts are, how people found them (search engines, other sites, etc.), and track your search page rank.

Unlike Google Analytics (assuming you were one of the few who signed up for Google Analytics in the first five minutes before they shut the door), Blogbeat provides the information in real time. It took me about 5 minutes to install the script on my blog and minutes later I was seeing the traffic reports.

Once you’ve logged in Blogbeat also offers some common results in simple language: “which posts were most popular today?” and “who sent the most visitors my way?” are a couple. Finding out what search terms are attracting visitors is also a click away.
You can also even subscribe to the reports via RSS.

My only complaint is about the user interface. The information is easy to understand, but the font is a little big (too much scrolling required) and there are too many words in different shades of light grey. Also, it wasn’t always clear what report I was going to see when I drilled down a certain path.

If you’re looking for inexpensive traffic report solution ($6/mo for up to 500,000 monthly page views) and you want something with more cowbell–don’t ask–Blogbeat may be just what you’re looking for.

One benefit–although not the only one–of blogging is increased “findability” of your business through search engines.

I’m a big fan of writing quality content on a regular basis to make your Web site or blog relevant for appropriate searches. I’m not a big fan of continually tweaking your pages or copy to take advantage of any new “hack” that some black-hatted SEO expert may have discovered. It’s a short-term gain for a long-term loss in my opinion.

Still, it’s important to understand what search engines find important, so you can get the most out of the content you have on your Web site or blog.

Jason OConnor has written a great article on the new Google update–code named Jagger–that explains some of the changes he’s observed over the past few months.

The Boston Globe reports on a new service called Gather that plans on organizing content from all types of writers into a coherent collection online. Plus, they’re going to pay writers based on advertising that appears with the content. (Back to the eyeballs = profitability model?)
Although similar sites exist (About, Technorati, Bloglines, Topix, Squidoo, and Digg are listed by the Globe in varying degrees of correctness), the site does have the backing of Jim Manzi, former chief executive of Lotus Development Corp. and Bill Bradley, who played basketball for the Knicks before moving to Washington, D.C.

Only time will tell whether Gather becomes a venue for bloggers to “go pro”, but it is establishing its Web 2.0 cred by wearing its “beta” tag proudly by its logo.

Announced during MacWorld earlier this week was the release of iWeb, a new part of iLife ’06.

iWeb includes blogging software and integrates seemlessly into the rest of iLife, which includes iPhoto, iMovie and iTunes, among iOthers. By using the rest of the suite, bloggers will have drag-and-drop options, such as dragging an iTunes playlist into the blog. Of course, links will be automatically created to the iTunes music store where visitors can purchase said songs.

Although the software seems to be targeted to personal bloggers rather than business bloggers, a lot of creative types such as ad agencies are likely to give this platform a try, giving it a certain inevitable buzz.

Will iWeb impact the blogosphere? I don’t know…did the iPod change the way we listen to music?

I got this through Wired, which had an opportunity to put iWeb through its paces.

Guy Kawasaki, start-up guru and Mac enthusiast, has started his own blog called Let the Good Times Roll.

The blog offers good info for start-ups, including recent posts The Art of Evangelism and The Top Ten Lies of Venture Capitalists.

Mac fans like myself will also find interesting items, such as Guy’s take on Steve Jobs latest keynote and other Mac-centric posts.

I do wish he included trackbacks and categorized his posts, but you can’t have it all.

We’ve all been there…staring at the empty sandbox that is our future blog post, with not an idea in sight.

Jonathan Kranz feels our pain and has written an article Five Surefire Content Ideas (When Your Blog is Drawing Blanks) at MarketingProfs.com aimed to help us.

Although most of the points are common sense, common sense isn’t always common practice. (Stephen Covey.) Plus, Jonathan Kranz is a hell of a copywriter. He throws in some "blog bonus points" for each item that offer an interesting twist on a common practice.

This article is mostly about creating content, but doesn’t specifically speak to what content will generate the most traffic. While your mileage may vary, I’ve discovered that how-to articles, posts that answer common questions in your field, and exposing scams generate the most traffic.

What surefire content ideas do you have to offer? What type of posts generate the most feedback and traffic at your blog?

Once you’ve been blogging for a while the inevitable happens; your vacation time arrives.

For those of you who have recently started your own business you may now be saying, "what is this word ‘vacation’ that you use?" Just stick with me.

How do you handle this time off in terms of your blog? Darren Rowse of ProBlogger has amazingly come up with seven different things you can do with your blog while on vacation.

I myself have done both #1 (give it a rest) and #2 (pre-blog.) What’s your choice?

AWeber is a company/service that I usually associate with autoresponders and email newsletters. We use them to deliver our 7 Days to Success e-courses. (The last "s" may be superfluous; I’ve yet to write a second one.)

That’s why I was surprised and excited to receive an email from them announcing their newest service: AWeber Feed Broadcaster. This new service allows you to:

• generate HTML/plain text emails from your RSS feed,
• choose from several attractive templates (beauty is in the eye of the beholder) or create your own,
• decide how many posts will appear in each newsletter,
• add specific marketing messages to your email newsletters, and
• add the signup box to your blog.

Why would you want an email newsletter generated from your RSS feed?

Well, most people still don’t "get" RSS feeds, but everyone "gets"
email and email newsletters. Plus, there’s no real downside. Current belief is to deliver your message in as many ways possible to
reach the customer in a way they want. (Blogs, podcasts, TiVo, etc.) If people want to read your blog
delivered via email, why not let them?

Perhaps in a couple of years (or months) this will seem superfluous,
but for right now it can greatly extend your marketing reach.

While there are certainly other services that generate emails based on your blog posts (currently flyte’s web marketing blog uses Bloglet), I’ve yet to see one that looks so sophisticated.

I haven’t yet trialed the product, so this isn’t a review, just a
head’s up. The service is included in your regular paid AWeber account,
so if you don’t use AWeber yet, you’ll need to sign up.

If you’re looking for additional information there’s a great video tutorial here, and an F.A.Q.

When I’ve had a few weeks of experience with AWeber Feed Broadcaster I’ll post a review.

Can you save a cartoon character?

One ex-employee of Ask Jeeves intends to find out. He’s launched the Save Jeeves blog to rally support for the titular butler.

Since Barry Diller’s IAC acquired Ask Jeeves there has been a lot of talk about dropping the butler as part of rebranding the search engine as Ask.com. Our blogger wants none of it, and is taking his fight online.

Is this a legitimate beef or some sort of crazy marketing scheme–think "New Coke"–to rally Jeeves’ users and draw more attention to Ask.com? (The ex-employee is so far anonymous.)

Whatever the answer, expect more blogs from current and ex-employees looking to use the medium as a bullhorn to get their voices heard in the boardroom.

Fast Company blogs about an interesting blogging experiment that does a twist on reality TV shows like The Restaurant.

With the help of the firm Transformist and a team of experts, Alane Ebner sets out to develop an architecture business in 10 weeks. Best of all, she and her team blog about their progress at Alane By Day.

While most of us who start a business don’t have the benefit of having
a team of experts mentoring us gratis, there’s still a lot to learn
from the day-to-day activities chronicled at Alane By Day.

Things like 13 strategies to start your own firm, how to develop an identity, or finding your customers
can be beneficial to any one who’s just beginning a business…or
anyone who’s running an established business, for that matter.

With
80% of new businesses failing in the first year, this blog makes for
interesting reading. Although other blogs have chronicled the start-up
phase, often there wasn’t a team of experts working to make the company
a success. Anyone who learns business lessons from The Apprentice might
be interested in picking up the thread in Alane By Day.

As of this writing, the blog is already at day 13 of 82, so there’s a number of posts to catch up on.

When is a blog not a blog?

When it’s a faux blog. Recently, two (or more) marketing hacks from Hollywood decided to cash in on the buzz on blogs to manufacture blogs around new releases. Perhaps they created these blogs to add "authenticity" to the campaign.

In other words, if you can’t be sincere, perhaps you can fake it.

Exhibit A: A History of Violence Blog by David Cronenberg
As my friend Josh Hallett describes it, this is more of a journal than a blog. There’s no comments, no RSS, no trackback, no posting dates.

And
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." (And
he comes across as surprising mundane for someone who has directed The Fly, Scanners, and Crash. But I digress.)

Is it interesting? If you find David Cronenberg interesting, perhaps. If you like watching videos of him getting into a Porsche, 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.

Exhibit B: Miles’ Blog (Surface)
This
is a "blog" for a new show on NBC called "Surface" that I have to admit
I haven’t seen. It’s written from the perspective of Miles, apparently
a pre-pubescent character who–from what I can tell–is documenting the
care and feeding of Nim, a sea creature he’s raising.

I’m torn
on this. On one hand I see an interesting way to market a show by
having material about the show available outside the confines of a TV
set or a program schedule. It would be great to see updates during the
week that document things that haven’t been on the show, but affect or
are referenced by later events within the show. It would make this blog
(and marketing campaign) truly viral.

On the other hand, this
"blog" is completely lacking in authenticity. (No comments, trackbacks,
or RSS, either.) The writing comes across as a Harvard grad trying to
write like a over-educated 15-year old, not like the character from the
picture. (Again, having not watched the show, perhaps this character
has graduated from Harvard with classmate Doogie Howser, M.D.)

If you are going to do a character blog, why not allow at least moderated comments and trackbacks?
Maybe you could include comments from fans who are also "in character."
It would give an opportunity for a community to build around this
fledgling show, and to develop a passionate, core audience.

Ultimately, the question becomes "what is a blog?"
Is it posts that include trackbacks, comments, and RSS? Does it include
linking to other blogs? Can it be written by a character, or does it
have to be written by a real person, by that person?

Hollywood
appears to be searching for ways to leverage the popularity of blogs
into their marketing campaign. As a "business blogger" myself, I can’t
fault them for that. However, can the people who bring you sound
stages, CGI and canned laughter create an authentic blogging experience?

Not soon after I posted It’s the End of the Blogosphere As We Know It (And I Feel Fine), I read this article at Wired called Can Bloggers Strike it Rich?

Jason Calacanis, founder of Weblogs, claims his writers make $200 – $3,000 each month. "Think a scuba diver or video-game player making $500 to $1,500 a month writing about scuba diving or video games."

Hmmm…maybe he should read Dr. Del’s article on video game networks.

In any case, read both sides of the story and make up your own mind.

Dr. Del Dhanoa posted an interesting article called The Implosion of the Blogosphere.

In it, he’s not predicting the end of blogging, or really even the blogosphere, but rather the way some bloggers make a living.

He uses the history of the video game networks, i.e., Gamespy, as a way of extrapolating what may happen to blogging networks such as WeblogsInc.com, Gawker Media and the like.

In short, he’s concerned that like video game networks, blogging
networks will accelerate the boom/bust cycle, paying bloggers more and
more money to jump ship, driving up ad rates, until the bottom drops
out. Basically, he’s warning against speculation.

It’s an interesting idea, and the article is well written. I’m currently reading "Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister,"
which is told from the perspective of Cinderella’s sister, and takes
place during the tulip bust that destroyed many fortunes in Holland and
beyond. I think it’s safe to say that whatever the market is,
speculation is a risky business that ends in a zero sum game, or worse.

For me, personally, and for most of the business bloggers out there,
we’re blogging for our business, not for a network. Whether blogging
networks succeed or fail in the long run, the blogosphere and blogging
should continue as long as businesses are interested in connecting with
their prospects and clients.