This probably spells doom for blogs: Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley, one of the biggest Internet hypesters of the boom ’90s, thinks the future is bright for blogs as an ad vehicle. See the full PDF report here.

MarketWatch: Meeker Sees Money in Blogs

Brilliant post by Maciej Ceglowski skewering audio posts for being pointlessly self-indulgent and missing most of what is great about both blogging and the Net in general. I agree with everything he says except that what makes his post so powerful is indeed that it is a very effective audio post. A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. I think the lesson is actually that, used judicioiusly, audio and video posts can indeed be effective, but only when they accomplish something that a normal text post cannot.

IdleWords.com: An Audioblogging Manifesto

Tom Humphrey, Nashville bureau chief for the Knoxville News Sentinel, is fumbling to get the hang of blogging at the Republican convention. Greg Brooks offers him some pointers, namely about the power of “decentralized editing” (my term). Amusing.

UPDATE:
James Lileks rips into this to hilarious effect (scroll past the stuff about Rudy G till after the pic of John McCain and Don Rickles).

It’s interesting for several reasons: 1. the site is described as a “web-only blog,” which of course makes it distinctive from blogs disseminated by carrier pigeon or smoke signals. 2. we learn that the bureau chief for a major newspaper has trouble writing clearly.

He goes on to mock the post sentence by sentence.

Greg Brooks: The Media Don’t Get It, Part MCMXXXII

Insanely dumb. Just imagine how much more interest in the Olympics and the Olympians athlete blogs could spur.

CNN: Olympians largely barred from blogging

Rock Bruner
Internet consultant

MediaPost columnist Mark Naples doesn’t think that blogs rock, but he thinks that I do. More to the point, he thinks I am “Rock Bruner.”

Okay, I know he doesn’t really think that, as we know each other. The “i” and the “o” are next to each other on the keyboard after all. But I can’t resist mulling over all the personal slogans it suggests:

• Like a Rock!
• I rock!
• Rock on!
• Rick Rocks ‘n’ rolls!

Okay, it’s not that funny, but it’s been a long week.

As for the premise of his article — that he doesn’t see what the big deal is about blogs — needless to say I disagree. In fact, I’d venture to sound so 1997 as to say he “doesn’t get” blogs. (A sure sign: he thinks they’re pretty much like bulletin boards.) I’d love nothing more than to Fisk the article and point out all the reasons why blogs, and not I, indeed do rock, but I’m behind on a client deadline. So I invite all you other blog boosters to have a go at him.

MediaPost: On Blogocracy and Its Significance

A morality tale of why it’s a bad idea to blog about your sex life with co-workers, especially when they work for Congress and the White House.

Washington Post: Blog Interrupted

More of the same about politics and blogs. Leads like this just bug me:

Forget direct mail solicitations and pleas made in person or on television. Savvy politicians trying to raise campaign money today are turning to the Internet.

No, don’t forget direct mail, TV and in-person politicking, for Pete’s sake. Why must journalists reduce everything to such simplistic binary choices. Blogs are good, but they will replace nothing. That’s just something new.

IndyStar: Savvy politicos turn to Web logs

Interesting piece Reuters apparently wrote for Billboard about the impact that blogs are having on the music industry. On the one hand, hip new indie bands such as the Killers, Scissor Sisters, Fiery Furnaces and Franz Ferdinand have all benefited from blog-fueled buzz. On the other hand, record companies predictably don’t know what to make of the copyright implications of MP3 blogs such as Fluxblog, Scenestars and TofuHut, the likes of which have scooped the record companies recently with previously unreleased material from new works by Fiona Apple, Interpol and Bjork.

My favorite quote is Chiore Sicha, editorial director of Gawker Media, calling 18-35 year old “this shocking demographic.” Egad!

Reuters: Blogs Build Buzz, Raise Copyright Questions

Paul Chaney of Radiant Marketing asked me and a few other prominent marketing consultant bloggers what we thought was the future of blogging. Part I of the post is up today. Part II is supposed to come tomorrow. In typical fashion, my answer is longest.

🙂

Radiant Marketing: The Future of Blogging, In Their Own Words, Part I

Good lord, just what we need, another ridiculous blog-related acronym: LoMoSo (location-based mobile social networks).

More on this dubious trend from ITBusineses.ca.

News.com: Has cell phone blogging found its place?

Sensible words of warning: don’t blog about your sex life or your boss’s dirty laundry without considering the impact it could have on your job security. At some jobs, it doesn’t really matter what you blog about; you boss or your boss’s boss just might not like blogs, or, more likely, understand them. Bottom line is unedited self-publishing online is threatening to some people. In which case, it comes down to which you like better — your blog or your job. Or, blog anonymously.

As if there weren’t enough examples of this sorry phenomenon already, here’s the latest: Penny Cholmondeley fired from her job working for Nunavut Tourism in the Arctic region of Canada due to one anonymous complaint about her blog Polar Penny.

STLToday: Blog slog can get you in trouble in the workplace

Too tired at the moment to add context, but an interesting story from the always-interesting Mark Glaser about the impact of blogs on traditional media.

OJR: Dear Bloggers: Media Discover Promotional Potential of Blogosphere

Mark Tosczak points out that the NYT has caught onto the fact that not all blogs are real.

NYT: Wry Hoaxes Enliven the World of Web Diarists

Stephen Yellin
16, high-school student
doing his part to
fulfill blogger stereotypes
(if only he were
named ‘Rantin’)

Get it while you can, this story is set to self-destruct for non-WSJ subscribers in about a week. A who’s who roundup among the bloggers covering the Democratic Convention in Boston, the blog story of the week (if not the century).

WSJ: Meet the Bloggers

Frankly, I’m not sure this is worth posting, as the observations about blogging are rather 2002, but it’s in the Economist, so, there you go.

Economist.com: Weblogging, The Trees Fight Back

General article on blogging from Time Magazine that does a reasonable job answering the perpetual question “What are blogs?” Nothing much new here to those of us who have already been at it for a while, but a good mainstream overview of the phenomenon.

Time: Meet Joe Blog

Interesting piece about a British school that has introduced roughly half of the students in the school to blogging, including those as young as seven, and the students’ academic performance, particularly in the area of IT, has improved markedly.

BBC: The Seven-Year-Old Bloggers

Nick Denton

I’ve written here before about Nick Denton, the publisher behind Gawker, Wonkette, Fleshbot, Gizmodo and, most recently, Defamer, all blog properties he hires other writers to produce, all of which are doing considerable traffic and have played host to real advertisers like British Airways, Absolut Vodka, Jose Cuervo, Warner Brothers Music, Intuit and others.

Not to name drop, but just for context, Nick and I are buddies from years ago (as in, he had Thanksgiving at my place last year), back from when he was a journalist for the Financial Times (and I for Boston Globe and others), before Nick quit journalism for dot-com entrepreneurship to found Moreover and then rather accidentally made a bunch of money on First Tuesday. Nick was the guy who turned me onto blogs, and in the last couple of years he has dedicated himself to being at the forefront of those pioneering the idea of commercial weblogs.

Nick’s a genuinely nice guy and obviously an uncommonly creative thinker (check out his latest project: ad campaign blogs), but what is perhaps most interesting about him (and anyway it’s the point of this rather embarrassingly butt-kissing post) is what a media darling he is. I’ve never known anyone since I did PR for Marimba’s Kim Polese who was such a publicity magnet. Towit, here are three articles about him published in just the last few weeks in major media, only the tip of the iceberg for this sort of stuff:

• NY Times: Nike Tries a New Medium for Advertising: The Blog
• Wired: How Can I Sex Up This Blog Business?
• Business 2.0: What Makes Nick Tick?

I think Ad Age may also have something in the works, but I haven’t seen it yet. Another buddy, Steve Hall, interviewed for the NYT piece, told me that the journalist Nat Ives asked him, “Does it seem like we’re writing about Gawker a bit too much?” Uh…yeah, maybe! FYI, my cell phone is 646 554-0963, if anyone wants to interview a blog expert other than Nick Denton anytime soon…

UPDATE:
ClickZ writes: “Questions for Gawker Media Publisher Nick Denton” (July 6) in which he reveals part of his secret: “Exercise, sometimes. Alcohol, often.”

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.

Wired: Will RSS Readers Clog the Web?

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