It was only a matter of time. Just as employers have clauses in their HR documentation about drug and alcohol use, it appears that blogs may soon join the ranks of contraband in the halls of some corporations.

According to an article in ABC NewsOnline, Australia, the authors of a new book “Uses of Blogs” have a detailed chapter on blogging and the law which highlight the wishes of some employers to ban blogging in the workplace. This is common sense -don’t blog on personal time. However, the lines could, and will, quickly blur as to how far this extends into the personal lives of employees.

“Employers are now considering including specific blogging provisions in employment contracts,” the authors write in Uses of Blogs, a book to be published later this year.

While I’m not an attorney, I’m projecting that the real enforceability of a no-blogging clause in an employment will be vetted in court after someone’s fired for a breach of contract.

Would anyone say, “sorry, I have to decline your offer as working for your company would keep me from blogging.” We’ll see…

Over at ClickZ Kate Kaye presents the findings of a recent survey conducted by the Blogads Network that distinguishes blog audiences into four categories: political, gossip, mom and music.

CEO Henry Copeland points out that some political and entertainment advertisers grasp the idea of targeting specific types of blogs based on the unique audiences they reach, many advertisers “don’t get the degree to which these are self-contained universes…This is not a basket of eyeballs; these are very interwoven communities.”

The study also showed that hardly anyone from the four groups listens to podcasts:

“62 percent of music blog readers, 75 percent of political blog readers, 77 percent of mom blog readers and 80 percent of gossip blog readers said they never listen to podcasts.”

Along the lines of advertising, eMarketer reports a study by PQ Media that Blog, Podcast and RSS advertising rose by nearly 200% in 2005 and is expected to grow another 145% in 2006 to reach nearly $50 million.

“Blog, podcast and RSS advertising are being driven by some of the same factors boosting the growth of the overall alternative media sector: continued audience fragmentation, the perceived ineffectiveness of traditional advertising, and the elusive but coveted 18-to-34-year-old demographic,” said Patrick Quinn, president of PQ Media. “[They] have demonstrated an ability to reach younger demographics as well as influentials.”

And then there was this interesting quote about podcasting:

Looking ahead, PQ Media estimates that podcast advertising will be a larger market than blog advertising by 2010, when the blog segment will comprise only 39.7%, or $300.4 million, of overall expenditures. Podcasting, projected to grow at a compound annual rate of 154.4%, is predicted to reach a total of $327.0 million in 2010. These numbers are closely in line with eMarketer’s own projections, which recently put total spending on podcast advertising at a total of $300 million by 2010.

Perhaps Blogads CEO Henry Copeland and PQ Media President Patrick Quinn should get together and compare notes?

The first mistake I mention in “The 11 Biggest Mistakes Small Business Bloggers Make” is not getting your own domain name for your blog, and using something.typepad.com or something similar.

However, you need to be careful if you use the registrars to research a blog domain name. (Or any domain name, for that matter.) Wired’s Monkey Bites blog reports here and here on a situation where someone put a desired domain name into a shopping cart at GoDaddy but didn’t check out right then. (Happens all the time.)

When they returned the next day to purchase the domain name it was gone, purchased by someone else and for sale for an inflated price.

The same thing happened to someone I know when she put her titular domain name in a shopping cart at GoDaddy but didn’t check out. The next day — poof! — it was gone.

Slimy? Yes. Illegal? Probably not.

In short: if you researching a domain name at the registrars, be ready to buy it right then!

So Andy whimped out and asked me to post for him about the official release of his book “BlogWild!“. Geez Andy, it’s a great book! Why wouldn’t you want to write about it? Now I’ve already done a review of both Andy’s and Des’ books, but this is Andy’s day. The book is real, it’s done, it’s even hard cover!

And I really did enjoy it (I still have to try the recipes). Here’s my thing about business books. First they need to be readable. Good prose is key. Humour is important. Next, they need to cut to the chase. Brevity scores major points in my book. Took me less than an hour to go cover to cover (yeah, okay I skimmed the Typepad sections … but I know when I’m fixing Toby’s site I’ll be referring to it). So if you car pool to work or take transit, you might be able to be done and have action steps before you even get to work!

That brings me to my next (and next to last) point … action items. End the chapters with nice easy action items. Something short and tangible that could even be done while you’re on hold or something. Intense action items just don’t work. KISS. Keep It Simple Stupid.

Finally, the anti-hype factor. Yes, blogs are hot. Yes, people are clamoring about them. But there are real business reasons for using the a blog to get your message out. How about saving money! There’s a good one (and it’s in Andy’s book). Andy leverages the hype about blogs to get your attention, but then puts all the advice into anti-hype tone. This is so important. People might get sick of talking about “blogs” per se, but they aren’t going to get sick of being able to write about their business, communicate with customers, and get a good search engine ranking for like $15/mo.

So … Andy’s book is for real. Congrats Andy!. And boy with all the authors on this site I’m getting to feel like the odd man out! Oh well. Who wants to read a book written by a geek anyway.

Tags: BlogWild, Andy Wibbels

I’ve been pretty absent from the Blogosphere lately and if you’ve been wondering why (or maybe you haven’t 😉 ) this is why. For the past month + I’ve been orchestrating the launch of a deal with Lycos to use and promote Qumana’s offline blog editor and our RSS reader QReader (formerly Lektora).

Lycos press release, Qumana release, my blog post

This has been a huge and exciting project for us and, to the best of my knowledge, is the first time a blog platform has chosen to promote a single blog tool for their users. Believe me this is just the first of these kinds of deals we’re working on.

Beyond what this means for Qumana, I think this is the first step towards a great thing for blogs and blogging. Make it easy for “regular people” to publish rich posts, publish to nearly any blog platform, tag their posts, and insert a key-word driven via Q Ads (formerly Adgenta) and I think we are enabling people to write more content, better and leverage it across lots of places.

So, thank you to the whole Qumana and Lycos team. The fun is just starting now!

Tags: Qumana, Lycos

Recently I wrote a post on optimizing your TypePad blog titles for the search engines. Today I read a well-documented article called Search Engine Optimization for Blogs by Bill Hartzer.

In it he discusses techniques to use if WordPress or Movable Type is your platform of choice. He also has some good information on promoting your blog. (Although, how he forgot Stephan Spencer’s fantastic collection of WordPress plug-ins I’ll never know!)
If you’re using your blog as a lead-generation tool be sure to check this article out.

Six Apart, creator of MovableType and TypePad, has rececently acquired SplashBlog, “a mobile photo blogging application and service that allows users to instantly publish photos from a camera phone to a blog.”

According to the Six Apart press release,

The addition of the SplashBlog team and the rich mobile blogging technologies they have developed will help assure that our users will continue to have the best user experience and most advanced features available when they blog from mobile devices and cell phones.

Just going to prove that there’s no run-on sentence like a press release run-on sentence.

Others also weigh in:

• John Cook’s Venture Blog
• San Francisco Business Times

With some of the recent attention towards blog relations, there’s no question that buzz marketing through blogs and similar consumer generated media is on the rise. Blogs are many things including marketing tools for business and also voices to be heard – consumer voices that provide insight into a marketplace. Availability and ease of communications along with creative tools make consumer generated media (CGM) a force to be reckoned with.

Recently Al Gore’s Current TV announced that they are looking for consumers to create commercials for its commercial sponsors (AdJab). I think you’ll see more of that as marketers and consumers embrace the medium.

At the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York last week, Rebecca Lieb of ClickZ moderated a session including Dave Balter from BzzAgent, Pete Blackshaw from Nielsen BuzzMetrics (Intelliseek) and Jim Nail of Cymfony who presented on creating and measuring buzz using blogs and word of mouth (WOM).

Some interesting stats and insights from the session:

• According to a study by McKinsey, two thirds of the U.S. economy is influenced by word of mouth.
• 50% of negative WOM happens because of a feeling of injustice on behalf on the value of the brand.
• Blogs are indexed at a faster rate and will enter search results more quickly. Brands have an oppotunity to leverage this to acquire more “shelf space” in the search results.
• Just because journalists are not writing about an issue or event, doesn’t mean it’s not being talked about.

Overall it was an excellent session. Here are notes on the entire session on CGM and Blog Buzz.

No doubt I wasn’t the only Australian blogger to hope that the ‘To Blog or Not to Blog’ segment on the Nine Network’s Business Sunday TV program, February 26, would have something worthwhile to show and say about the state of the Australian business blogosphere. Nothing too profound, mind you. Screened at the decidedly non-peak hour of 8.30am every Sunday in the ratings period, the program is not usually very mentally taxing. In the event, it was quite interesting for me, although I can’t help wondering what corporate executives would have made of it, in terms of the usefulness and desirability of their companies establishing a blog.

There is a link here to the transcript of the program. That is regrettably not a blog permalink, so it will presumably only stay on the web for a limited time. A handy resource for anyone reading the transcript is the post with links to the sites of the people interviewed: this was put up by one of the main interviewees, dedicated Microsoft Aussie Blogger Frank Arrigo, and is a blog permalink.

As the transcript shows, Frank and others, including Trevor Cook, had some very useful comments to make. But what I found a real downer was that the last two people interviewed, before a final comment from Frank, were Australian lawyers from global partnerships, emphasizing the downside risks of corporate blogging and explaining why their firms weren’t blogging. No serious discussion of risk management, just a ‘flick to the too-hard basket’ approach.

Knowing from experience how what is actually said in interviews from such programs can become scarcely recognizable when the program is aired, it may well be that the lawyers – both very knowledgeable in the IT space – actually contributed a more nuanced commentary. Snip! Sorry (not really) about that!

Actually, the final comment from Frank was pretty neat, pointing out that corporates actually can’t afford not to be in the blogging space. But my own feeling is that half-awake corporate execs chomping on their breakfast toast at 8.55am or so would have been inclined to be more influenced by the do-nothing-new, cautious words we heard from the attorneys.

Of course, one Sunday morning television program cannot tell the whole story. I’m tremendously keen for business blogging to kick off in Australia and I’m optimistic about that happening soon. I’ve been encouraged in this by indications such as the invitations I have to present at various events this month and next and then later in the year.

It’s quite possible however that not a lot has changed since Trevor Cook’s excellent State of Australian Blogging  post five months ago:

Overall, blogging in Australia lags behind the US and probably behind some Asian and European countries. Why? One reason is that we usually do. Australia’s population is made up of a few thousand people who have a genuine global view and who are very much at the cutting edge but the bulk of the population are followers of international trends (we’ll try something when it becomes the rage overseas).

Trevor concluded that post with an expression of optimism about how things would be this year. So I find it sobering that a conference on blogs, wikis and rss, at which both Trevor and I are scheduled to speak, has now been re-timetabled from the end of this month to a date six months hence.

Are we there yet? I don’t think so.

If you’ve been in this industry as long as I have (and what’s that? five minutes?) you’re probably dead tired of mainstream media articles that either promote blogging as the next coming or dismissing it as so five minutes ago.

Jason Fry of the Wall Street Journal has an article today called “Blog Epitaphs? Get Me Rewrite!” (Read it quickly; this link will expire faster than a Mission Impossible recording.)

One of my favorite lines:

My bet: Within a couple of years blogging will be a term thrown around loosely — and sometimes inaccurately — to describe a style and rhythm of writing, as well as the tools to publish that writing.

Although I’ve been saying for a while that blogs will probably become invisible in the future, I prefer Fry’s prediction that it will be a “style and rhythm of writing;” it makes it sound like jazz: full of improvisation and promise.

The question this weekend wasn’t if the Americans would win in hockey (the women just earned the bronze), but how BlogBurst (just in beta from Pluck) would compensate bloggers who sign up for their program to re-publish blog posts in MSM newspapers. A comment left on Techcrunch indicates that there will be a revenue share once BlogBurst leaves beta, so that is good news (sorta).

The larger question is, then, what will this mean for the MSM? Can newspapers re-build or reinvigorate their online readership with blog content? Blogs are certainly getting a lot of attention, and blogs, IMHO, are building and enhancing the ideas sparked in the MSM, seems to me that it would be a nice compliment to have blog posts related to a topic supplement online content.

It will remain to be seen, though, what the revenue model will be and how it pans out for bloggers.

More on my blog here

Tags: BlogBurst, Pluck, Techcrunch, MSM

Have you been reading Darren’s Blogging for Beginners series? No? Well you should. All of us should. It’s a great check-in for old hands and newbies. Today’s installment is on writing good content and another must-read on the blogosphere (maybe I should bone up on this since content is my topic for the Blogonomics Business Blogging Cruise … and BTW there is less than a month left to get discounted pricing). Darren’s series is something that you should certainly start with when you’re considering a business blog … or encouraging clients to blog.

Speaking of which …. if you are starting blog … this is another important article to read: 23 Questions for Prospective Bloggers – Is a Blog Right for You?. Let’s face it, while all of us here contributing to BBC are sold on blogging and lots of us are making careers of it, it isn’t for everyone. Starting with Darren’s post … ask yourself these questions … and you’ll be in a good position to know if a blog is right for you.

Tags: Business Blogging, Darren Rowse, How to blog, Blogonomics

Blogs to Riches – New York Magazine

Technorati adds authority weighting – Scoble
What is authority? – Rubel

State of the Blogosphere Part 2: Beyond Search – Sifry

How to Almost Live on Blogging – Wired

Corporate Brand Blog: Liberator or Oppressor? – Chief Marketer

The Economist published an article this week on the threats and opportunities of blogs and bloggers, “Corporate reputations – The blog in the corporate machine“.

The Threat:

“The spread of “social mediaâ€? across the internet—such as online discussion groups, e-mailing lists and blogs—has brought forth a new breed of brand assassin, who can materialise from nowhere and savage a firm’s reputation.”

The Opportunity:

“Many big companies have been looking eagerly for ways to tailor their advertising to specific groups of consumers. They have found that web logs and internet discussion groups, which bring together people of similar interests, can help them turn hot links into cold cash. But besides trying to get out their message, companies are also learning that blogs can provide early warning signs of potential problems.”

Steve Rubel was also quoted in the article giving tips on how to use a blog for crisis communications, suggesting the creation of a “lockbox blog”.

Despite the attempt at describing pros and cons of consumer generated media and blogs in particular, the article doesn’t do justice to the many positive marketing, PR and branding benefits. Reputation management is not the only reason companies should pay attention to the blogosphere. Regardless, the article does draw more attention to blogging with an influential audience and that’s a good thing.

OK, I know I’m stretching here, as this is a blog about business blogs, but hear me out.

Vernon Evans, Jr. is sentenced to die on Monday, February 6th. He’s certainly not the only person in America on death row, but he’s the only one I know who has a blog…a blog called Meet Vernon.

Vernon doesn’t have Internet access, so people email questions to him and he responds through an intermediary who then posts to his blog.

Whatever your personal feelings on the death penalty, this is an interesting approach to “personalizing” a death row inmate…something that has been done time and again through more traditional means in the past.

Is this what Marshall McLuhan meant when he said “The medium is the message?” Maybe. Or maybe it’s just the way in which many people may mis-interpret this famous line.

In any case, I first heard about this blog through the Wall St. Journal, although I’m sure it’s been picked up by other news media as well. What makes this story different than many others is the medium through which the story is being told.

Sometimes a message is important because of the way it’s delivered; as Vernon’s supporters have shown us, the blogging platform itself alters, enhances, and promotes the message.

While I’m sure (at least I hope) your blog serves a different purpose than Vernon’s, be aware of the unique attributes of blogging: its sense of community involvement, its immediacy, and its ability to be “news worthy” just because it’s a new medium.

Its newness and particularities make it a powerful method to disseminate your message.

The big discussion right now in the blog space is whether the recent comments from Yahoo’s Chief Financial Officer Susan Decker mean that Yahoo has “given up” on the search space and “conceded” it to Google. The problem is, I think everyone’s misinterpreting what Decker said because they’re all succumbing to the “win or die” philosophy that’s so prevalent in the industry. But if you can put that aside, there’s nothing particularly concerning, alarming or even distressing about what Decker is exploring. It’s the Ferrari Solution:

    What do Yahoo, Apple and Ferrari have in common?

It’s far too early to write Yahoo off or somehow conclude that the company is irrelevant to the world of search. Search is the future of the Internet and there’s still lots of space for innovation.

The Boston Globe reports on a new service called Gather that plans on organizing content from all types of writers into a coherent collection online. Plus, they’re going to pay writers based on advertising that appears with the content. (Back to the eyeballs = profitability model?)
Although similar sites exist (About, Technorati, Bloglines, Topix, Squidoo, and Digg are listed by the Globe in varying degrees of correctness), the site does have the backing of Jim Manzi, former chief executive of Lotus Development Corp. and Bill Bradley, who played basketball for the Knicks before moving to Washington, D.C.

Only time will tell whether Gather becomes a venue for bloggers to “go pro”, but it is establishing its Web 2.0 cred by wearing its “beta” tag proudly by its logo.

Announced during MacWorld earlier this week was the release of iWeb, a new part of iLife ’06.

iWeb includes blogging software and integrates seemlessly into the rest of iLife, which includes iPhoto, iMovie and iTunes, among iOthers. By using the rest of the suite, bloggers will have drag-and-drop options, such as dragging an iTunes playlist into the blog. Of course, links will be automatically created to the iTunes music store where visitors can purchase said songs.

Although the software seems to be targeted to personal bloggers rather than business bloggers, a lot of creative types such as ad agencies are likely to give this platform a try, giving it a certain inevitable buzz.

Will iWeb impact the blogosphere? I don’t know…did the iPod change the way we listen to music?

I got this through Wired, which had an opportunity to put iWeb through its paces.

We’ve all been there…staring at the empty sandbox that is our future blog post, with not an idea in sight.

Jonathan Kranz feels our pain and has written an article Five Surefire Content Ideas (When Your Blog is Drawing Blanks) at MarketingProfs.com aimed to help us.

Although most of the points are common sense, common sense isn’t always common practice. (Stephen Covey.) Plus, Jonathan Kranz is a hell of a copywriter. He throws in some "blog bonus points" for each item that offer an interesting twist on a common practice.

This article is mostly about creating content, but doesn’t specifically speak to what content will generate the most traffic. While your mileage may vary, I’ve discovered that how-to articles, posts that answer common questions in your field, and exposing scams generate the most traffic.

What surefire content ideas do you have to offer? What type of posts generate the most feedback and traffic at your blog?

Once you’ve been blogging for a while the inevitable happens; your vacation time arrives.

For those of you who have recently started your own business you may now be saying, "what is this word ‘vacation’ that you use?" Just stick with me.

How do you handle this time off in terms of your blog? Darren Rowse of ProBlogger has amazingly come up with seven different things you can do with your blog while on vacation.

I myself have done both #1 (give it a rest) and #2 (pre-blog.) What’s your choice?