FCC Chairman
Michael Powell

Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission is now blogging (sort of) at Always-On. (Free registration required.)

Link

New from Weblogs Inc:

• AutoBlog
• BloggingBaby
• Joystiq

(So branding isn’t their strong suit.)

Meanwhile, Weblogs Inc CEO Jason Calacanis has a recent rant titled “What makes a website a blog? (the blog test).” I’m not sure who died and made him king of the bloggers, and, no, I don’t agree with all of his criteria (particularly not about comments — so, I take it Instapundit isn’t a blogger? Or about the lack of an editor — at MarketingVox, editor Tig Tillinghast makes contributors post to draft, but it’s still a blog in my book; and as for frequently linking to other sites, so Salam Pax’s site wasn’t a blog when he was just writing about life in Baghdad before and during the invasion?). Whatever. I think trying to define a blog is a waste of time. You know it when you see it, that’s about it.

What I would recommend to Jason, however, for his new blogs to make them more blog-like and credible would be some personal identity. What really makes a blog a blog, if you ask me, is some kind of relationship readers have with the writer. Looking at these new Weblogs Inc blogs, however, I see no indication of who the authors are. They’re not pseudononymous, they’re just anonymous.

We don’t need a set of rules, just self-policing (like this post, or Jason’s other excellent post calling Drew Curtis to account for payola) and commonly accepted best practices.

Good luck with the new, blogs, though. They look otherwise interesting.

UPDATE:
Here is a definition of what makes a (good) blog that I prefer.

Jason Calacanis, publisher of the blog network Weblogs Inc, accuses Fark.com’s Drew Curtis of selling out the blogosphere by accepting payment for the links on Fark, which would otherwise seem to be pure editorial. Calacanis says he was told by a Fark ad sales person that editorial links cost $300-400.

This story broke a few days ago and I’ve been meaning to get to it earlier, but I’ve been busy. I’ve also been chewing over my reaction to it. On the one hand, I like Fark and I realize that he deserves some kind of revenue for the wonderful resource he’s created, and I’m sure that if he labeled the ads as ads, users would inevitably be less inclined to click on them.

But bottom line is Jason is right. THis kind of blatant editorial fraud is nothing but trouble for the blogosphere, not to mention for Fark itself at this point. AltaVista learned that lesson years ago when it pioneered the idea of selling link advertising on its search engine but without labeling them. Big user brouhaha.

Moreover, I might not have gotten so annoyed about it till I read in the Wired piece picking up on the whole controversy that Drew is claiming that Calacanis’s experience was “an isolated incident.” Now, I can’t prove this (unless push were to come to shove, and then I’d make a call), but trust me, that’s bullshit. I know a couple of viral marketing media buyers who told me more than a year ago that they were buying links on Fark, and other sites like it, too. This is no issolated incident, it’s a frickin’ industry niche.

And that is bad. Bad for blogging. What’s worse, is you have Jon Fine, an Advertising Age reporter, telling Wired that mixing advertising and editorial is not really a big deal: “Journalistic watchdogs get really (excited) about it,” he said. “But does the public give a shit? I don’t think so.”

That’s just great. As if the public doesn’t hate advertising and distrust media companies enough already.

TheJasonCalacanisWeblog: Fark.com sells their editorial

Michael Sippey

Michael Sippey, formerly a general manager at email marketing services firm Quris, announced last week that he is joining the staff of Six Apart, makers of blog publishing tools Movable Type and TypePad, in the role of VP of product.

I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Michael for about four years or so, the amount of time I’ve been working with Quris as my client for market research. I hadn’t even heard th word “blog” back then, but Michael had. At his site Stating the Obvious, he began blogging back in 1995. Indeed, he’s one of the original bloggers. (More recently, he blogs at Sippy.com.) He’s also an MBA from the Haas School of Business with more than a decade’s experience as a strategic marketing consultant; having worked with him, I know he’s one smart cookie.

I’m very pleased for Michael and also for Six Apart. Yes — disclosure — I use Six Apart products, including TypePad for this blog, and I am friendly acquaintances with a couple of their other staff members (Mena and Anil), but I can say objectively I’m quite impressed with the management team they’ve put together in recent months: Anil Dash, an A-List blogger and formerly a top web tech guy at the Village Voice, Andrew Anker, an investment and business management expert who co-founded and served as CEO of Wired Digital, and 6A’s new CEO Barak Berkowitz, who’s long history of executive positions included EVP at Disney’s Go Network.

What was once a scrappy garage-based maker of software for a dubious new Web trend as actually starting to look like a serious company. Frankly, I take the fast maturation of this company as much as anything is a sign of the bright future of blogging.

Anyway, congrats Michael. Keep me in mind if Six Apart feels like spending money on market research.

The story is slightly confused about things, but it quotes me (albeit briefly), so I’ll be nice and just note it and move on.

San Antonio Express-News: Companies get on blog bandwagon

The article starts out well, focusing on the blog of Jonathan Schwartz, president of Sun Microsystems:

Jonathan Schwartz, president and chief operating officer of server maker Sun Microsystems (SUNW ), first suspected that his blog was a success when his salespeople began reporting that customers were reading his posts and sealing deals faster. Then, the blog started getting a surge of traffic from users with e-mail addresses ending in “ibm.com” and “dell.com” — folks who work for Sun’s rivals….
Some six weeks later, he’s a firm believer that a blog — which generally consists of diary-like entries that are posted to the Web — is a must-have tool for every executive. “It’ll be no more mandatory that they have blogs than that they have a phone and an e-mail account,” Schwartz says. “If they don’t, they’re going to look foolish.”

Then, this:

In fact, these blogs, which now account for a handful of the estimated 20,000 blogs on the Web, could eventually grab a lion’s share of the Internet audience, says Chris Charron, an analyst with tech consultancy Forrester Research in Boston.

Forrester thinks there are only 20,000 blogs? Uh…Technorati monitors more than three million of them, hello? (Top left corner of the site.) Whatever. It’s otherwise quite a good article on the subject.

Business Week: Blogging for Business

Too tired at the moment to add context, but an interesting story from the always-interesting Mark Glaser about the impact of blogs on traditional media.

OJR: Dear Bloggers: Media Discover Promotional Potential of Blogosphere

Blog for blog publishing platform WordPress. Strange that the blog’s archive starts only this month.

Ugh. I’m working so hard on various paid research proejects at the moment, that I’m giving this poor blog short shrift. I’m relying a bit to heavily, therefore, on you, my wonderful readers, to do all my fact-checking for me. Poor blogging habits, I know, but there you are; my theory being bad blogging is better than no blogging at all.

Anyway, I got this wrong, as commenters have pointed out. This blog is unaffiliated with the business, just a volunteer blog. Therefore, it doesn’t really count as a business blog, does it?

Sorry! I’ll try harder next time, I promise. <fingers crossed>

WordLog

Jane (not her real name)

Just to be clear on this recent theme of faux blogs, I’m not against the idea in principal. As I said the other day, I actually think the Beta-7 Sega blog was pretty clever. It’s just the lame ones I object to.

Jane Blog is another example of a faux blog done really well. It’s well written, funny, cheeky, naughty, in short full of the right snarky tone of many good personal blogs. Importantly, compared to something really lame like Barbie’s blog which links to nothing, Jane actually reads and links heavily to lots of very hip blogs — Gawker, Defamer, Tony Pierce, Fark, Eurotrash (!), Anil Dash, Suicide Girls (naughty!) and lots more — both in her posts and her blogroll. And if that weren’t enough evidence that this is written by someone who gets blogs, she uses TypePad, not some hokey pseudo blog publishing platform. (E.g., she has permalinks!)
But, just in case you weren’t clear, in her About Me page, she concludes:

(by the way, I‚Äôm not actually real, I‚Äôm a fictitious character on the TV series “Good GIrls Don’t.” But that won‚Äôt stop me from writing to you every day. I mean, every weekday. Cause on weekends I‚Äôm in party mode.)

You go, girlfriend!

Link

Mark Tosczak points out that the NYT has caught onto the fact that not all blogs are real.

NYT: Wry Hoaxes Enliven the World of Web Diarists