Harold Jarche is a consultant specialized in helping organizations improve performance efficiency through combination of technology and education. He started blogging earlier this year on topics (recently) including tele-education, human performance analysis and university course management systems.
One of the things about the whole blog trend that I find so exciting for business is effectiveness and power of these simple publishing tools to accomplish a great degree of what “content management systems” such as Interwoven and Vignette have required tens of thousands of dollars and months of training to match. Of course, give us an inch and we’ll take a mile, and with that in mind, I am taking notes on a long list of features I’d like to see introduced to the next generation of blog tools to make them that much more effective (risking contradicting, perhaps, the beauty of their simplicity today, but I’m willing to take that risk).
Meanwhile, the movement towards powerfully simple and cheap tools continues apace. The folks from 37Signals have now released Basecamp, a web-based project management tool with “blog simplicity” that includes features such as scheduling, to-do lists, file sharing, RSS, iCal, and Mozilla Calendar integration, among other features. Priced at $19/month.
Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing writes:
37Signals, a fantastic web-dev company, has produced a new project-management app called Basecamp that looks like a winner. Not only is it extremely pretty and easy-to-follow — I’d expect no less from the usability wonks at 37Signals — but it’s also open: information flows out of the app as RSS and can be bulk-exported in XML, so none of your precious project-management material becomes a lever to lock you into paying the (surprisingly reasonable) monthly rates.
I know that blogs and XML syndication are not synonymous, but let’s face it, bloggers are leading the charge on adoption of RSS, Atom and related XML syndication protocols. This article by Wired suggests that there may be too much of a good thing in this regard, and that if XML syndication were to really catch on big (e.g., Microsoft is planning on releasing its own XML syndication reader built into its upcoming overhaul of the Windows operating system), the resultant demands on traffic may overwhelm the Net. Seems to me this could be overcome with some smart use of proxy servers or other work-arounds, but I’m not really a technical guy, so what do I know.
Robert Liodice, president and CEO of the ANA, has been blogging for a little over a month. The ANA is one of premier industry trade associations for marketing industry. I have to say, I’m surprised that “a suit” seems to really get blogging as well as Loidice demonstrates. For example, he links to Wikipedia to clarify concepts in his posts, which is a smart blogger thing to do. Not surprisingly, he uses the blog to boost for the industry (e.g., “Great (Not Just Good) Times Are Ahead for Marketers”), but he also uses it to comment on an initiative of another industry association (“NAB Responsible Programming Taskforce”) as well as to respond to how the press is clarifying ANA initiatives (“NUDG: What Really Happened”). A great example of why every industry association should adopt this handy communication tool.
It has been quite surprising that Google has not yet started blogging, given their acquisition last year of Blogger.com, and all, not to mention their perfectly aligned sensibilities with blog culture, or at least one would assume.
Well, it looks like we’ll see something interesting soon. As of this writing, the google.com/blog page says only “test,” but it’s certainly cause for hope.
[UPDATE 5/6/04: This page now comes up as an error. Someone is obviously playing around with something, though. Stay tuned…]
Be careful what you wish for — or what you blog about, anyway. This article describes that spooks have caught on to blogs and are using them to track trends and turn up interesting bits of information. The article also says China is trying to block blogs. All I can say is good luck. (I’m visiting China later in May; let’s see whether they can keep me off my blogs.)
Investor’s Business Daily: Blog-Tracking May Gain Ground Among U.S. Intelligence Officials
Lame. Not a real blog (yes, I realize she’s a doll), more of a journal (“Omigod, you’ll never believe the adorable pair of shoes I bought with Mercedes today!”). Pass.
A great article by George Packer, a regular writer for the New Yorker, about the poltical impact of blogs and his own love-hate relationship with the new populist medium. In fact, his only negative attitude about blogs seems to be he finds them so fascinating that he gets sucked into them for hours at a time, which is, I believe, familiar to many of us.
I take strong objection, however, to the article’s headline. The revolution will so be blogged. In fact, that’s exactly the point. We don’t need it to be televised. TV is controlled by The Man. Blogs are all about The People, baby.
(Whoops, sorry, I forgot for a minute this is supposed to be a serious business-oriented blog.)
Mother Jones: The Revolution Will Not Be Blogged
Along with Nick Denton of Gaker Media and Jason Calacanis of Weblogs Inc., Tony Perkins is one of the early advocates for using a blog-like format to power a commecial web publishing model with AlwaysOn, which launched nearly two years ago (as of this post).
AlwaysOn has its critics among the old-school blogger community, many of whom question whether AlwaysOn is a blog (or network of blogs) at all. It does seem to have elements of a more “traditonal” online magazine, with many or most posts being longer essays as opposed to short blurbs like those of most blogs, and a broad team of contributing writers. It’s also unclear (to me, anyway) whether there is a traditional editorial hierarch to the site (i.e., posts get approved first by an editor) or whether every writer posts directly to the site in blog tradition. But it’s certainly blog-like enough to merit inclusion in this directory.
Like Red Herring, Perkins’s prior venture, the topic area of AlwaysOn is primarily the intersection of finance and technology.
Dane Carlson, an entrepreneur, has started this blog seemingly just as a resource to other aspiring entrepreneurs, not as a promotion for his own business (in fact, it’s not even clear from his About page what his business is). He explains more of the blog’s mission:
Business Opportunities is a moderated list of legitimate of business opportunities for entrepreneurs. Its presented like a weblog with chronological archives and extensive outbound links.
Jerry Michalski is one smart cookie. For five years, he edited Esther Dyson’s reknowned tech industry newsletter Release 1.0. Since 1998, he has been operating as an independent consultant to leading Silicon Valley companies, and others. Sadly, he blogs infrequently. I’d be interested to read his insights a lot more often than he doles them out.
I’ve known Nick for years from our time together on the Internet marketing speaker circuit. Not only a great speaker and consultant, but Nick is also the author of the popular book NetWords about online copywriting. He’s also been running a newsletter on the topic for a while, and, online wordster such that he is, a blog was only a logical extension, which he’s been doing since last August.
If I may be so bold, Nick, as to offer a bit of advice for the blog: 1) link to it prominently from your main consulting page, rather than making folks dig into your About Me page to find the link, and 2) fix your archives, so that you can navigate all the way back to the start more easily from the main site navigation.
Nerve, a thinking-person’s erotic site (still, probably not safe for most workplaces), has lauched this weekly column on “sex in news, media + culture,” a blog-ish feature, if not perhaps a “proper blog,” whatever that means — e.g., no permalinks, written once a week in more of a column format than that of a blog, but it has something of a blog feel. Certainly, it is at best a poor-man’s Fleshbot (definitely not safe for work).
Esther Dyson is truly a thought leader in the Internet and technology space. A consultant and venture capitalist through her firm EdVenture Holdings, her newsletter Release 1.0 has been an important read for technology executives for more than a decade. Release 2.0 is the title of her book, and Release 3.0 is the name of her fortnightly column for the New York Times Syndicate. So, it’s only logical that when she started a blog last year, it became Release 4.0. Dyson is also the host of the prestigious technology conference PC Forum.
Rich Ottum runs the eStrategyOne consulting firm, focused on Internet marketing. He has been observing industry news and trends on this blog for nearly a year (as of this posting).
He recently wrote an article “10 Steps To Marketing With Business Weblogs” on WebProNews and on his site he also he also offers this (Word doc) white paper, “Marketing with Business Weblogs Primer.”
Another article about how to blog for business, this time by Rich Ottum, general manager of eStrategyOne. Top five pieces of advice:
This post led me to create another category for this blog, “How to Blog for Business.”
WebProNews: 10 Steps To Marketing With Business Weblogs
Once upon a time, The Industry Standard was the best magazine in the world, covering the Internet economy better than anyone. Then, evil bastards over at IDG pulled the plug on its financing at the first whisper of the economic downturn. Well, now the Internet is back, and, to a lesser extent, so is The Standard. Only this time, it’s just a blog. Mark Glasser, a former reporter for the publication, explains over at the Online Journalism Review, the back-story:
[F]ormer Industry Standard online honcho Matt McAlister — who is vice president and general manager of online operations at IDG’s InfoWorld — has decided to bring the site back to life as a moonlighting project. His plans are modest, with a rotating schedule of guest bloggers over the coming months, but he is clearly optimistic that the Standard still has a place in the media universe.
. . .
[F]ormer Standard contributors Jimmy Guterman, Rafat Ali, James Ledbetter and Mike Butcher have signed up to blog without pay. There will be no editorial oversight before posting, and bloggers will write to the style that suits them best — but mainly with links to news and comments.
Frankly, it’s a former shadow of its former self, but it was so great back when, I’m happy to take whatever reminders of that I can get.
This site needs a blog. The site looks like it was built in 1997. I’d say it sucks, but then, the pun is too kind to them.
The postcards for your friends &0158; could the be lamer? The merchandise &0158; yawn. (When I was in junior high school, one of my favorite t-shirts (wishful thinking) said “Trojan Field Tester.” That was at least sort of funny. No one at this company has a sense of humor?) The arcade games &0158; pu-leeeaase! Were those ever fun or challenging for someone older than four years old?
The only half-way interesting and useful section of the site is the information center. But it is just crying for a blog. Imagine all the legitimate condom, STD and sex-related news they could report on, not to mention more interesting Fark-ish naughy, funny and incredible-but-true sex-related stuff.
Call me when you’re ready to have an interesting web site.
Slightly geeky for what you’ve seen of this blog so far, but I’m a wannabe nerd, and this seems really cool to me. Paul Frankenstein innovates a simple way Movable Type users can assign different CSS styles to different posts using categories.
Updating my earlier comment about the beta release of Movable Type 3.0, Six Apart’s president Mena Trott shares some details here about the philosophy of the 3.0 version of the software. Basically, it is more of an overhaul of the underlying platform, in terms of extensibility and support for outside plug-ins than it is a big update of new features. Sounds a bit anti-climatic, but probabaly better for us all in the long-run. She suggests that incremental 3.x versions will see new features added. In the meantime, you can probably expect to see more features popping up in the independent developer community.
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Business Blog Consulting is a site devoted to demonstrating how effective weblogs can be for communicating with customers and marketing to new customer prospects. You will find here lots of examples of business and corporate blogs, as well as resources to help you learn more about the topic.
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Toby Bloomberg of Diva Marketing
Andy Bourland of Bourland.com
Rich Brooks of Flyte
Paul Chaney of Blogging Systems Group
Sally Falkow of Expansion Plus
Josh Hallett of Hyku
Tris Hussey of Larix Consulting
Lee Odden of TopRank
Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts
Dave Taylor of Intuitive Life for Business
Jim Turner of One by One Media
Dana VanDen Heuvel of BlogSavant
Des Walsh of Thinking Home Business
Debbie Weil of WordBiz and BlogWrite
Jeremy Wright of Ensight
Rick E. Bruner is co-author and principal analyst on this report
Our own contributor Jeremy Wright is the author of this book
"The Corporate Blogging Book: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know to Get It Right" with a foreword by GM's Bob Lutz..and the rest by Debbie Weil.
Produced by contributor to this site Debbie Weil. Rick E. Bruner is one of the featured experts in this report
This report is written by contributor to this site BL Ochman
I guess this was inevitable
