In my recent comment/rant on RSS replacing email, a folks have pointed out a recent wave of investment in RSS-related companies. So I thought I’d duly note this story for more details along those lines. Note that it mentions NewsGator got some funding, which I said in my post is my pick of the lot of RSS readers.

Wired: RSS Attracts Really Serious Money

Cindy Schmelky (not)

Yet another example (apparently) of a fake blog for a consumer product. Attention marketers: passing fake blogs off as real io LAAAAAME!!! You will get outed and look like asses.

I’ve said before I don’t mind fake blogs in some cases. I think the distinction is when they are obviously fake, or better yet admit to being fake or in some limited cases part of a publicity stunt (though, that model is growing old fast), they can sometimes be cool. But I can’t think of an exception when you are playing to your core audience pretending to be something you’re not (in this case, a 15-year-old girl) is not just piss-poor marketing likely to bite you in the ass. You’re playing your customers for fools. That is not cool.

Ringtonia has the scoop:

Cool Ringtones Blog which I’ve mentioned in Ringtonia before, is not like a initially thought, the blog of a teenager age who loves ringtones, but the business blog of Ringingphone.com, a provider of ringtones, wallpapers, online games…
Though the blog introduces Cindy Schmelky, 15, from Wayne, Penn with a picture and a quote “I love ringtones more than life”, she’s really just a figurehead for those articles as various members of the company’s team write them, according to Ringingphone co-owner Bob Bentz.
…
That a ringtone company has a blog is a great idea. But there is no need to mislead readers into thinking the blog is written by a 15 year-old, when it’s not.

All that said, naming the fake blogger “Cindy Schmelky” was a nice touch, as it doesn’t sound like the kind of name you’d come up with for a fake person. Her tagline ” I love ringtones more than life” is especially creepy.

UPDATE:
Check out the comments; a representative from Ringtones apologizes for the deceptive nature of the blog, saying they’ve learned their lesson and stopped faking the bloggers identity. Indeed, they still use the young woman’s photo, but they don’t pretend she’s a real person anymore. They simply refer to the blogger’s identity now as “The Staff at Cool Ringtones Blog.” Real names of those blogging would be a better improvement, but this is certainly something.

Link

Oh, this is rich. The latest example of someone getting fired for blogging comes from an employee of no less savvy socially networked company than Friendster (which, so far as I am aware, has no official blog of its own to address the controversy on; too bad, that). According to the blogger in question, Joyce Park, aka TroutGirl, the offending posts were both quite short and, to my outsider interpretation, fairly innocuous. I predict this is going to have a bad PR fallout for Friendster in the blogosphere.

UPDATE:
Ted Pibil notes in my comments thread on this post that Jon Udell has an excellent wrap up on this: Why we owe Troutgirl our thanks. Lots of good links there to add context and further the analysis of the implications of this. Thought it was worth highlighting here in the main post. Thanks Ted.

TroutGirl: Shitcanned

The guy behind this new service Blabble has been exchanging emails with me about this for more than a week, but so far I haven’t gotten beta access to it, so I can’t really determine how interesting it might be. He says it will target PR and marketing folks to help track trends as they emerge in the blogosphere. Obviously, it could be interesting in theory but it all depends on the execution.

Internet Retailer: Mining Blogs for Buzz, Blabble Automates the Search of Blog Content

A corporate blog is just like a personal blog, except you don’t get to use the word “motherfucker.”

— Mark Pilgrim

via BigBlogCompany

Dive Into Mark: Corporate Blogging

Check this out. Evil bastards.

PaidContent points out this story about the Miami Dolphins team inviting publishers of 14 fan web sites to a schmooze fest the hope will become an annual event known as Dolphins Web Weekend. Mentioned in the story are blog-like sites FinHeaven and Phinatics. Now that’s smart blog relations!

The Olympic organizers shoud take note of this (though something tells me that if the Chinese have anything to say about it in Beijing, we shouldn’t look for a much greater blog-friendly policy in four years).

Mercury News: Web Site Operators Get Royal Treatment From Dolphins

Scanning Userplane’s site, I honestly couldn’t tell you what the hell they do; something about Flash communication apps. A lot of marketing doubletalk, if you ask me. But they blog, which we like. Here’s the “About Us” boilerplate from a recent press release; maybe you can make heads or tails of it:

Userplane is a pioneer in offering Flash-based Web applications that support live text and audio/video communication. Based in Los Angeles, the company is an innovator in enterprise community messaging that enables a broad range of Web sites to run branded communication applications. Using Macromedia’s Flash Communication Server MX technology, Userplane Apps are deployed internationally on sites ranging from online communities to intranets. The application suite reaches tens of millions of users and supports over a million live conversations a month. Userplane continues to provide forward-thinking Web and software development for industry-leading clients including Red Bull, Honda, 1-800 Flowers, and Juicy Couture.

Link

50 highly subjective points, several amusing, a few actually valuable.

Simon World: Everything You Wanted to Know About Blogging but Were Afraid to Ask

Weird photo that
Steve Jurvetson
uses on his blog

A few weeks ago, I wrote that high-profile venture capitalist Tim Draper was blogging. Looking back at that site, I’m not sure it’s really a blog at all. He’s an author on Always-On, and it’s really hard to call things on that site blogs, as their system is kind of retarded.

Regardless, his colleague Steve Jurvetson, of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, is now blogging, and there’s no doubt it’s a real blog: it’s hosted on Blogspot, after all.

Link

Pete Blackshaw

A couple of weeks ago I noted that Intelliseek, which produces the blog intelligence applications BlogPulse, was hosting a seminar on the topic of business blogs. Apparently they thought it would be a good idea to put their money where their mouth is and start a blog of their own to keep up the momentum on the topic. The blog is written by Pete Blackshaw, the company’s chief marketing officer.

Meanwhile, Intelliseek just introduced an new analytics feature to BlogPulse. The press release reports:

The new blog analytics capability is designed to help marketers and brand managers track, measure and analyze information from nearly two million blogs a day – information posted and shared by influential, active online consumers and opinion shapers.

Link

A few months ago, I wrote about the Red Hat World Tour Blog. That apparently worked so well for the Linux services company that they now have a series of blogs, including an Executive Blog. It caught my eye that the first post there is from Michael Tiemann, VP of Open Source Affairs. I wonder if he’s any relations to former NYC mayor Daniel Tiemann for whom the tiny street I live on was named.

Link

In interesting advertising-supported blog. From their press release:

CoolBusinessIdeas.com, a Singapore-based business intelligence company which publishes a free, monthly e-newsletter that collects new, promising business ideas and innovations globally, has expanded its audience to cater to an international audience. CoolBusinessIdeas.com has also built its new website around an open blog.

Link

[This is a teaser of a post. I have original research data about RSS usage to report, but I ramble on and on first and only deliver the goods in the last paragraph.]

I’ll admit it, when I first discovered RSS, I was all excited about it, too. I even gave in to the hype and joined the popular speculation that RSS might be a viable alternative to email for marketing purposes. But then, like the guy in Monty Python’s Holy Grail who complained of having been turned into a newt, I got better.

Frankly, I’ve always been a bit underwhelmed by RSS. I know that’s not cool to admit (the gals over at BigBlogCompany will probably get their panties in a bunch to hear me say it), but there it is. Yeah, in principal it’s great, but having tried several RSS syndication apps, I haven’t been impressed with the execution. The main thing I hate about most of them is the ephemeral quality of posts: if you let a few days go by without checking in on your feeds, the older items scoll off into the ether, and if you want to go back and look at old links, you’re SOL. I did love NewsGator when I first discovered it and even paid the $30 for it. The idea of having RSS feeds turn into email messages really clicked for me. The only problem is I don’t use Outlook for my email. I’m a Eudora user and have been for many years and I’ll give up on Eudora in favor of Outlook when you pry it from my cold dead hands. For a while, I was using Outlook exclusively for my NewsGator RSS feeds, but somehow I couldn’t keep up the momentum of regularly using yet another Internet communications app; I haven’t checked my NewsGator feeds for months.

But I do have a point here aside from just my own lukewarm experience with RSS. I just came across a post titled Seven Reasons to Switch from EMail Marketing to RSS Advertising on Pheedo.info. Bill (whose last name is not apparent on the site; what’s up with that?) gives these seven reasons to back up his thesis:

1. Sender ID
2. CAN SPAM ACT
3. Blacklists
4. Known Sender
5. Email Filters
6. Bonded Sender Program
7. Cost of Sending Email

(Bill’s orignal post on Pheedo has links on all of those reasons for more context.)

I don’t get this. Aside from Blacklists, those all seem to me like reasons to stick with email marketing, signs that legit marketers are going to triumph over spammers in the end, or at least competitive advantages they have now to distinguish themselves from spam. Frankly, I’m happy to go on record predicting that spam is on the retreat. I firmly believe in 2-3 years, spam will be much less of a problem for email users and legit marketers compared to today.

But, more to the point, switching from email to RSS? Don’t be a fool. By all means, introduce RSS. Despite my personal lack of fascination with RSS, I do believe it has a role to play and a more promising future, even if that may not be in the near future. Note that the post I linked to above (on MarketingVox) where I had given into dreaming of a time when RSS may present an alternative to email, I was writing in the context of Microsoft saying it will introduce an RSS reader into its Longhorn operating system. When Microsoft comes out with a free RSS reader, particularly one built into the OS, then I think RSS will go mainstream. What they should really do, in my opinion, is buy NewsGator or just rip off the idea. But Longhorn isn’t due out till 2006, so let’s not hold our breath.

But here’s the kicker, the reason why I hope you made it all the way to the bottom of this rambling post. Why not kill your email program in favor of RSS today? Because virtually 100% of Internet users use email and virtually 0% of Internet users use RSS today. Sure, we all assume it’s not a lot of folks who use RSS, but I’ve got the actual number. This July, I conducted a survey for my client Quris, an email marketing services provider, of 2543 Internet users from Harris Interactive’s panel. I am still writing up the report for this research, so this is an unreported scoop, but I trust Quris won’t mind. One of the questions we asked was about various digital communications media and devices they use, including this choice:

I use a “news aggregator” to subscribe to websites (using “RSS” or another “XML” syndication language).

The response? Thirty-five people out of 2543 checked that option. That is 1.4% of the total, that five years after RSS has been available to the world.

Sure, go ahead and dump your email programs in favor of RSS. But don’t come crying to me when you realize how dumb of a choice that was.

Is it a humorous attempt to turn a weakness into a strength or a shameless promotional gimmick? You decide.

BizNetTravel’s Travel Log is a travel agency blog I help produce with Adrants‘ Steve Hall. We both suck at spelling. So, for the next two months, BizNetTravel is giving away travel guide books to folks who can find spelling errors and other language mistakes in Steve and my posts. Sadly, this applies only to the BizNetTravel’s site, not on our other sites. What do you think we are, made of travel books?

BizNetTravel: Find Spelling Errors, Win a Guide Book

Ross Mayfield and team over at SocialText, makers of an “enterprise social software” (which, as best I can understand, is some kind of hybrid blog and wiki platform for corporate knowledge management), has just closed a “series A” round of financing for an undisclosed sum from investors including VC of Neoteny and über blogger Joi Ito, social network LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and social network Tribe founder Mark Pincus.

I’ve had the pleasure of chatting with Ross on the phone a few times and exchanging several emails with and can attest he’s super smart. See for yourself: he blogs good stuff at about social networks and knowledge management at Ross.TypePad.com and Corante’s Many-to-Many.

Socialtext.com: Socialtext Closes Series A Financing

A couple of months ago, I wrote a post titled Promoting Your Blog with some advice about driving traffic to your blog. Since then, I came up with another really good technique: get Farked.

Here’s how you do it:

A) Write a funny post. This step is a doozie, because you may not be funny. Really what you need to do is find some original, offbeat content. Observe something that others haven’t about the world (e.g., a wacky business idea someone has put in place, as was my case recently — see below).

a1) Adding a picture of a scantily clad woman probably helps, as Adrants can attest.

B) Submit the link to your funny, scantily clad post to Fark and/or CollegeHumor. These sites, largely collections of funny links, get absolutely sick traffic.

C) Cross your fingers and hope they accept your submission for publication.

D) If they deem your post worthy and link to it, watch your traffic counter spin like a pin wheel in a hurricane.

I recently experienced this with BizNetTravel, a business blog I help a client publish on the travel sector. In my not-so-humble opinion, it’s quite a good blog that gets too little recognition and traffic for the effort I and Adrants’s Steve Hall put into it. The other day I wrote a post about a funny service called ScooterMan (click the link for details). As an afterthought, I added a picture of a woman in a bikini with a scooter (that I actually stole from someone else’s site who linked to my post). As another afterthought, I submitted the link to CollegeHumor.

I didn’t check the logs for a couple of days, but CollegeHumor published the link. Fark then picked up the link from CollegeHumor and also pointed to BizNetTravel.

KA-BOOM!!!

A site that normally gets a few hundred visitors (on a good day) suddenly got nearly 10,000 visitors on a Sunday. It’s slowed down since, naturally, but we’re still way over normal in the residual traffic. The link has also gotten picked up by many other smaller funny link sites.

Just thought I’d share that happy technique. 🙂

Cornell University’s PR department blogs the process of redesigning the university’s web site.

Link

Business 2.0’s senior writer Om Malik reports that Technorati, the popular blog search engine and tracking service, has taken $6.5 million in VC funding lead by Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Steve Rubel and Matthew Podboy mull over what it means for PR professionals and media companies when bloggers, particularly those who are also professional journalists, use their blogs to scoop exclusives, ignoring traditional PR practices such as embargoing news.

Om Malik: Technorati Gets Fed VC Dollars

Thank you, thank you, thank you Blogger, for starting it all. Five years — ages ago, yet the blink of an eye.

Evhead: Happy Birthday Blogger