BlogAds, a leading ad network for blogs, released its second annual survey of blog readers. Some 30,000 blog readers filled out the survey. I’m too busy to summarize, but suffice it to say blog readers appear to be a high-quality audience that should be attractive to advertisers.

This is must-read for anyone who is trying to sell advertising on blogs. One thing that would make the study better, however, would be to index these questions against average Internet users, so we had a sense of how blog readers are better than average Net users. Still, it certainly makes a case for the value of blog readers.

UPDATE:

I neglected to mention that Gallup just released a survey about blog readership that found that 15% of Americans, or 19% of U.S. Internet users, read blogs at least a few times a month, but the findings of the poll were available online for only a few days before they went behind subscription-access lock-down. Here is a MediaPost article that analyzes the two polls together, including this nugget:

Frank Newport, editor in chief at Gallup
poll, says his results are not inconsistent with Copeland’s conclusion.
Newport compared readers of blogs to readers of The New York Times. "We know that only a fraction of the American public reads the Times, but it affects everyone because that’s what the people who control mainstream media read."

Aside from Google AdSense and Overture Content Match, what other networks are there that focus on blog advertising besides these?

• AdBrite
• BlogAds
• BURST! Media
• CrispAds
• Pheedo

And don’t say Weblogs Inc. or Gawker, as those are publishing ventures, not networks in the sense that any existing blogger could simply leverage them to sell ads on their site.

I had an enjoyable dinner last night at the trendy NY restaurant Spice Market with

David Geller and Brian Ratzliff, respectively CEO/President and VP of Marketing & Business Development of WhatCounts, along with Bob Silver, SVP of MWWGroup PR. They wanted to pitch me on the value of an all-in-one blog hardware/software platform for corporate blogging, the BlogUnit, following my somewhat cynical post about it following its launch announcement.

Since they were nice enough to ply me with food and wine, I’ll be nice enough to take a few minutes to summarize some of what we discussed and share my reflections.

WhatCounts has been around for about three years, focused on email
marketing services for mid-sized companies (some of their ~150 clients
include Seattle Times, Chicago Sun, Advance Publishing). Hoping
to catch the blog wave, they’ve come out with the Unit, blog publishing
software bundled with a server box. Notable features include built-in
email newsletter publishing integration (a big plus in my mind
and gaping hole in most blog publishing platforms), APIs, Web Services,
LDAP support, other cool tech acronyms, built-in ticket support a la
TypePad, high-end customer support, in-bound RSS feed publishing
(another gaping hole in many blog publishing platforms; everyone is so
hot on publishing to RSS, but what about taking RSS feeds from other sites or applications and publishing them through the blog publishing tool to your own blog?), and other stuff.

Price: $10,000+.

That last piont is one we got stuck on for a while. Their argument
is that for corporations of a decent size, that price is no obstable,
considering that it includes the hardware the company would need to
dedicate to the system anyway, along with professional support,
built-in security, yadda-yadda. My feeling was they will have a hell of
a time competiting at that price given the legions of bloggers who will
be advocating Movable Type, WordPress, etc. at a cost of between free
and practically free.

It’s not the price itself I think they have to worry about but the
evangelists. So a company, or rather an individual employee,  gets the
idea the company should have a "blog." They’re going to start their
research and immediately hear "Movable Type, Blogger, TypePad,
WordPress, Movable Type, Manilla, Drupal, TypePad, Movable Type,
WordPress," etc. Who the hell is going to evangelize a $10,000 product?
That’s what commissioned sales people are for.

Besides, the more I thought about it after I left, I don’t believe
you’re really talking about a "blog" when you’re talking $10,000
software. You’re talking about an enterprise business knowledge
management system. Or, not to put too fine a point on it, "content
management." And everyone who knows blogs knows that they are the
antidote to content management.

An anecdote may be instructive here. A "friend of mine" recently
started a job at a mid-sized company and decided an internal blog would
be a great knowlege management tool. So I…I mean, my friend, started
mumbling about it internally and he got the idea that several people
would want to consider this or that aspect of whether a blog was the
best tool or what various approvals may be needed, etc.

Instead of losing heart, he sniffed around and found a group that
had already flirted with the idea, got a referral to a friendly guy in
IT who went ahead and found server space and installed MT. My friend
tweaked the basic template a bit and filled the site with a week’s
worth of content or so before he even pointed it out to his manager:
"This is what I’m talking about." At that point, the manager could see
exactly how useful it was.

My friend started quietly sharing links to content on the blog to
others internally on a beta basis, many of whom agreed it could be a
useful way to distribute information. Eventually, he was introduced to
the group internally that is tasked with managing the intranet. They
let it be known that his style of skunkworks wasn’t the way he was
supposed to have gone about this (hey, I’m new here), but after some
quick evaluation they also agreed it was a handy tool, one that seemed
easy to support, the price was truly a non-issue, etc. It’s now on the
road to offical sanction and dedicated internal resources.

My friend was told later that had he gone about it through the
official channels it certainly would have taken much longer to ever get
the green light.

Point is, pricing the tool at $10,000 means it has to go
through the proper channels. My friend’s own department (market
research) doesn’t have $10,000 for software applications (but he could
put the $150 MT license fee on his corporate Amex no problem), and
whether IT would have seen fit to cough up that much dough vs. kludging
something themselves would have been a decision that could have ended
nowhere. That kind of gate is going to test the enthusiasm of many
internal blog evangelists. The reason blogs have spread like wildfire
is they are being promoted by evangelists, not sales people.

My $0.02. I told them I’m sure there’s a market for their sales
approach. But I think there’s a much bigger market for Six Apart’s.
There are, after all, only 2000 "Global 2000" companies, compared to
11+ million small businesses in the U.S. alone.

Scott Kessler of BusinessWeek has picked his five favorite companies to watch in ’05 and I’m sure you’re surprised to read that there’s a blogging company included. 

Weblogs, Inc., co-founded by Brian Alvey and Jason Calacanis, is the company behind well regarded blogs like the Autoblog.

According to Scott:

I believe blogs will grow increasingly prominent, because they offer interesting and unique content, are easy to search and organize, and have the potential to generate notable revenues and profits through the use of online advertising (primarily keyword search) and affiliate marketing. Gawker Media is another major network of blogs.

For once I agree with Jason Calacanis.

Jason Calacanis: Why Bloglines sold: It’s not a business

BURST Media

has introduced an ad network for blogs. Current properties include Gawker Media blogs, BlueLemur, 2 Walls Webzine, and CelebCourthouse, with others on the way soon.

Meanwhile, CrispAds is another player in the blog ad network space. I’m getting briefed more on their play shortly and will update with details then.

1

ClickZ: BURST! Media Launches Blog Ad Channel

Big congrats to my buddy Steve Hall for his Adrants blog being named the #1 "Websites You Should Bookmark" in Ad Age’s (print-only) 2004 Book of Tens issue. (Just in case you thought sex had stopped selling…)

Adrants: Adrants Named Number-One Site to Bookmark

This is great. Saw it first on MarketingVox, which linked to the original note on Micro Persuasion, where Steve Rubel noted that IntelliSeek is targeting ads on Google to keyword searches of Steve Rubel. Some additional quick research shows the same goes for Nick Denton and Jason Calacanis, though sadly no one seems interested in my name or, surprisingly, Robert Scoble.

I suspect this is rapidly going to become the next litmus test for cool in the blogosphere (in which case we’d soon see sad examles of people bidding on their own names through dummy sites, no doubt), the way it has been for a while to have a first-name rank on Google (e.g., despite the fact that he personally rarely blogs anymore, I see that Denton retains his enviable rank on "Nick").

Continuing to show its fascination with blogs, Microsoft has just released a new blog publishing system of its own.

Any reviews out there yet?

UPDATE:
As one commenter notes, bOingbOing has a funny/disturbing post on about how MSN is censoring authors’ ability to use dirty words in the titles of their blogs. Other reviews also noted in comments below.

ANOTHER UPDATE:
Further details from PaidContent, AP and a press release.

CALL TO ACTION:
Anyone want to review this platform for me for $25? (If so, see review terms here first.)

Link

This piece speculates that the big money in blogs will be in the blog tools. Maybe, but I don’t understand why any company would pay $50,000 and $150,000, according to the article, for blog software from KnowNow, a company I’ve never heard of, when it could pay for a multi-seat site license from Six Apart for Movable Type for just over $1,000. The company also mentions Open Text, another blog publishing system I know relatively little about, as well as Cymfony, a PR tool for monitoring blog posts, among other things (with a name that stupid, I am willing to predict its imminent doom). The article also perpetuates the myth that AlwaysOn is a blog. (I used to keep an open mind about that, but I’ve come to agree with most bloggers that AlwaysOn is so not a blog.)

BusinessWeek: Betting on Tools that Power Blogs

A week after her blogosphere-bombshell “Shitcanned” post where TroutGirl (aka Joyce Park) wrote of getting fired from Friendster for blogging, she tells her side of the story to Red Herring. I still haven’t heard Friendster’s side of the story. Have they told it somewhere that I’ve overlooked?

Thanks to Olivier for the link.

Red Herring: No Friendster of Mine

Paul Chaney at Radiant Marketing suggests it’s time to retire the word “blog.” In his comments field I suggest “blog” isn’t so bad, or anyway “weblog” isn’t, and I also say that based on my PR background it’s too late to try to rebrand it anyway. Interesting reading, anyway.

Radiant Marketing: A Blog By Any Other Name

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

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

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

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

I want to commission reviews of the following blog publishing systems:

• WordPress
• pMachine
• ExpressionEngine
• GreyMatter
• iBlog
• Blosxom
• Manila Userland
• Radio Userland
• PHPNuke

UPDATE: Based on your feedback, I’ll also include the following platforms for review (what the heck, it’s only my money, right?):

• Drupal
• Blogware
• b2Evolution
• Textpattern
• Traction
• Slash
• Nucleus CMS / Blog CMS

That is, of course, presuming I can find folks out there willing to write about all of these. (NOTE: Movable Type, TypePad and Blogger aren’t on this list because I am prepared to write those reviews myself.)

I am ready to pay the princely sum of $25 per review in real cash money (of the PayPal variety, anyway) for a worthy review according to specs outlined below. Sure, it’s crap money, but how much do you get paid to blog now? Besides, if you’re interested in getting paid to help anyone set up a business blog on your chosen platform, this may be a decent lead generator.

If you’re interested, here are the conditions of the deal:

• You should NOT send me a review unsolicited. This is an important test of your ability to follow directions. You should instead send me an email describing why you are the best person to for the job of writing such a review
• You should have at least a few months’ of experience blogging on the platform you intend to review
• You should have no close affiliation with the company that produces the software in question or other potential conflicts of interest
• You must adequately address all of the review points I note in the review guide below.
• You should be at least technically literate enough to address all of the questions below.
• You can also post the review to your site, but for my palty $25 I can repurpose the review however I see fit, including packaging all these reviews together in a report for sale or other creative uses.
• If I accept your review for publication on this site, I won’t edit it except to correct spelling, grammar, etc. though I may add bracketed editorial comments, if I’m so inclined.
• You need to have a PayPal account, as that’s how I plan to send reviewers payment.

There may be other qualifications I haven’t thought of yet that I’ll explain in private correspondence if we get that far.

If you’re interested, keep reading below the review guide:

Review Guide

Reviewers should address all of the following points in their software review:

• General performance. What makes this different/better than other blog publishing platforms?
• What are some of the best advantages about this platform?
• What are some of its disadvantages?
• What’s the killer feature, if there is one?
• What features does it lack or need fixing?
• Where does the publishing engine reside? On its own hosted servers, like Blogger or TypePad? On your own web server, like Movable Type? On your desktop, like Userland Radio? Other? (Outerspace?) What advantages/disadvantages do you see in this approach?
• What’s the geek factor on this? How comfortable can non-technical people be with it?
• What’s the learning curve? Totally intuitive? Lots of features, thus requiring more time to familiarize yourself with all of it?
• What’s involved in setting it up? If you’re not technical, do you need help?
• Are there platform restrictions? (E.g., PC/Mac, APS vs. Linux servers, SQL Server, etc.)
• Who produces it? Is it an open-source community, a labor-of-love by some programmer, a company with financial backing? What is the likelihood this development team is going to still be at it a year or two from now, providing new features, etc.?
• Where is the software developed? How is language support in English (the web site, the manual, the support communities, etc.)? Other languages?
• What’s the pricing of it?
• Is there tech support?
• Is there a good user manual?
• Is there a third-party developer community? If so, how active?
• Is there a vibrant user/support/forum community? If so, what are the URLs of such?
• Is there support for photos galleries?
• Is there a built-in Blogroll/Link List kind of feature to manage blogrolls?
• Can you post via email? Mobile phone/moblog?
• Does it email posts to subscribers who so choose?
• Anything notable in the archive features?
• Does it support comments? Comment-spam filtering? If so (the latter), what’s the approach?
• Does it support trackback?
• Any idea how well it works on a Mac, with Mozilla or other non-W2K IE platforms?
• Does it pioneer any other new blog features that other platforms don’t have?
• Does it support multiple authors? If so, does it have decent permission controls? (E.g., can you limit authors to publish only to draft?)
• Does it support a simple modular design for page elements? (E.g., when editing templates, are things like blogroll lists, sidebar elements, headers, etc., managed as separate entities, or are they all just in the HTML of a single template?)
• Is it well suited for public corporate blogging? Why or why not?
• Is it well suited for internal corporate blogging? Why or why not?
• What other blog platforms have you used that you can compare this to?
• What else do we need to know about this system?

UPDATE:
These additional questions have since occurred to me:

• Does it let you publish in XML syndication? If so, in which formats? RSS 1.0? RSS 2.0? Atom? Others?
• Does it have a spell checker?
• Does it have a wiki-publishing component?
• Can you easily set up multiple weblogs from one account or instalation of the blog publishing software, or must you create multiple accounts or installations?
• Does it support categories? If so, how about hiearchical categories (e.g., Movies / Horror, Movies / Comedies, Movies / Thriller, Books / Fiction, Books / Biographies, and so on)? What about surpressed categories? (That is, in the monthly archive, publish all except the “Breaking News” category)?
• Does it let you easily create a “remaindered links” blog-within-a-blog, a la Anil Dash‘s Links Blog? (Obviously, you can kludge this in most systems, but I’m wondering if some blog software has it off the shelf.)

If you have other points you think I should include in this review guide, please recommend them in the comments field. Also, if there are other blog publishing platforms you think I should add to this list (excluding TypePad, Movable Type and Blogger, which I plan to review myself), please also note in the comments section. If you are interested in writing such a review for me, please send me an email making a case for why you’d be the best person to do so.

New from Weblogs Inc:

• AutoBlog
• BloggingBaby
• Joystiq

(So branding isn’t their strong suit.)

Meanwhile, Weblogs Inc CEO Jason Calacanis has a recent rant titled “What makes a website a blog? (the blog test).” I’m not sure who died and made him king of the bloggers, and, no, I don’t agree with all of his criteria (particularly not about comments — so, I take it Instapundit isn’t a blogger? Or about the lack of an editor — at MarketingVox, editor Tig Tillinghast makes contributors post to draft, but it’s still a blog in my book; and as for frequently linking to other sites, so Salam Pax’s site wasn’t a blog when he was just writing about life in Baghdad before and during the invasion?). Whatever. I think trying to define a blog is a waste of time. You know it when you see it, that’s about it.

What I would recommend to Jason, however, for his new blogs to make them more blog-like and credible would be some personal identity. What really makes a blog a blog, if you ask me, is some kind of relationship readers have with the writer. Looking at these new Weblogs Inc blogs, however, I see no indication of who the authors are. They’re not pseudononymous, they’re just anonymous.

We don’t need a set of rules, just self-policing (like this post, or Jason’s other excellent post calling Drew Curtis to account for payola) and commonly accepted best practices.

Good luck with the new, blogs, though. They look otherwise interesting.

UPDATE:
Here is a definition of what makes a (good) blog that I prefer.

Jason Calacanis, publisher of the blog network Weblogs Inc, accuses Fark.com’s Drew Curtis of selling out the blogosphere by accepting payment for the links on Fark, which would otherwise seem to be pure editorial. Calacanis says he was told by a Fark ad sales person that editorial links cost $300-400.

This story broke a few days ago and I’ve been meaning to get to it earlier, but I’ve been busy. I’ve also been chewing over my reaction to it. On the one hand, I like Fark and I realize that he deserves some kind of revenue for the wonderful resource he’s created, and I’m sure that if he labeled the ads as ads, users would inevitably be less inclined to click on them.

But bottom line is Jason is right. THis kind of blatant editorial fraud is nothing but trouble for the blogosphere, not to mention for Fark itself at this point. AltaVista learned that lesson years ago when it pioneered the idea of selling link advertising on its search engine but without labeling them. Big user brouhaha.

Moreover, I might not have gotten so annoyed about it till I read in the Wired piece picking up on the whole controversy that Drew is claiming that Calacanis’s experience was “an isolated incident.” Now, I can’t prove this (unless push were to come to shove, and then I’d make a call), but trust me, that’s bullshit. I know a couple of viral marketing media buyers who told me more than a year ago that they were buying links on Fark, and other sites like it, too. This is no issolated incident, it’s a frickin’ industry niche.

And that is bad. Bad for blogging. What’s worse, is you have Jon Fine, an Advertising Age reporter, telling Wired that mixing advertising and editorial is not really a big deal: “Journalistic watchdogs get really (excited) about it,” he said. “But does the public give a shit? I don’t think so.”

That’s just great. As if the public doesn’t hate advertising and distrust media companies enough already.

TheJasonCalacanisWeblog: Fark.com sells their editorial