In addition to profiling business blogs, I plan to use this site to keep track of a number of useful resources for bloggers, especially those that advance the interest of business bloggers. So here’s one. The About Us page explains:

There a number of services designed specifically for tracking and connecting blogs. However it would be expensive for all the services crawl all the blogs in the world all the time. By sending a small ping to each service you let them know you’ve updated so they can come check you out. They get the freshest data possible, you don’t get a thousand robots spidering your site all the time. Everybody wins.

So why would you want to be on these sites? One word: traffic.

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Ali Mohammad Abtahi

This is nothing short of mind-blowing: a blog by Ali Mohammad Abtahi, Vice President of Islamic Republic of Iran. In English, no less. Talk about blogs being revolutionary.

Blogs have actually become very popular in Iran, as this Wired story and this BCC story attest. But a senior politician in any country blogging is remarkable, particulary one that we, in the West anyway, think of as so restrictive as Iran. It will be interesting to watch what becomes of this remarkable site, which has been around since January, 2004.

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Seattle P.I. has set one of its reporters, Todd Bishop, to cover the region’s biggest corporation around the clock with this popular blog, founded in September 2003.

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This isn’t breaking news — it was first reported by the sources below a few weeks ago — but I’m still getting caught up with my backlogged notes for this blog.

Anyway, news is that Microsoft is readying something called Blogbot, a kind of search tool focused on weblogs for release in the next couple of months. The idea is likely to be something similar to its Newsbot search service, already in beta in the U.K., which is strikingly similar to Google News (at a glance, anyway). A U.S. version of Newsbot is also expected in the next few months. Makes me think the new blog aggregation service Kinja may have its work cut out for it.

Reports on Blogbot come from Seattle P.I.’s Microsoft Blog, the San Jose Merc and eWeek.

Microsoft has already demonstrated itself to be quite blog savvy, with a host of blogs of its own, including that of its corporate evangelist Robert Scoble, the round-table video blog of several of its product architects at Channel 9 and a large collection of other company-sanctioned bloggers.

http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/

Debbie Weil

Consultant Debbie Weil has been publishing an email newsletter called WordBiz about business copywriting online for more than two years (as of this writing). She makes money by running seminars, consulting and selling reports, as well as ads in her newsletter and on her blog. Her blog features the same kind of breezy writing and straight-forward advice that has made her newsletter so popular among small and large businesses.

Her blog also includes a category on Blogging for Business, which I’ll be sure to scrape for all interesting entries to plug into this directory in the coming weeks.

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Debbie Weil’s WordBiz organized a teleseminar on the topic of Business Blogs a few months ago, in which I partook as one of the “experts.” She’s done a nice job packaging the audio of that seminar with a companion PDF report. Some of the points she promises you’ll learn from the report:

• Why blogging is better (and easier) than updating a regular Web site
• How blogging is different than sending an e-newsletter
• The best technology for publishing – and subscribing – to blogs
• How a blog fits into an overall marketing and communications strategy
• Plus, the tools you need to start your own blog right now!

Price: $59.

WordBiz: Blogging for Business

This article in the Washington Post describes how popular advertising on weblogs has been in this political season. The story notes that most of these ads are going through the BlogAds network.

The story includes an anecdote of A.B. “Ben” Chandler, a Kentucky Democrat running for a special House election back in January who spent $2,000 for ads on 11 blogs, which was perceived as a risky idea in a tightly funded political campaign. The ads were so successful that in two weeks, some 1,700 readers from the blogs donated $80,000 to the campaign, mostly from out-of-state, which the campaign plowed back into tradiational broadcast and print ads and went on to win the campaign.

W. Post: Some Candidates Turn To Blogs to Place Ads

The popular blog publishing platform Movable Type, from Six Apart, is starting to accept beta-user accounts for its long-awaited version 3.0 upgrade. Much excitement in the blogosphere for this announcement.

(Updated info on the 3.0 release here.)

Business Blog Consulting uses TypePad, which is also by Six Apart.

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CEO Henry Copeland launched this do-it-yourself ad network for blogs nearly two years ago, and at that time there was a fair bit of skepticism that the business would ever pan out. Well, it has. The service now has more than 200 blogs using the system, each of which has at least 3,000 ad impressions each week. Some, such as InstaPundit and DailyKos, have millions of readers per month. The service has proven particularly popular with political advertisers — more than two dozen candidates in the presidental and other races have used it to reach political junkies through blogs. But many smaller and medium-sized companies are also find blogs a great way to advertise niche products. Blogs are ideal “for products that have a sensibility, not commodities, those looking to find audiences with a particular mindset,” Copeland said. Some of the biggest bloggers using the system are now earning thousands of dollars a month in advertising.

I have counseled BlogAds about its overall business strategy.

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A New York Times reporter, Julie Flaherty, attended BloggerCon II and wrote this piece about the discussion at the conference about trying to make blogs make money for their writers.

NY Times: Many Started Web Logs for Fun, but Bloggers Need Money, Too

Hugh MacLeod is best known around the blogosphere as “the guy who draws cartoons on the back of business cards.” Something about his cartooning style has really struck a nerve with bloggers. His own blog features a lot of his original drawings. His background is in advertising creative, and I think he still does some of that on a freelance basis, as well.

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Rafat Ali, formerly a journalist for Silicon Alley Reporter, runs this blog about trends in online publishing. He also sells advertising for the blog, which is his sole occupation for more than a year. He says he earns more off the blog than he did as a staff reporter, although he also spends a considerable amount of time selling ads himself. He notes that he has also lost advertisers due to his uncompromising coverage of the industry. He’s a pioneer among one-man-brands as far as commercial blogs go.

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MarketingVox (formerly named MarketingWonk, Up2Speed and MarketingFix) is a new aggregation blog focused on Internet marketing trends. The site is funded by Andy Bourland, who pays a salary to the site’s full-time editor Tig Tillinghast. The site accepts advertiser and aims to be a commercially viable nano-publishing media property focused on an industry niche.

I am one of this site’s co-founders, and I remain a shareholder, contributor and strategic consultant to the business, although I am no longer involved in its day-to-day operations.

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Adam Kalsey’s firm specializes in web site development and online marketing. He is also the moderator of Marketing Vox’s Publishing forum.

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Marketing Vox (which I co-founded, I mention both for bragging rights and full disclosure) produces this email discussion list / blog about online publishing. Blogging, and particularly business-related blogging, is a major theme of the forum. I used to be the moderator of this forum for a few weeks, anyway, but it got to be too much work, so it is now capably moderated by Adam Kalsey.

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Judith Meskill

I had the pleasure of sharing a car ride with Judith from Boston to NY after BloggerCon II and got to hear a lot about her remarkable professional background: an impressive mix of executive experience at marketing, operations, technology and more (she programs in something like 8 or more languages, after having been sent to programming classes by the IT department of a F500 company when she worked as a marketer constantly pushing the IT department to outdo themselves with special programming requests).

These days, she’s a high-priced (I’d assume) consultant focused on knowlege and social networking, and other corporate collaboration issues. She also blogs at socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com.

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Amy Gahran

Amy Gahran is a writer, editor, trainer and speaker. One of her recent posts (as of this writing) is “More Corporate Blogging Resources,” each of which I’ll be sure to scrape as individual entries in this blog as soon as I have time.

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Ross Mayfield

Ross Mayfield is CEO of Socialtext, what I would call knowledge management software, but he’s told me should be called “enterprise social software.” Anyway, Ross is a leading thinker in the space of social software and people-powered publishing (such as wikis, business blogging, social networks). In addition to his personal blog (linked in the headline of this entry), which itself tends to be more about business than his personal life, he also blogs on Social Text’s site as well as part of a great group blog about social software called Many2Many on Corante.

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BzzAgent is a really interesting marketing agency that has put together a network of more than 25,000 BzzAgents, orginary people who sign up at the site because they like to be in on the “next big thing” in the world of consumer products. The agency’s clients include Penguin Books, Kellogg’s cereal, Monster.com, Estee Lauder, Lee Jeans and others. When the agency has a campaign, it sends out products to hundreds of its BzzAgents, who are then encouraged to recommend the products to their friends, provided they like the products. The agency provides the agents how to be effective brand evangelists? What’s in it for the agents? Mainly just free product samples and bragging rights to be the first to know of hot new products. But that is apparently motivation enough for thousands of participants.

Anyway, the agency also has a fairly active blog since November, 2003, charting the company’s growth, letting it communicate with its agents and share agent’s ideas with the rest.

Thanks to Todd S. for the link.

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A new blog (as of this posting) by British consultants Wayne Robinson and Tim Duckett. The About Us reads:

We run a marketing and technology consulting business that helps smaller companies in the UK. A lot of our work is now centring on using technology to reduce information problems. So this blog is designed to share our knowledge and first hand experience.

A criticism I have of this blog, other than its somewhat clunky layout (e.g., the page is too wide for my laptop screen and I hate blue link borders around images, but whatever [UPDATE: they’ve since fixed that, but the CSS is still acting a bit funky for me]), is that the above About Us statement claims “we run a marketing and technology consulting business,” but there’s no information about that company anywhere on the site that I can see. The consultants link to short profiles of themselves, and I gather that is the “business,” but it’s not even clear what the business is called (the URL is Infosential.com, but the blog seems to be titled “Cutting Through”), but I’m nitpicking. The content seems worthwhile (particularly since they already linked to my blog).

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