So, in case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been posting to this blog a lot less lately. Regular readers may know that I took a full-time job six months ago (at DoubleClick) and a few months after that, I ended up taking over my department (Director of Research), as a result of which, I am very busy these days.

Sadly, evangelizing the marketing value of blogs is not tightly aligned with my job or DoubleClick’s business interests, so this site has been a labor of love. More to the point, however, I think the mission of the blog has to a certain extent been accomplished. When I began it, I felt there was a need for a voice on the web articulating this business value and highlighting the many new business blogs as examples for others to follow. In the just over a year since I started the blog, however, stories like the recent one in BusinessWeek have been making the case very well in the mainstream media, and there are many other blogs talking about the same issues, including those I link to on the left of this page under "From Whom We Steal." The best of those, IMHO, is Steve Rubel’s MicropPersuasion, in whose shadow I think this blog has been living for some time.

Therefore, with mixed feelings I am going to make formal what has been de facto the case for a few months: I don’t plan to update this blog very often going foward. Perhaps I’ll find something on-topic to say from time to time, and I welcome the other contributors to this site to feel free to remain as active as they want (which past performance suggests not especially active).

Meanwhile, if you need a fix of Bruner postings, I do still post a few times a month about general Internet marketing topics at ExecutiveSummary.com and more often about general nonsense at my personal site, Bruner Blog. I also do have plans to launch some new topical resources in the coming months, so stay tuned. Until then, thanks for your attention and I wish you all productive business blogging!

In case you haven’t seen it yet, BusinessWeek came out with a great story last week aptly titled Blogs Will Change Your Business. Here’s a taste:

Go ahead and bellyache about blogs. But you cannot afford to close your eyes to them, because they’re simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself. And they’re going to shake up just about every business — including yours.

I also refers to Steve Rubel as "an all-knowing Thumper in a forest of clueless Bambis," which is probably one of the weirder things they guy has ever been called. Anyway, required reading for followers of this trend.

BusinessWeek: Blogs Will Change Your Business

Man, I am a bad blogger. I spent much of the evening last night spamming marketing bloggers about a new report I’ve just finished writing. What was striking is how much more frequently they all blog than I do.

Ah well. Here’s what I’ve been busy with lately, anyway: The Decade in Online Advertising (PDF | landing page), a wide-ranging retrospective of the development of the web marketing industry. Needless to say there is a section on blogs. It’s free to download.

For a sample chart (my favorite), click here.

The following is links to resources for attendees for Todd and my panel (along with Six Apart’s Deborah Schultz) blog panel at the WOMMA conference in Chicago today.

Useful Blog Tools for Market Intelligence

• Technorati
• Blogpulse
• PubSub
• Feedster
• Bloglines

Blogs About Business Blogging

• Business Blog Consulting
• A Penny For…
• Micro Persuasion
• Big Blog Company
• Blog Business World
• Debbie Weil
• Lots of others in the left margin of this site, under "From Whom We Steal"

Examples of Business Blogs

• Many, many, many, including (among those we discussed in today’s presentation):
• Captain Morgan’s Blog
• Jonathan Schwartz, president of Sun Microsystems
• Microsoft’s Robert Scoble
• Stonyfield Farm
• General Motors
• Boeing
• Atomic Books
• Green Cine
• Signs Never Sleep
• 800 CEO Read

Blog-Related Research

• See here

Todd Sattensten has also been posting a few relevant posts for this presentation, including "Using Blogs for Word of Mouth Marketing" and "Blogging Panel Live at WOMMA – Before"

Deborah Schultz, marketing director of Six Apart, also offers this perk, supposedly for attendees to this panel, but she also encouraged me post this here, a life-time 10% discount code to a TypePad account: "womma05"

UPDATE:

Sitting in the session Customer Evangelists: Motivating Customers to Talk About You, which followed ours on blogging, Ben McConnell of Church of the Customer
, and he asked for a show of hands as to how many people have been to a Build-a-Bear Workshop. Now, as someone without kids, I’ve never heard of this fast-growing company, which, as you may gather, lets you build your own personalized toy bear. Half the hands in the room went up. A few minutes later, Ben showed a screenshot of Robert Scoble’s Microsoft blog and asked how many people in the room had been to the site. This, bear in mind, at a conference about customer-evangelism marketing, and for any of you first-time readers, "The Scoblizer" is perhaps the most widely read business blog. Maybe five hands went up, two of which were mine and Todd’s. Wow. That puts things a bit in perspective. Why am I always drinking the koolade of "the next big thing" while oblivious to what Middle-America actually cares about (the conference is in Chicago, after all).

Gen. James Cartwright

Defense Industry Daily, a relatively new industry blog from Watershed Publishing (publishers of MarketingVox), reports that four-star general James Cartwright, the top guy in charge of the U.S.’s nuclear arms infrastructure, is now blogging. It is literally required reading in his reporting command.

While the blog is supposed to be secure on a need-to-know basis, Defense Industry Daily indicates it’s actually read the thing. (Yipes.)

Oops. I just realized the first post (nothing special) to this blog was March 19, 2004.

I realized that I should probably note that fellow site poster Todd S. and I are both speaking on a blog panel at the Word of Mouth Marketing Association‘s debut conference next week (Tues. & Wed.) in Chicago, in case any of you faithful readers were planning on attending. Should be fun. We just had a productive call about it. Deborah Schultz, marketing director for Six Apart, will also be on the panel. We’re actually planning to blog a bunch of resources here just before our panel on Wednesday morning, so stay tuned.

Here’s a clue that WOMMA "gets it": the site has a Press Pass Policy page that reads, in part:

This event is being held in a small venue with limited seating. We have
reserved 20 seats for press and bloggers. Priority will be given to
reporters with media credentials and full-time bloggers who are coming
as journalists primarily to learn and cover the event.

I suspect they’ve long ago since given out those few passes, but don’t you like that the policy applies equally to bloggers? Except, "full-time bloggers" pretty much narrows the field. I mean, Jeff Jarvis and Steve Rubel and Glenn Reynolds and Markos Moulitsas Zúniga and most of the rest of us aside from Jason Kottke have full-time jobs. I presume it’s more a polite way of saying, "Sorry, you don’t get enough traffic" to all the wannabees. Fair enough.

Decent article about blogvertising. I was interviewed at length but didn’t get quoted. Oh well. Features the usual cast of characters: Denton, Calacanis, Copeland.

Just had a call with Todd S. (are last names important?), and he was aggrieved by the last paragraph of this piece:

For now, many big companies are sitting on the
sidelines. "We’re in a wait-and-see mode," says Stuart Bogaty, senior
partner and managing director of mOne Worldwide, a digital ad agency
that is part of WPP
Group. He thinks that companies will remain skittish until agencies can
better monitor and control what individual bloggers are saying about
them. On the other hand, that might undercut their renegade appeal. "If
we were able to convince a blogger to do that," he notes, "it would
reduce the value of his blog in general."

The link above allows free access to the story for a week, so read it while the reading is good.

WSJ: Many Advertisers Find Blogging Frontier Is Still Too Wild

Good buddy Nick Aster, a great web designer and Movable Type jockey, who designed this site, as well as some Gawker Media properties and others, has just launched a blog with a conscience: TriplePundit, which he describes to me in an email as "geared towards MBA students and other interested people, and is a digest of daily information, oriented toward a triple-bottom-line (people, planet, profit) aproach to business."

I love that mission statement, both for its concision and its purpose. I just wish he’d post it to the site, as the current upper-left blurb doesn’t say it so well: "Bringing out the green in green: Triple Pundit is a daily serving of relevant, business focused news that will help you integrate the well-being of society & environment with success in business." (For one thing, I’d never heard the term "triple bottom line" before, though he writes about it like it’s something familiar; I do, however, LOVE the idea.)

In any event, way to have at it, Nick. Best of luck!

Link

Yahoo’s new blended blogging/social network tool, Yahoo 360, is in beta. So far, I haven’t seen the backend of the system. It’s invite-only; I was invited to open an account as part of a private email discussion community, but it turned out the invitee didn’t realize that so far blanket invites couldn’t be processed outside of Yahoo. I’ll update when I know more.

Meanwhile, more coverage from Steve Rubel, AP, CNET, Forrester’s Charlene Li, WSJ, Marc Canter (who has actually tried it) and others.

Wow. I just read business and blog consultant Jeremy Wright’s harrowing account of being turned away at Canada’s border to the U.S. after a two-hour interogation basically because the border guard didn’t grok  blogs. Solidarity, brother.

Communication consultant Debbie Weil dings the executive bloggers at Boeing and GM for neglecting to comment on recent big negative news about their companies (CEO resigning in sex scandal and major drop in earnings forecast respectively).

She’s got a good point. It’s also probably the kind of scenario that freaks out most companies about blogging. But, as she points out, if you’ve got it, you might as well flaunt it (i.e., you’ve earned positive credibility with an audience of readers through these blogs, so you may was well use the channel to advance a positive interpretation of such bad news rather than ignore the elephant in the room).

Debbie Weil: GM & Boeing: Corporate “Tell-It-Not” Blogs

3/22/05 UPDATE:

The numbers discussed in the original post below are based on Alexa data, which are notoriously questionable (Alexa’s numbers come from users of its browser toolbar, so by definition it’s a self-selected audience, which in this case probably skews heavily towards bloggers). Tig Tillinghast of MarketingVox read my post and sanity-checked it with Hitwise; those numbers say that NYT’s audience is still larger than Blogspots, but the trend of the data would suggest that Blogspot is soon set to overtake NYTimes.com.

ORIGINAL POST:

Wonking around Saturday night, I found something interesting: collectively, the blogs hosted on Blogspot get more visitors than NYTimes.com, according to Alexa.

Meanwhile, Technorati’s David Sifry reports on various recent trends among blogs with cool graphs, including the rapid growth of the blogosphere, spikes in blog posts based on mapped to news events, and in-bound links to top-blogs vs. mainstream media sources. Good stuff.

UPDATE:

Xanga.com crushes NYTimes.com:

Particularly informative is to look at the two-year trend: Xanga and Blogspot.

Lame that I didn’t notice this before. Very cool. Nokia and Six Apart’s Movable Type have collaborated to present a great "moblog" tool.

From the web site:

You love taking pictures, not to mention getting and sending text and picture messages – but what to do when your phone’s full of great memories? Save them in your Nokia Lifeblog!

Nokia Lifeblog is a PC and mobile phone software combination that effortlessly keeps a multimedia diary of the items you collect with your mobile phone. Lifeblog automatically organizes your photos, videos, text messages, and multimedia messages into a clear chronology you can easily browse, search, edit, and save. Nokia Lifeblog does the work of organizing the items you create and receive, and you can also add notes throughout the day, or tag and update your favorites so they’re always on your phone.

Details on this BBC story and an earlier press release.

622 Nokia Lifeblog

Click for larger version

Vacuum cleaner maker Dyson has chosen two hip UK tech blogs, ShinyShiny ("a girl’s guide to gadgets") and Tech Digest for a clever rich media campaign that features two skyscraper ads on either side of the page via which readers can play a Pong-like game. Unfortunately, by the time it was reported, the ad seems to have finished its run. (Via MarketingVox)

BlogAds, a leading ad network for blogs, released its second annual survey of blog readers. Some 30,000 blog readers filled out the survey. I’m too busy to summarize, but suffice it to say blog readers appear to be a high-quality audience that should be attractive to advertisers.

This is must-read for anyone who is trying to sell advertising on blogs. One thing that would make the study better, however, would be to index these questions against average Internet users, so we had a sense of how blog readers are better than average Net users. Still, it certainly makes a case for the value of blog readers.

UPDATE:

I neglected to mention that Gallup just released a survey about blog readership that found that 15% of Americans, or 19% of U.S. Internet users, read blogs at least a few times a month, but the findings of the poll were available online for only a few days before they went behind subscription-access lock-down. Here is a MediaPost article that analyzes the two polls together, including this nugget:

Frank Newport, editor in chief at Gallup
poll, says his results are not inconsistent with Copeland’s conclusion.
Newport compared readers of blogs to readers of The New York Times. "We know that only a fraction of the American public reads the Times, but it affects everyone because that’s what the people who control mainstream media read."

Tim Bray thinks the media obsession with bloggers getting fired for blogging is a crock. Rather, he makes a compelling argument that blogging is actually good for one’s career. He’s a posterboy for the idea himself; after being a prominent blogger for years stemming from his experience as an experienced technologist and entrepreneur, he was appointed Technology Director of Sun Microsystems last year, a company that now has several senior managers blogging.

Another case in point: Microsoft just announced its acquisition of Groove Networks, makers of a peer-to-peer-style employee knowledgement management system, whose founder CEO, Ray Ozzie, has now been appointed chief technology officer at Microsoft. Granted, Ozzie is well known in some circles for having founded Lotus Notes once upon a time, but he is also a revered blogger, although curiously he hasn’t posted to his once-popular blog in a year.

Deb Weil points out that HP has several blogs, including those of executives Rich Marcello, SVP & GM of Business Critical Servers, HP and Dan Socci, VP of HP Services, Technology Services Marketing.

Link

Aside from Google AdSense and Overture Content Match, what other networks are there that focus on blog advertising besides these?

• AdBrite
• BlogAds
• BURST! Media
• CrispAds
• Pheedo

And don’t say Weblogs Inc. or Gawker, as those are publishing ventures, not networks in the sense that any existing blogger could simply leverage them to sell ads on their site.

I had an enjoyable dinner last night at the trendy NY restaurant Spice Market with

David Geller and Brian Ratzliff, respectively CEO/President and VP of Marketing & Business Development of WhatCounts, along with Bob Silver, SVP of MWWGroup PR. They wanted to pitch me on the value of an all-in-one blog hardware/software platform for corporate blogging, the BlogUnit, following my somewhat cynical post about it following its launch announcement.

Since they were nice enough to ply me with food and wine, I’ll be nice enough to take a few minutes to summarize some of what we discussed and share my reflections.

WhatCounts has been around for about three years, focused on email
marketing services for mid-sized companies (some of their ~150 clients
include Seattle Times, Chicago Sun, Advance Publishing). Hoping
to catch the blog wave, they’ve come out with the Unit, blog publishing
software bundled with a server box. Notable features include built-in
email newsletter publishing integration (a big plus in my mind
and gaping hole in most blog publishing platforms), APIs, Web Services,
LDAP support, other cool tech acronyms, built-in ticket support a la
TypePad, high-end customer support, in-bound RSS feed publishing
(another gaping hole in many blog publishing platforms; everyone is so
hot on publishing to RSS, but what about taking RSS feeds from other sites or applications and publishing them through the blog publishing tool to your own blog?), and other stuff.

Price: $10,000+.

That last piont is one we got stuck on for a while. Their argument
is that for corporations of a decent size, that price is no obstable,
considering that it includes the hardware the company would need to
dedicate to the system anyway, along with professional support,
built-in security, yadda-yadda. My feeling was they will have a hell of
a time competiting at that price given the legions of bloggers who will
be advocating Movable Type, WordPress, etc. at a cost of between free
and practically free.

It’s not the price itself I think they have to worry about but the
evangelists. So a company, or rather an individual employee,  gets the
idea the company should have a "blog." They’re going to start their
research and immediately hear "Movable Type, Blogger, TypePad,
WordPress, Movable Type, Manilla, Drupal, TypePad, Movable Type,
WordPress," etc. Who the hell is going to evangelize a $10,000 product?
That’s what commissioned sales people are for.

Besides, the more I thought about it after I left, I don’t believe
you’re really talking about a "blog" when you’re talking $10,000
software. You’re talking about an enterprise business knowledge
management system. Or, not to put too fine a point on it, "content
management." And everyone who knows blogs knows that they are the
antidote to content management.

An anecdote may be instructive here. A "friend of mine" recently
started a job at a mid-sized company and decided an internal blog would
be a great knowlege management tool. So I…I mean, my friend, started
mumbling about it internally and he got the idea that several people
would want to consider this or that aspect of whether a blog was the
best tool or what various approvals may be needed, etc.

Instead of losing heart, he sniffed around and found a group that
had already flirted with the idea, got a referral to a friendly guy in
IT who went ahead and found server space and installed MT. My friend
tweaked the basic template a bit and filled the site with a week’s
worth of content or so before he even pointed it out to his manager:
"This is what I’m talking about." At that point, the manager could see
exactly how useful it was.

My friend started quietly sharing links to content on the blog to
others internally on a beta basis, many of whom agreed it could be a
useful way to distribute information. Eventually, he was introduced to
the group internally that is tasked with managing the intranet. They
let it be known that his style of skunkworks wasn’t the way he was
supposed to have gone about this (hey, I’m new here), but after some
quick evaluation they also agreed it was a handy tool, one that seemed
easy to support, the price was truly a non-issue, etc. It’s now on the
road to offical sanction and dedicated internal resources.

My friend was told later that had he gone about it through the
official channels it certainly would have taken much longer to ever get
the green light.

Point is, pricing the tool at $10,000 means it has to go
through the proper channels. My friend’s own department (market
research) doesn’t have $10,000 for software applications (but he could
put the $150 MT license fee on his corporate Amex no problem), and
whether IT would have seen fit to cough up that much dough vs. kludging
something themselves would have been a decision that could have ended
nowhere. That kind of gate is going to test the enthusiasm of many
internal blog evangelists. The reason blogs have spread like wildfire
is they are being promoted by evangelists, not sales people.

My $0.02. I told them I’m sure there’s a market for their sales
approach. But I think there’s a much bigger market for Six Apart’s.
There are, after all, only 2000 "Global 2000" companies, compared to
11+ million small businesses in the U.S. alone.