Thanks to Rick for posting to the BBC mailing list how to get some invite keys to coComment.  Of course, by replying I also volunteered to review it (doh!).

So … I’ve signed up (very easy, only a little bit of info required).  I put the bookmarklet on my toolbar.  I added my person comment RSS feed to my aggregator. And then I left my first comment.  It happened that Scoble had a post on another comment tracking service I just couldn’t resist!

First impressions … easy sign up.  Easy to use.  The comment I registered was immediately reflected in my account.

I’ll also throw my two cents in on this whole topic.  While blogs are all about the conversation, I know personally I haven’t left as many comments on blog posts for the very simple reason that it’s been way, way too hard to keep track of them.  Not all platforms offer comment feeds, and who really wants to have to keep adding and culling those feeds.  E-mails … well good sometimes, bad other times.

I’m pretty hopeful about this new service and am certainly going to kick up my commenting a notch to give it a good, solid try

Tags: coComment, blog comments

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Dave Sifry of Technorati has issued an updated “State of the Blogosphere”. Here are some interesting factoids:

• Technorati now tracks over 27.2 Million blogs
• The blogosphere is doubling in size every 5 and a half months
• It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
• On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
• 13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
• Spings (Spam Pings) can sometimes account for as much as 60% of the total daily pings Technorati receives
• Sophisticated spam management tools eliminate the spings and find that about 9% of new blogs are spam or machine generated
• Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour
• Over 81 Million posts with tags since January 2005, increasing by 400,000 per day
• Blog Finder has over 850,000 blogs, and over 2,500 popular categories have attracted a critical mass of topical bloggers

The growth rates are amazing. It is also interesting to see the percentage of splogs that are machine generated. Plus some new vernacular, (at least to me) “Spings”. You can read the whole thing at Sifry’s Alerts.

On Friday I received an email from my wife with the subject line “price,” a message of “February price” and an attachment called “price.zip”. A quick phone call confirmed that she didn’t send it. She didn’t send it again later that day.

On Saturday I received the same email from four other people. Intrigued, I Googled varients of the subject line, message and attachment. Nothing relevant. So I hit Technorati. There weren’t dozens of posts, but I did find one that led me to this post that discussed the bagle variant, along with characteristics, what it does to your system, and most importantly removal instructions.

Two lessons: One, the blogosphere is unmatched in staying up-to-date with buzz and breaking news when the news may not be of interest to the general public (or what Fox News and CNN deem to be of interest to the public, like Oscar nominations and high-speed televised car chases.)
Two, over the next few days those posts and ones like it will get a lot of traffic. What’s going on in or around your industry that you can blog about that’s going to capture a lot of searches? Blogging early about something of interest to your audience can be a great way of capturing the interest of new prospects.

Gawker Media has launched Valleywag, a tech gossip rag, focusing mainly on the people and stories of San Francisco and Silicon Valley. The blog is edited by Nick Douglas who most recently was writing for Blogebrity. The Valleywag FAQ has the rest of the details.

The first few posts are a mixture of Photo-chop skills and inside-the-valley commentary. The site should get quite a bit of traffic from the left-coast folks and those wishing they were on the left-coast.

VistaPrint first gained fame as the company that would send you a few hundred business cards for free. And so a million small businesses ordered the free cards and would eagerly scatter them to prospects, clients and colleauges. The caveat was that the back of the business cards said Get your own free business cards at VistaPrint.com. These spankin’ new business cards told the recipients the business’s contact info but also that they were too cheap to drop a whole thirty dollars on custom made business cards that advertised their business, not VistaPrint’s.

And so anytime a business uses dirt cheap or half-assed solutions for their business, I call it The VistaPrint Syndrome. This is beyond starting business on a shoestring or bootstrapping… You’re starting it on a stale ricecake, an eye booger and a dream.

And so it is with Blogger. I roll my eyes every time a business announces their new business blog and the address is at blogspot.com. I’ve been accused of being a blog bigot for telling clients to not use Blogger under any circumstances. Using Blogger and the free Blog*Spot hosting is basically telling the rest of the world that you’re too cheap to spend a few dollars for a halfway decent blog for your business. You’re too cheap to pay for web hosting, too cheap to pay for a 1-click install of WordPress, too cheap to pay for a domain-mapped TypePad blog. Business bloggers who use Blogger/Blog*Spot are telling the rest of the world not to take them seriously.

Sure it is just a blog. Blogs are supposed to be fun. Cheap and free was the initial allure of blogs. That was great at the beginning. I expect this same trend to eventually apply to WordPress.com once newbies figure out that the .com is the free hosted product and the .org is the free installable software – hopefully by the .com will have domain mapping.

Having a Blog*Spot blog and expecting someone to be impressed is like having a Yellow Pages listing and expecting them to go Oh. Wow. Shocker. You’re listed in the phone book.

Solutions?

1. Buy a domain name, get hosting for it, publish with Blogger to your own domain name.
2. Move your blog to a service like TypePad or BlogHarbor and domain map it.
3. Date/marry/hookup with a geek, have them install WordPress, Movable Type or TextPattern for you and be done with it. And then dump/divorce them if necessary.

If we want business blogs to be taken seriously we have to raise our expectations of our blogs and the newbies just starting out. Each time some company says Go to our blog at yadda-yadda dot blogspot dot com we should all feel as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

Final word: I love VistaPrint. They are a great service and their express shipping option is a dream. I love Blogger. I started with them five years ago with my personal blog.

Here is another great Firefox extension that allows you to interact with the web pages you visit. It’s called Hyperwords. Hyperwords allows you to highlight the text on any web page and then choose from an automatic menu to search, look up reference sites, map, tag, check definitions, translate, email or blog about the page

Since blogs are technically web sites with feeds, (ok, I’m simplifying just a bit), then there is no reason a blog cannot be effectively marketed like a web site. To this end, Stephan made a great post about optimizing this blog, pointing out some important tips that bloggers would do well to follow.

In my experience working with both search engine optimization and blog marketing, I’ve found that there are more ways to market a blog than a site without a feed. A few of the many resources to help you do this include:

RSS Button Maker – This nifty tool created by Thomas McMahon allows you to fill in your blog name, url and feed url and pick the buttons you want to create. Hit submit and it will output the code for about 20 or so RSS feed reader/aggregator RSS subscription buttons with your feed information embedded. Then all you need to do is copy and paste the code into your blog template.

A study performed by Ipsos-Insight sponsored by Yahoo (pdf) indicated that RSS feed subscription buttons or “chicklets” are the preferred way for users to subscribe to a blog’s RSS feed.

This tool also creates the code for several social bookmark services to make it easier for your readers to add your blog to del.icio.us, digg, slashdot or furl.net. Should your blog get bookmarked enough, it may make the “popular” list from one of these services and that can drive significant amounts of traffic.

RSS to Email Tools: FeedBlitz and R|mail – Sign up for these services and then place the code in the template of your blog. Visitors can opt to receive your posts via email. At first I wondered, why would anyone do that? RSS is so much more convenient. I can say from personal experience, 1/3 of the daily visitors to my own blog choose this option and we’ve had similar rates with blog marketing clients. Those are blog visitors you might not have otherwise had.

Monster Blog Directory Submission List – This list shows the “add a blog” or “add your feed” urls for over 80 different blog and RSS search engines and directories. The list gets edited monthly to add new sites or to edit urls. One of the advantages to having a blog as part of your company web site is that with a feed, you can get your site listed in these directories or search engines and a site sans feed cannot.

One thing I will note, is that blog marketing tools are only as effective as the quality of the content on the site they are being used to promote. There is no substitute for quality content and also the social networks between communities of like-minded blogs to draw traffic.

OK, so I don’t have 101 uses for RSS YET…I’m working up to it, and I need your help.

Rich Ziade over at basement.org listed about a dozen uses for RSS, including:

• Tracking packages
• Following the comics
• Transferring contacts between computers

There are, I’m sure, dozens of ways to use RSS, outside of the normal news gathering, competitive intelligence.

Other RSS uses lists:

RSS Specifications – Uses for RSS

public virtual blog – Cool Uses of RSS

What’s your innovative use for RSS?

At the end of the month, I’ll compile a list of all the great ways to use RSS here. Let’s shoot for 101!

Lots of buzz. Lots of folks.

Word-of-mouth-marketing (WOMM), Florida warmth & sun and a bunch of online experts… including our very own Toby Bloomberg, Josh Hallett and Dana VanDen Heuvel who are live blogging the Word of Mouth Marketing Association‘s conference in Orlando. (Dana is one of the lead bloggers.) What more could you ask for?

Check out the WOMBAT (Word of Mouth Basic Training) conference blog. Day 1 here. Day 2 here. They’ve got a full crowd of international attendees and speakers. 400 people according to conference organizer and WOMMA ceo Andy Sernovitz. Wish I were there…

Note: there are lots of posts on the WOMBAT blog. You’ll have to poke around. A sampling: Women and WOMM; B2B and WOMM; WOMM and ethics; WOM and blogging.

Also see Technorati.

Bottom line: WOMM has come into its own as a separate and defined marketing niche. The notion that this form of marketing can be codified and measured is fascinating. Stay tuned…

David Kline, co-author of one of the handful of books published thus far on blogging (Blog! How the Newest Media Revolution Is Changing Politics, Business and Culture) emailed me this week to ask for a quote for the article he’s working on about what’s holding the F500 back from blogging and what it will take for blogging to go mainstream. He referenced the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki’s stat that only 3% of F500s are blogging. I responded with the following mini rant:

Fear & blogging on the blogosphere Long Tail
(with apologies to Hunter S. Thompson)

Fear is the single most important thing holding corporate America back from embracing blogging. Fear of being open, fear of a two-way conversation, fear of not being able to control the message, fear of the time commitment. Just makes sense. If you put blogging in the basket of corporate communications it runs absolutely antithetical to so-called current best practices.

So what will make this change? Again, fear. Fear of not embracing the new media technologies which so many consumers are now adopting, whether it’s a video iPod or a blog. Fear of not being where your customers are. Which, increasingly, is online.

Well, that’s my thought for the day. Now back to cleaning up the mess on my desk… Oh, and don’t misunderstand. I’m not being critical of the F500s efforts thus far to launch blogs. Just realistic.

This just in: BuzzMetrics, a division of VNU (which owns lots of stuff, including a lot of research firms, such as Nielsen Media Research (the TV ratings folks) and Nielsen//NetRatings, one of the leading Internet audience measurement firms), has merged with (read: acquired) IntelliSeek.

IntelliSeek and BuzzMetrics have been battling it out for supremacy in the field of monitoring online consumer generated content for business intelligence. Both companies monitor, through a combination of technology and human analysts, discussions about products and trends taking place in email discussion communities, online forums, bulletin boards and the like, but since blogs came on the scene, that has really been their raison d’ê·tre.

The new company will be called Nielsen BuzzMetrics. Jonathan Carson, formerly CEO of BuzzMetrics, will take over as CEO of the new venture, while Mike Nazzaro, CEO of IntelliSeek, will be president and COO. My buddy Pete Blackshaw, CMO of IntelliSeek, get’s the dotcomish title of Chief Marketing and Customer Satisfaction Officer, while another buddy, BuzzMetric’s Max Kalehoff, will be marketing VP.

Max, formerly of Jupiter Reseach, will also be joined by his ex and future colleague Gary Stein, who started at BuzzMetrics just this week in a client service role after years as one of the most prominent analysts covering the online marketing sector at Jupiter.

Strange when the company that’s supposed to track the buzz is making the buzz. Just goes to show, in a round about way, how hot blogs are for market intelligence, as Toby was just saying.

It seems that every virtual corner I turn there’s talk about tracking the buzz from 2.0 social media tools e.g., blogs, boards, Flickr, etc. The marketing research profession is entering an exciting (although some may find it uncomfortable) phase in the development of data collection and analysis techniques. The field (literally!) has gone from asking questions via door-to-door interviewing to listening to virtual conversations.

Granted, the use of consumer generated media (CGM) as a credible research tool, is in its infancy (historically researchers seem to move cautiously…look how long it took for firms to embrace online research); however, consumer generated media is too rich to overlook. Some companies are beginning to explore CGM as a supplement to traditional research for information about:

• Brand buzz -who.what.where
• Competitive intelligence
• Product development and improvement
• Pre launch buzz
• Early warning crisis management
• Advertising effectiveness
• Voice of the customer

I understand that Chrysler is using CGM to track trends. They’ve gone from mining data at a high level – sensibilities about specific models to a more granular level of information about features and attributes. The next step is better understanding the influencers and how the information flows.

Just yesterday I heard from a reliable source that a popular Atlanta beverage company is reviewing research firms that monitor digital conversations.
However, for CMG to become accepted as a mainstream, credible technique marketing research professionals will be challenged to:

• Incorporate CGM information into the findings from traditional methodologies
• Develop a standard of credibility that is acceptable by practitioners and academics
• Determine what is white noise and what is significant information without sanitizing the data

Here’s one to ponder …

Information is any difference that makes a difference. – Gregory Batson

Technorati Tags: Marketing_Research, CGM, Consumer_Generated_Media, Blogs

As Rick mentioned, I’ve lent a hand with the recent blog revamp. One of those things is to help search engine optimize (SEO) this blog a bit more. I’m just in Phase 1… there’s plenty more left to do. Here’s a recap on what’s been done:

1. URLs. It’s imperative when switching blog platforms that the old permalink URLs still work. There are plenty of deep inbound links from the blogosphere to specific posts that provide that all-important “link gain” (such as Google’s PageRank) to this blog. We don’t want to lose that! So I ensured that the permalink URLs of all the old posts within our new WordPress 2.0 blog are exactly the same as they were under Typepad. I couldn’t do that with the category URLs (WordPress requires that category URLs include a directory), so for those I did a permanent (301) redirect to the new URL. (In case you’re curious, I did this through a rewrite rule in .htaccess). That way the link gain passes on to the new URL. I also set up a rewrite rule for all pages under http://businessblogconsulting.com to 301 redirect to the corresponding page on http://www.businessblogconsulting.com. This will eliminate duplicate pages in the search engine indices and consolidate link gain. Otherwise when people link to http://businessblogconsulting.com without the www it creates another site for the search engines to visit and explore. For new posts, the permalink URLs will contain full words and hyphens not underscores, since underscores are not considered to be word separators by Google.
2. Title tags. From an SEO perspective, the title tag is the most important thing on the page. Most blogs don’t have optimal title tags. The best title tag is one that LEADS with the targeted keywords. Most blogs, including this one, led with the name of the blog. Instead that should go at the end. I’m happy to say that’s now the case here. And I customized the home page title tag to have some good keywords in them like “corporate blogs” and “business blogging”. Note that now the home page title (which is “Business Blog Consulting: Everything about Corporate Blogs and Business Blogging”) has both singular and plural forms “blog” and “blogs”, as well as the verb tense “blogging”. Creating a custom title tag for your blog’s home page is well worth doing. Consider this: I decided to target the search phrase “web marketing blog” with my personal blog, Stephan Spencer’s Scatterings. By simply changing the home page title tag from “Stephan Spencer’s Scatterings” to “Stephan Spencer’s Scatterings: Web Marketing Blog” and adding a mention of “web marketing blog” once in the body copy, I went from nowhere in Google to currently #8 out of 55,200,000 for “web marketing blog”! That’s an important point, btw… Make sure the keywords you are targeting are not just in the title tag but in the body copy as well. On this blog, you’ll notice that “corporate blogs” is now in the home page title AND in the body copy. Hopefully I’ll be able to report back soon that we’re highly ranked for “corporate blogs”!
3. Tagging. A tag cloud and tag pages are a blogger’s secret weapon. I can’t believe how few bloggers do this. I’m not talking about Technorati tags. I’m talking about using a plugin like Ultimate Tag Warrior, which is exactly the plugin I installed to create tag pages like this one. So now, if we want to target a new keyword in the search engines, we just start tagging some posts with that keyword and, presto!, we’ve got text links everywhere pointing to this new tag page (notice I’ve put a tag cloud on the global site nav so such links are ubiquitous throughout the blog). And of course I made sure the tag name is mentioned at the beginning of the title tag and in the body copy! I’m going to further optimize the tag pages by adding some keyword-rich intro copy to each tag page, but I haven’t gotten to that yet.
4. Related Posts. I installed the Contextual Related Posts plugin so now we’ve got more interconnections between blog posts, which is a good thing. Each permalink page lists related posts at the bottom of the page. Most blogs are overreliant on the chronological archives, which tells the search engines to weight your recent posts more heavily. But an old post may be really well optimized and targeting a really important keyword. So that post needs more link gain, and that means more links pointing to that page and links from pages higher up in the site hierarchy. Related Posts is a good start. I made each blog author’s name a link to their posts, and that will help too. I’m also going to install a Top 10 Posts plugin to provide further linkages, and that will be even better! But I haven’t gotten a chance to do so yet. Ah, not enough hours in the day…
5. Link text. I’ve made the title of each blog post link to that post’s permalink page. The word “permalink” is not good link text, for the same reason that “click here” is not good link text either. (Unless of course you want to be #1 in Google or Yahoo for “click here”!) By having the words in the post title as link text, this tells the search engines what the permalinked page is about much more effectively.

This isn’t a comprehensive list, and I’m sure I’ve forgotten some things. If I have, I’ll post an update here.

BTW… Here are a couple other good blog posts to check out if you want more search engine visibility for your blog: Ultimate WordPress SEO Tips, Google Teaches Bloggers How To Rank

Last week TypePad had well documented service issues and outages caused by in part by their attempts to keep pace with the enormous growth of blogging. Today, WordPress (probably the largest benefactor of the TypePad blues) launched a much awaited 2.0 upgrade.

But, if you tried to grab your copy you were greeted with this message all day long.
“Switching servers, please check back in about a half hour. Thanks! — Matt”

I’m not picking on either service, they are both wonderful success stories, I just don’t know if anyone can really handle the adoption rate of blogging. There’s certainly room for others to play!

Georgia Patrick, one of the Duct Tape Marketing Channel contributors, has a great thread going, titled – All I Want For Christmas is a Blog Gone Bad. The post is about some media coverage titled “When Blogs Go Bad.” The discussion centers on the very good outcome that can be had when your blog receives what some might see as negative attention.

Take a look and add your good/bad blog stories.

Great new extension for Firefox users allows you to blog a site directly from your browswer. The extension seems to work flawlessly with TypePad, WordPress and MovableType blogs. Easy to use and easy to set-up

Performancing for Firefox

The  #1 concern I’m hearing from organizations interested in exploring blogs to support marketing strategies is, “But what about the negative comments? How do we control people posting bad things about our brand or our company?

Marketing has changed. The world has changed. It changed while you were not looking. It changed when the internet, email and cell phones made it easy and cheap to communicate.

Bottom-line with over 50 million people chatting it up on blogs if you turn comments off you loose the home court advantage. People will talk about your company, your products, your customer service and even your blog. Why would you not want that discussion to take place where you can easily monitor it and respond?

To turn comments on. To turn comments off. This has be come a tired debate in the blogosphere. One of the benefits of a marketing blog is the opportunity to dialogue with customers, prospects and stakeholders.  Sorry, no comments does not make a conversation. It’s called a monologue. One person takes center stage with no opportunity for direct feedback. For my money, a blog without comments and trackbacks is an on-line newsletter. And that’s not a negative comment.

Great example of a highly focused brand kibitz on a non “corporate blog” is McChronicles. This blog about McDonalds recently welcomed it’s 18,000 visitor. A Google search for McChronicles pulls 15,800 results. And with this post the count is now 15,8001. That’s a lot of Big Macs! U.S. News and World Report highlighted McCs in an article about customers creating buzz.

Citizen or conversational journalism. McDonald owners get it. Some are asking McChronicles to review their restaurants. Corporate McD people have been known to drop by to listen (tracked by referral stats). However, the folks at corporate McD’s must be busy chowing down on their burgers since a sanctioned McD blog has not yet surfaced.

If you’re still not convenienced that comments on are a smart business decison, here are …

5 Strategies To Combat Negative Blog Comments
5. Turn off comments
4. Monitor comments
3. Develop a comment policy
Include on your navigation bar and above the comment section
2. Delete comments that do not meet your guidelines

The Number One Way To Combat Negative Blog Comments …
1. Show ’em what you are made of!
Use negative comments (those that express legit concerns) as a way to demonstrate how you handle customer concerns.

Our customers’ sphere of influence is not limited to their around the corner neighborhood or the company water cooler but anywhere there is an internet connection or cell phone access. With the understanding – that companies no longer control the message (influence yes. control no.) – and that customers have more power than ever before in “helping sell your product”, you gain a huge advantage over your competition – those that are trying to swim upstream against the current. It’s an exciting, new world. Don’t be afraid to become apart of it. 

This is a nice way to end 2005.  To give you some personal context, this is biggest blogad buy ever — 800 blogs.  This is more ads than Blogads.com sold in the entirety of 2003.  (The previous record was held by Audi, which ordered ads on 286 blogs last spring.)  I’ll leave it to the media mavens among you to figure out the larger ramifications, but for me this is just a darn pleasant way to end a good year.

 

Finally, I’m fuzzy on the details of this, but there may be some opportunity for bloggers to interact with one of the NBCites (Keith Obermann on online viral weirdness, Rita Cosby on porn and Joe Scarborough on internet addiction) as they pull together the shows. If you are interested, write me and I’ll try to put you in touch with the NBC person who floated this idea.

  Forbes Magazine calls out blogs in its “Attack of the Blogs!” issue on the magazine’s latest cover.  In his article, (requires registration) Daniel Lyons tells us that blogs are being used for evil, saying  “they are the ultimate vehicle for brand-bashing, personal attacks, political extremism and smear campaigns.”

 “Bloggers are more of a threat than people realize, and they are only going to get more toxic. This is the new reality”.

Dave, I’m very excited! Finally, Google’s unveiled its blog search system, called, ingeniously enough Google Blog Search, and I want to learn all about how to use it. You ready to take on that challenge?

I’m also excited about this. Finally, we can sidestep slow and primitive RSS and Weblog search engines like Technorati and Feedster and instead tap into the amazing speed that is the underlying Google technology.

However, it’s still Google, so it’s still leaning on the complex side. Let’s have a look…

First off, basic searches are easy enough. Want to see where I’m mentioned in the blogosphere? Search for “Dave Taylor”: you can obviously make the appropriate tweaks to search on your name instead, if you’re so inclined. Want to see what parenting weblogs are out there? That’s particularly easy now, just search for Parenting. Curious about what the blogosphere is buzzing about Voice Over IP telephones? That’s another easy search: voip.

But this is Google, so now, finally, you can use more sophisticated search patterns too. Instead of just searching for “voip”, let’s try a more sophisticated OR search