Update: SixApart’s Anil Dash responds.

As I wrote here and here a few weeks ago, I’m one of thousands running a business blog on TypePad. The service has been excruciatingly slow of late. (Just now I thought I’d tear my hair out while waiting for this post to Save.) Sometimes it’s down altogether.

Don’t get me wrong. This is not a “trash 6A” blog entry. It’s a please please please listen to your customers before it’s too late message. The buzz is building. There’s talk of moving some high-profile blogs (including this one) to WordPress or another platform.

My advice? Post fast. Post fresh. Be transparent. The blogosphere is gonna bite if you don’t. And get something up on your Status Blog (which, BTW, doesn’t have an archive so it’s conspicuously not quite a blog) or on Mena’s Corner that acknowledges the problem.

C’mon guys. We love you! Don’t disappoint.

In the spirit of a task the Blog Herald has undertaken in reviewing 100 blogs in 100 days, blogger extraordinaire and small business blogging advocate, Paul Chaney has undergone an ambitious task of reviewing 52 small business blogs in 52 weeks.

Undoubtedly, small business blogs, like small business web sites, represent a significant growth opportunity. Yet most media attention is focused on large company blogging activities. Paul’s project is a great effort at generating visibility towards small business blogs and is sure to uncover innovative and interesting blog implementations.

Paul has received quite a few "nominations" already, however he may have some open yet.  So send any small business blog examples of your own or of your small business clients to him via email.

BTW, Paul did not ask me to post this, I asked him. We’re both blogging at AllBusiness.com and I think the small biz blog review is a great project.

In doing research for her book, The Corporate Blogging Book, my colleague and friend Debbie Weil asked a half dozen or so of her blogging colleagues if they wanted to comment on her proposed list of categories for blogs. As she explained it:

“I’m trying to be more creative than saying blogs can be used ‘for marketing and PR and thought leadership, as well as internally for project and knowledge management.'”

Her proposed list includes blogs as a complement to traditional PR, conference blogs, customer evangelist blogs (what today’s NYTimes calls branding blogs), etc.

Where this gets interesting is that I didn’t respond with a expansion of her categories, I responded quite differently, and the subsequent email offers some good insight into how blogs have evolved from a simple system to a proscribed technological communications platform with many specific requirements. I’ll let the email talk for itself.

Here’s what I wrote:

“But blogs are just content management tools, Debbie, so I believe it’s the case that they can be used for an infinite number of different corporate tasks, as many as there are tasks requiring online communication, archiving, or discussion. Anything from a shared discussion space for developers to a space where draft documents can be discussed in the pr group to evaluating logos for a new product in marketing, with the watchful eye of the VP involved.

“I understand your desire to categorize and “taxonomize” but the very act of trying to break it down into discrete parts inevitably changes the nature of what you’re writing about and your reader’s reaction to the material.

“Make sense?”

Rick Bruner then followed up with:

“I’m so glad, Dave, to hear you say “blogs are just content management tools.” I agree completely. I honestly think what’s most remarkable about blogs is the simplicity of the tool, not all the rules people apply to personal voice, whether comments are on or off, etc. At their heart, they are just a means for anyone to self-publish with little hassle.”

Toby Bloomberg offered an even more potentially controversial response:

“I agree with you and Dave; that was why I began talking about blogs to begin with… but then the marketers got their fingers in the virtual pie and the game hasn’t been the same.”

Sally Falkow agreed, with her comment:

“How refreshing to hear these comments. I have been taken to task many times for using blogs in odd ways – and not having all the things a blog is ‘supposed to have”

“I completely agree that a blog can be used for many different things. I have clients who publish news blogs – and now that Yahoo News is indexing blogs their content is being picked up.

“I am also using blogsites as a monitoring tool and it works very well. The RSS feeds are set up to monitor words and phrases and then the analysis is done in the blog so other members of the team and execs can access it. Internal use only, of course.”

Tris Hussey gave an additional thought and added a prediction about the next release of WordPress too:

“Expanding on the blogs as content management theme here … Blog platforms make great, cost-effective platforms for “websites”.  If you’re an SMB [small to medium size business -ed] with a limited budget you can get some budget hosting that includes MySQL and have WordPress installed in a few mins.  Since WP’s theme and style system is pretty flexible you can cut design cost and time incredibly.

“I’ve been advocating blogs as website solutions for SMBs before, but now even more so. Personally when WP 1.6 comes out I think it’s really going to shake things up in a huge way.”

I’ll let Debbie have the last word:

“Yes, yes and yes. I agree with all of you. I’ve been explaining blogs as a content management tool since 2001. But for the purposes of the book I can’t just say “Oh and you can do anything with a blog.” I need to give examples to make it make sense to readers. And I like to put examples into categories. It’s just a way of packaging the info.”

But what do you think, dear reader? Is a blog simply a tool for managing content on a Web site, or are there a specific and well-agreed-upon set of capabilities and features that it either must or should have to truly be considered a blog in the greater online community?

 

A group of bloggers including mainstream journalists from outlets such as   CNBC, The Nation and The New York Times are banding together to strike a blow   at established media and pick up some ad dollars in the process.

 

http://www.pajamasmedia.com/

 

"It’s
always nice to see the big players finally waking up to the power of
blog networks. Obviously everyone’s keen to see what the incredibly
creative people who are involved with PJ Media come up with but, until
we see what they actually have up their sleeves it’s a little hard to
get too nervous.

 

Even in just the 1 short month b5media
has been around, we’ve already seen 3 networks promise big launches,
only to tone back their expectations (one launched with 50 and now only
has 35, for example).

 

We look forward to the competition and new ideas PJ Media will bring.   It’s always nice to be challenged, after all."

Sorry, I can’t let this one pass. As much as I’d like to believe the reported results of the iUpload and Guidewire Group Corporate Blogging Survey released this week, I can’t. The survey reports that 89% of companies are blogging. And that corporate adoption of blogging is entering the hyper growth phase.

Here’s the rub. The conclusions are based on 140 respondents. That’s far too small a number from which to draw such a sweeping conclusion. In addition, the way the survey was conducted taints the results. DoubleClick research director Rick Bruner (yes, Rick is the brains behind this blog!) spoke with Mike Sigal of Guidewire Group to find out more. Rick emailed me the following:

"I think the sample size is less of an issue than the sample recruitment methodology…

Oh, and not so coincidentally, perhaps, iUpload sells an enterprise blogging platform. Download the  iUpload and Guidewire Group Corporate Blogging Survey here.

…He [Mike] said they sent out invitations from some
mailing list that should have been representative of the Fortune 500…
But they also put the word out to lots of [bloggers], who posted about
the survey on their blogs. Meaning that a significant number of
respondents were self-selected. Hence, it’s likely that companies who
are particularly tuned into business blogs were more likely to respond."

Makes
sense, doesn’t it? I know I was one of the respondents who took the
survey and I suspect every blogging "consultant" or expert also took it
just to see what questions were being asked. Add up the number of non-corporate respondents to the survey and I wager you’re well under 100 statistically valid responses.

In comparison, I got over 700 responses [PDF of results] to a survey I ran last summer on business blogging. The clearest result from that survey: Time is the top Fear Factor when it comes to corporate blogging.
Other results: 55% of respondents said blogging will become a
"must-have" corporate marketing tool. But it’s not quite here yet. My
survey was publicized to the 15,000-plus subscribers to my
e-newsletter, WordBiz Report.

Download the survey
You can download the iUpload and Guidewire Group Corporate Blogging Survey here. Read with a grain of salt. Then do leave a comment below. Would love to hear your thoughts.

You gotta love it. Seth Godin and the smart crew he’s assembled have
torn a page directly out of Seth’s books to soft-launch his new online
company, Squidoo. No traditional PR, no advertising,
just viral blogging via his new e-book, Everyone Is An Expert [31-page PDF]. The e-book explains (sort of) what the service does. I was lucky enough to get a copy from his Editor-in-Chief Megan Casey, when she emailed it out last week.

In the e-book Seth talks about creating “meaning” out of the mess of information you get when you search for something on the Web. Squidoo is all about finding what you’re really looking for. Because an expert has compiled information for you in a way that makes sense and is immediately useful.

And who are these experts? Well, as the e-book explains, anybody can be an expert. Squidoo’s Web 2.0 platform enables anyone to create a “lens” – a special kind of Web page that points to links and information about your expertise. (A Squidoo lens page also enables you to make money.) But it’s not just links. That doesn’t  describe it properly. It’s RSS feeds and other stuff…

that automatically update your lens page for you.

(And it’s Web 2.0… as I understand it, because Seth & co. are building it from other apps or services or databases already out there.)

Here’s the clearest explanation thus far, from the Squidoo blog, of how a lens works:

It’s a guide (like about.com) and a reference (like wikipedia.com).
It’s a place for personal expression (like typepad.com) and an open
platform for real people (like del.ico.us).

Tantalizingly, the e-book closes with a list of URLs that link to sample lenses. But they don’t go live until Oct. 18th!

Here are two of them:

http://www.squidoo.com/samples/royalties

http://www.squidoo.com/samples/sethgodin

SixApart is one of the companies largely responsible for the migration of blogging from personal musings to the small business and corporate world. Their hosted TypePad service has been wildly popular amongst professionals. IBM legend Irving Wladawsky-Berger uses TypePad (instead of IBM’s blogging platform); Seth Godin uses it. Michael Hyatt, CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishing, uses it. Intuit’s QuickBooks uses it here and here. The Air Conditioning Contractors of America uses it. This blog uses it. And lots more.

So when the TypePad service goes down, as it did earlier this week, it’s a pretty big deal. Lots of business blogs disappeared for hours. And if you’re the publisher of one of them, as I am, it strikes fear in your heart. Has the damn thing been swallowed up? All those thousands of words gone forever?

I was in a panic to put it politely. For me, and thousands of other customers, this was a crisis. Frustratingly, there was scant information at the time on SixApart’s supposedly real-time status blog.

Well, I’m delighted to report that 6A now gets this crisis blogging thing (see above). They’re talking to us. They’re telling us, candidly, what happened:

Both Monday’s and Tuesday’s outages were the result of hardware failures…

That’s really all customers want. We care more about being kept in the loop than about how bad the news is.

It’s just that we want the information in real-time, during the crisis. Tell us something, anything immediately. Acknowledge that there’s a problem (even a big problem) and that you’re working on it. But do it in plain English. Get the CEO to jump on the "status blog," if necessary. Don’t for heaven’s sake leave it up to your techies to pen one sentence about a "temporary service degradation." That’s jargon. It’s not communication.

Hard to do in a crisis, I know. But it’s the whole point of having a blog as a channel for real-time communication. To turn your customers, who are momentarily in a panic, into your evangelists. And who better than SixApart to model how this should be done. Thanks guys, for being responsive to my comments.

Note: turns out you can back up the contents of a TypePad blog into a file and download it to your computer. I just did it here. Now that would be a good tip to give TypePad customers, wouldn’t it? Doesn’t reflect badly on 6A and is a gentle reminder that these are just machines after all.

Yahoo! has just unveiled their new quasi blog search engine. I say "quasi" because, unlike Google’s blog search engine, their combines blogs and news on one page. News items show up center column and blog results are in a right-hand column sidebar, with the most recent posts being returned first (Technorati-style). The blog returns Flickr photos as well.

Blogspotting’s Stephen Baker makes a good point. He says, "[T]his is one more sign that the mainstream and bloggers are swimming in the same pool of data." The line between blogs and mainstream content is getting fuzzier.

Yahoo! is pulling content from the over 750,000 blogs in their MyYahoo! database, so it’s a good idea to get your blog indexed if it’s not already. 

[Via Blogspotting]

With all the talk about AOL’s purchase of Weblogs, Inc., this might have gone under the radar, but Verisign has purchase Dave Winer’s Weblogs.com for a paltry $2 million. Seems that if you have a domain that includes the term "weblogs" you’re pretty hot property these days. Heh.

Yea, I think this qualifies as big news. AOL is purchasing Weblogs, Inc. for a cool $20 million (or is it $30 million?) Yea, it’s big news. So big in fact it falls in the OMG! category. Rafat Ali says this is perhaps the first pure content-related company being bought out in the blog/Web 2.0 space…or at least of this scale. The story is spreading like wildfire across the blogosphere already says Ali. It’s true. Check out Technorati.

I used to blog for WIN. If Calacanis splits his bounty with his bloggers, I’m sure I’m going to wish I still did. (Maybe he’ll grandfather me in. Nah, probably not.)

Blog Moguls…now that’s a term you don’t hear everyday. Blogging already has moguls? It’s an article on ClickZ about, no, not Jason Calacanis and Nick Denton (Until I read the article they were the only two blog moguls I knew of.) These are John Batelle and "Pud" Kaplan and they’re blazing new trails in blogvertising with their respective Federated Media Publishing and Adbrite.

Now, thanks to Audi, blog advertising has become respectable. Anyway, it’s worth a read. (Audi used BlogAds, btw, so how come Henry Copeland hasn’t been crowned with "mogul" status yet?!)

Lately, I’ve been focusing on the effect blogs have on business in terms of ROI (affecting the bottom-line), particularly those used for marketing purposes. To date, I’ve found no studies that quantify such data, just some occasional mentions like that of the Audi blog success, but that was more blogvertising. I’m interested in companies that actually use blogs as marcom tools. Anybody know if such a study exists?

Today Business Week’s Blogspotting Blog mentioned that Yahoo’s director of tech development, Bradley Horowitz has said Yahoo will be launching some sort of Blog or RSS search early next week.

Back in July Steve Rubel posted about Yahoo testing RSS search and ZDNet posted in August that Yahoo was testing blog search in Korea.

The Google Blog Search feature
recently released has had mixed reviews which means an opportunity for
Yahoo to gain a leg up if indeed it’s RSS or Blog search tool really
performs.

Rick and I were contacted by Rob, author of a new pinging site, Feedshot.com. This one does not yet include as many sites as Pingomatic or Pingoat, but according to Rob does function as the intial submission rather than just a ping. Here’s his blurb…

I’ve just launched a service called FeedShot that submits an RSS or Atom feed to 17 blog search engines. It covers all the major engines (DayPop, Feedster, IceRocket, and Technorati), and the list is expanding every week. The service is free, and what makes it unique is that it’s set up to do the initial submission for a feed, rather than as a pinging service. The best part is a report indicating which submissions were successful, which failed, and which were duplicates.

Over at the Burning Door, FeedBurner has announced PingShot, a new service that notifies aggregators and search engines when your feed has been updated. On the post there is an FAQ about the new service.

A quick check of my FeedBurner account shows the new option (click image for larger version):

The default services listed are Technorati and My Yahoo. You can check PubSub, Ping-o-matic and NewsGator and then add up to three other services which include: Feedster, Icerocket and Weblogs.com.

If you have a FeedBurner account you will need to activate this service via your control panel. Outside services such as web directories and search tools may submit their name to receive notifications of updates.

Not soon after I posted It’s the End of the Blogosphere As We Know It (And I Feel Fine), I read this article at Wired called Can Bloggers Strike it Rich?

Jason Calacanis, founder of Weblogs, claims his writers make $200 – $3,000 each month. "Think a scuba diver or video-game player making $500 to $1,500 a month writing about scuba diving or video games."

Hmmm…maybe he should read Dr. Del’s article on video game networks.

In any case, read both sides of the story and make up your own mind.