LATEST UPDATE (August 4):
ATTENTION XBOX WEENIES: When I first created this post, I didn’t really understand what this blog was about. Whatever. Now I get it. I’ve since acknowledged that. Please stop posting comments on this thread to that same effect. Point taken. Get a frickin’ life already.

ORIGINAL POST:
It’s sad that consumer marketers think the best thing they can do with a blog is create fake ones. It was one thing when Sega did its Beta-7 blog, as that was actually really good and lots of people fell for it. But the stupid Be Tag-Free thing and now I Love Bees (from Xbox) are just lame. Michael O’Connor Clarke has the full story in his aptly named post Buzz Marketing.

FIRST UPDATE/CLARIFICATION:
A few commenters in my comments section on this post suggest that I’m not giving this its proper credit, that the blog is just one link in a chain of some kind of online mystery teaser campaign, and that lots of gamers who are following it think it is in fact a pretty cool campaign. I haven’t had the time (or inclination) to follow up on it further and judge for myself, so do take my cynicism with a grain of salt. May be I’m the one who doesn’t get it in this case, not the marketers.

What I think this does hightlight, however, is that it’s possible to come into a marketing event like this without the proper context, so marketers need to consider that. Like in the movies, you should be able to see a sequel without having seen the original and still enjoy it. If this works in its full context but looks bad if you find your way into it partway through, that is a problem. A link to this page from Instapundit would blow away the people are finding it from the start, and then more people could have a negative impression than a positive one. Like my annoyance at Big Blog Company the other day; so their “fuck you” comment wasn’t intended for outside eyes. Their mistake, however, was assuming it wouldn’t be seen out of context. Taken out of context, it wasn’t pretty.

Another Fake Blog: I Love Bees

MSNBC’s political commentary show Hardball with Chris Matthews has launched a blog to accompany the political conventions. A group blog, bloggers will include

• Ron Reagan (son of the late president)
• Willie Brown (former SF mayor)
• Dee Dee Myers (former press secretary under Clinton)
• Chris Matthews (Hardball host)
• Joe Trippi (Howard Dean’s one-time campaign manager and web/blog guru)
• Chris Jansing (MSNBC anchor and correspondent)
  Joe Scarborough (MSNBC host)
• Andrea Mitchell (NBC News chief foreign affairs correspondent)

It will be interesting to see whether the blog lasts beyond the conventions. My guess is it will.

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Various coverage about BlogOn conference, mostly highlighting the experiences of everyone’s favorite blogging business, Microsoft.

• CNET News: Blog’s the Word in Big Business
• Wired: The Empire Blogs Back
• Various blog posts via Daypop

Steve Outing, a columnist for Editor & Publisher and blog enthusiast, reports on Poynter’s site that the Spokane Spokesman-Review has started successfully selling ads on some of the paper’s blogs, recently recruited from among the paper’s reader community.

CORRECTION:
Ken Sands, managing editor of the new media division of Spokesman-Review, notes this (in the comments field, but I highlight here):

Slight correction: the ads are being sold on blogs that are produced by staff writers. The site also links to community bloggers, but doesn’t sell any advertising related to non-staffers.

Poynter: Newspaper Blogs and Making Money

VAR Business points out in this piece that blogs have done something quite remarkable for Microsoft: made it cool.

VAR Business: The Ogre’s New Voice: Can Blogs Save Microsoft’s Image?

Slowly but surely, the PR industry is starting to take blogs seriously. This long article, published originally in The Holmes Report, a newsletter for the PR industry, is reproduced on Steve Rubel’s site (a guy who does get it), Micro Persuasion. While the points made in the article are generally the right ones about how blogs really are something important for businesses to pay attention to, I can’t help but observing that The Holmes Report’s own “weblog” hasn’t been updated for almost two years.

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Daniel W. Drezner, assistant professor of political science at the University of Chicago and Henry Farrell, assistant professor of political science and George Washington University, have posted a new academic paper on blogs:

This paper addresses this puzzle by focusing on two interrelated aspects of the “blogosphere”: the unequal distribution of readers across the array of weblogs, and the increasing interactions between blogs and mainstream media outlets…
The skewed distribution of weblog influence makes it easy for observers to extract information or analysis from blogs – but the reason they are important is that journalists and opinion leaders are readers of blog.

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In yet another example of the impact that blogs have had on the media landscape, CNN has announced a blogosphere analyst to provide perspective on the Democratic National Convention coverage. And a better analyst they couldn’t have chosen.

While much has already been made of the number of bloggers given press access to cover the convention in Boston next week, CNN has just announced (see link in headline of this entry) that it will have David Sifry, creator of the blogosphere monitoring tool Technorati, providing blow-by-blow commentary about convention coverage from across the hundreds of blogs writing about it. As part of the coverage, Sifry announced a new feature to the site, politics.technorati.com.

Meanwhile, political sarcasm blogger Ana Marie Cox of Wonkette has been tapped by MTV to provide conference coverage for that hip media outlet.

UPDATE:
Not to be outdone, Feedster has launched politics.feedster.com offering blog convention coverage as well.

Sifry.com: Technorati and CNN

The latest blog from Microsoft, this one by the Internet Explorer team.

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Duly noting another business blog from a well-known firm.

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Just noting, as I should have earlier, a series of developer blogs from IBM.

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An anonymous blogger (as far as I can tell) at SciFiHiFi.com, who is apparently an Apple employee, makes a case against business blogging. His (? her?) jumping off point is a recent post by PR specialist and blog evangelist Steve Rubel titled “Why Apple Employees Will Blog in Revolt”. While Rubel suggests Apple should be blogging, as I also did recently, SciFiHiFi guy disagrees, suggesting that not blogging is part of Apple’s “Think Different” mystique.

Obviosly, I don’t agree, but the post is worth reading, if just for the contrarian argument. One point he/she makes is “I personally think that every official corporate weblog I‚Äôve ever seen (from Microsoft‚Äôs Channel 9 to the Google Blog) has come across as rather contrived and trendy.” True, that’s a danger of some blogs (though I happen to like Channel 9, even if I don’t often read it; Google Blog, on the other hand, is certainly a disappointment), but he/she conveniently overlooks some much better business blogs, most notably in the context of Microsoft being Robert Scoble’s, which is widely read and respected.

Anyway, SciFiHiFi’s implication is that there is a danger for a company like Apple, the success of which relies in large part these days on underpromising and over-delivering (according to its fan base, anyway), is that a blog would reveal too much. I never get this argument against business blogs. You trust employees to grant interviews to the NY Times and the WSJ and not to reveal too much in the face of touch questions from seasoned jouranlists, don’t you? Why then should some trusted employee not be able to keep their mouth shut about company secrets on a weblog? The blog could be about any number of things other than company secrets and new feature previews, such as a showcase of “Made on a Mac” projects around the web, or whatever.

Also, SciFiHiFi makes the case that corporations are not people and they shouldn’t try to sound like people, hence business blogs sound artifcial. But the whole point of a good company blog, like Scoble’s, is it’s clearly written by a person with an individual point of view, thereby humanizing the company, as we all know that companies are made up of individuals. Given that Apple all but invented the job title of “evangelist,” I think it’s conspicuous that they don’t have a blog. “Think Different” is fine when it makes strategic sense, but don’t go against the flow just for brand consistency even when it’s not the right thing to do.

(But don’t get me started on Apple; I’m a former Apple die hard who was eventually dragged onto the PC by an old job, and no amount of trend ads will ever get me to switch back to Mac. But that’s another story.)

Sci-Fi Hi-Fi: Redmond Blogs, Cupertino Codes

Kirsten Osolind

Kirsten Osolind writes:

Hi Rick: I don’t make your blogroll. Darn. If I told you it was my birthday, would you add me for a gift? Perhaps not ‚Äì you don’t know me.

Oh, heck, I’m a sucker for a pretty face. Happy Birthday, Kirsten! (Unless, of course, you’re just yanking my chain and it’s not really your birthday, in which case I refer you to the gist of this post.) Kirsten’s blog statement of purpose (I love those):

RE:THIS BLOG…a fun, flippant BLOG with points of interest about women & small business, from re:invention’s founder, Kirsten Osolind. Dedicated to all good women & men (and those sorely deserving a good thunk on the head).

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Exhibit A
(Click to enlarge)

Odd. I was reading through my server logs this morning, when I saw that I had traffic coming from a page on The Big Blog Company. The Big Blog Company’s home page has a lot going on, so it’s a bit hard to figure out at a glance what they do, but partway down the page it explains:

The Big Blog Company is a one-stop shop for company blogs, a new tool for on-line communication for companies that want to strengthen their relationship with customers and their presence in the marketplace.

Ah, yes, another blog consulting company. (From my experience so far, good luck, guys.) Anyway, the page in question that was driving me traffic appears to be some page behind password protection. See Exhibit A.

There didn’t appear to be any way to register for the password-protected section that I could see. Looking around the page, however, I noticed in the upper-left corner there was a link for “Big Blog Company,” which I presumed would take me to the homepage, so I clicked it.

Exhibit B
(Same to you, buddy)

In fact, it flashed a temporary page that then just redirected me back to the log-in page. Imagine my surprise, however, when I clicked again and looked more carefully at the message up in the corner of this temporary refresh page: “Yeah, fuck you. Log in.” I beg your pardon? I’m trying to log in, but it’s not exactly clear how, gentleman. Doesn’t seem like very businesslike language for a consulting company.

Meanwhile, I’m also getting a lot of traffic today from this post on a site called GoFuckYourself.com, but that would appear to be an unrelated coincidence. Some days, it just doesn’t pay to get out of bed in the morning.

UPDATE:
Big Blog Consulting Company perpetuate the British stereotype that Yanks have no sense of humor and assume I’m a moron. At least I get to use trackbacks now. Whoopie!

New features in blogger, notably a what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWIG) editing interface.

Evhead: Now in Blogger, WYSIWYG

I’ve never been the biggest fan of the “trackback” feature on many blogs — it just seems to further clutter the footer of posts, it seems generally underutilized and, as far as I understand, it’s available only to blog publishers using TypePad or MovableType. But, since a few of you have asked me about it, I’ve turned it on for future posts. I better start seeing some trackback links now soon, or I’ll be turning it off again eventually.

UPDATE/CORRECTION:
Okay, okay, as a few of you have pointed out, I am wrong about MT/TP being the only blog softwares that enable Trackbacks. See comments and trackback-comments for details. I’m also seeing trackbacks on other posts, so I guess I’ll leave them on for a while and see how it goes.

First, watch this video. It’s funny, basically showing the discomfort women suffer from their bra tags.

The site (linked in the above headline) purports to be an amateurly designed petition from a few concerned women calling on bra makers to design bras without itchy tags at the back, as Hanes has done with men’s undershirts. The site also links to a few blogs on the topic.

I am sure (just based on what I see) that this is really a stealthy preview campaign for some bra maker that already has such a product they are about to unleash on the world, and this is a viral advance teaser. If I’m wrong about that, it’s certainly an market and marketing opportunity some such company should capitalize on. But, I’m not wrong; trust me. This is too slick and well-orchestrated to be genuinely a populist thing. This has slick cyber agency written all over it. Stay tuned…

UPDATE:
Oh yeah, it’s definitely a campaign. Here’s an ad for the “grassroots” site on hip fashion site DailyCandy.com. Expect TV ads to follow soon.

ANOTHER UPDATE:
In case you’re too lazy to click on the comments on this post, reader John Fratus observes, “The domain registration on betagfree.com is to Sara Lee (i.e. Hanes, Bali, Playtex, Wonderbra, etc.).” Now, why didn’t I think of that?

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I just got the following email:

Dear Sir,
My name is Matthew Lin, an MBA candidate at University of New Brunswick at Saint John, Canada. I am currently conducting a research on how weblogs are being used as business tools, and their particular implication for small and medium enterprises. I have designed a questionnaire in order to survey individuals who publish weblogs or can describe the reasoning behind their company’s weblog. The survey will be posted online for one month, starting next week. I am seeking your assistance to promote this survey to your readers, in hope of gathering a good cross-section of business weblogs. Please spread the word!
The survey [“The Blog as a Meaningful Business Tool”] is available at: http://business.unbsj.ca/bblog/
Additional information about this project (e.g., objectives, hypotheses) are available upon request.
Thank you for your consideration. If you are aware of others who might also be interested in posting this questionnaire URL, please feel free to forward this email to them.
Sincerely,
Matthew Lin

Be a sport and help the fellow out: take the survey and spread the word. I’ll be sure to post results when they’re made public.

Jeff Jarvis of the wonderful blog Buzz Machine &mdash and, oh yeah, his day job is president of Advance Internet, parent to CondeNet and other major media online properties — is offering a tutorial for ad agencies and the like on what he calls “citizens’ media,” which means blogs and other stuff that may as well be blogs.

Of course, I’d be happier if big media companies called me for such a presentation, but Jeff’s already put one together and presented it to the likes of Daimler Chrysler, BBDO, and Organic, so I figured I should give him props.

If this were any cooler, I’d probably wet myself: you can now subscribe to NYT stories via RSS.

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