Tony Williams, the esteemed mayor of Washington DC, has joined the blogosphere. On the 15th of August Mayor Williams launched Mayor’s Blog. He  posted a couple of paragraphs and told his constituents to "stay  tuned." Expectations were set that the new blog would connect the Mayor with the citizens of DC.

The people chatted; they welcomed Mayor Williams to the blogosphere,
expressed their concerns and even offered the Mayor blog advice: need
an RSS feed, filtering comments is not transparent, read other DC
blogs and don’t forget to remind people it’s really you.

And then they waited. And waited. And waited. The people were getting
annoyed. Where was their leader? Where was the connection?  "When
are you going to say something interesting, helpful, provocative or
something? So far it’s a snooze with a long time between snores."

Mayor Williams came back a week later with Star Wars humor. Yoda would say, "a weekly paragraph will not an exciting blog make." Then he really got serious and set expectations for himself….

Generally speaking, I will try to be cogent and consistent. By this I mean: first, providing you observations you can’t find elsewhere in over 100,000 pages of the website; and second, stating the same, take your pick – distinctive or disgusting comments regardless of the audience and the circumstances.You should know my position on an issue, whether you agree with it or not. Blase press releases will not a …YODA!

And expectations for the readers … the blog is not a service line but righteous indignation or comforting, supportive comments are welcomed.

Mayor Williams, I think you’re getting this blog stuff….go forth unto the blogosphere and prosper.

A lesson for all bloggers – "a weekly paragraph will not an exciting blog make."

Article in the Washington Post (free subscription required).

The gist is that locked-out CBC workers are going to use a blog—www.cbcunplugged.com—andpodcasts to put out news and favourite programs to compete with theiremployer.  I can’t wait.  Tomorrow is the big day.  Ihaven’t been to the CBC website in days.  If I don’t get the newsupdate e-mails, I don’t go.  Who has my attention now?  The Globe & Mail.  Their newsletter is nice, html layout, etc.  I’m going to have to see if I can get an evening wrap up in addition to my morning one.

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").

Poynter reports on a bold new initiative by the French newspaper LeMonde which has opted to let its readers create blogs on the newspaper’s site. In order to blog, readers must subscribe to LeMonde’s premium online service, which costs ‚Ǩ6 ($8) a month, according to Poynter.

Poynter: LeMonde Lets Users Blog

Darren Barefoot

>From the "Now Why Didn’t I Think of That?" Department, blogger Darren Barefoot ("Technical Writer, Playwright, Raconteur, Miscellanist") has put his services up for bid on eBay with the auction item title "Rent a Blogger – Online Marketing and Technology Expert: Improve Your Company’s Online Presence and Bottom Line." Barefoot credits Jeremy Wright of Ensight with the idea, as Jeremy also has a similar auction going on.

Both writers are offering their blogging services for three months to the winning company, with 5-10 blog posts per week. More than two days left in Wright’s auction, but bidding is already up to $1,500, and with more than six days to go for Barefoot’s, bidding is up to $500, as of this writing (I’ll update on the close prices).

I suspect there will be more of these to follow and that these auctions will be cited in the future to gage the market value of blogging services.

UPDATE:
The first of the two auctions, for three months of Jeremy Wright’s services, ended today (Dec 3), with the winning bid at $3,350 by Inkspress.com.

FURTHER UPDATE:
Darren Barefoot’s auction had a big close (over $1,000 added to the bid in the last few hours) to close at  $2,025.00 by eKiosk (not clear who that is).

eBay: Rent-a-Blogger

Very interesting interview on last night’s Marketplace radio program from American Public Media, an interview with futurist Andrew Zolli of Z + Partners. Zolli talks about the impact of blogs, social networks, peer-to-peer behavior and other online trends as creating a “numerical social cartography” that is having a big impact on marketing by letting (smart) companies track buying trends in explicit detail. He knows of what he speaks (Z + Partners even have a (somewhat neglected) blog of their own), with references to David Sifry’s Technorait and The Virtual Book Tour. Here are some roughly transcribed excerpts:

Retailers and marketers of all kinds are looking around social networks to try to create new forms of economic value. A great example of that is something arranged by an author in California called The Virtual Book Tour…. This one little blog [on the virtual tour] may have 100 readers. Well, that’s just as good as going to Minetonka and doing a reading and doing a reading at the local Borders.
…
The file sharing we generate on the Web…. There’s an oportunity to see people doing that in real time and building maps and networks of their social relationships. So this person who is a friend of this person introduced this song to this social network and it spread this quickly. That’s of unbelievable value. That’s the equivalent of going into that person’s bedroom and saying “I was there when this person made that person a mix tape.”
…
Commercial anthropology is here to stay. It is going to lead to shift in how we think about global marketing. We can get very effective at reaching exactly the right five people. That’s the kind of effect this kind of social cartography has on the wolrd of marketing.

Now that’s what I’m talking about!

Marketplace.org: Internet Trends

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

This sounds a bit dubious. The site’s funkily formatted homepage explains:

Blogversations are a new way to market. Here’s how it works: Advertisers sponsor bloggers to dicuss a topic or question. Bloggers earn $$. Advertisers engage turned-out audiences.

It continues on from there, but you get the basic idea. The homepage notes “advertorials not encouraged.” Not encouraged? How about not allowed? I’m not going to say this is necessarily evil; I’ll leave that to plenty of the rest of you, I’m sure. Certainly bears watching.

Link

Interesting example of the network effect of blogs. The About statement explains:

Using the power of weblogs for open-source charity. Don’t just fight evil: Strengthen the good.
STG is the nexus of a network of bloggers committed to raising awareness for small charities around the world. Every three weeks this space highlights a new “micro-charity”—a small, inspiring charity, one with a real face and where $1 makes a difference—and the bloggers in the network link to that post, sending traffic, and awareness, the charity’s way.

Link

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?

It really is remarkable how cool Microsoft is about blogs. This post on Community Kitchen explains:

We just launched the Microsoft Community Blogs Portal, a searchable listing of blogs by Microsoft employees, categorized by product or technology topic. The project also makes it easier for pages across Microsoft.com to publish lists of relevant blogs and posts from those blogs.

Isn’t this the kind of thing you’d expect from Apple, considering how innovative they’re supposed to be and all (yet, do they actually do anything with blogs as a company?).

Thanks again to Olivier for the link.

Link

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

I would have to say this is one of the most innovative blog projects I’ve seen in a while. The site explains its mission thusly:

For Art of Speed, Nike commissioned 15 talented young filmmakers to interpret the idea of speed. Over the course of 20 days, this weblog will introduce these innovative directors, their short films, and the digital technology behind the scenes.

Combining two of my favorite trends: advertainment (advermovies, in this case) and business blogging. What else can I say?

Hardly surprising that the creative engine behind this project is Nick Denton‘s Gawker Media. On Nick’s personal site, he writes a more detailed and thoughtful explanation of what the new site is about and the future of this kind of “campaign blog,” which he likens, appropriately, I believe, to a magazine’s “special advertising section”:

Gawker has produced an Art of Speed weblog, consisting of items about the films, their makers, and digital filmmaking in general. The microsite is at www.gawker.com/artofspeed. It’s a month-long temporary weblog, written by Remy Stern of newyorkish.com, and designed by Patric King of House of Pretty.
…
In principle, campaign weblogs allow a marketer to participate in the weblog conversation, rather than observe it as a passive sponsor. Now we’ll just have to see whether they work.

There is a lot more to his post than what I’ve quoted here, but rather than just reprinting the whole thing, I’d encourage you to read it for yourself. There is no doubt this is a seminal event in the development of business blogs. The NYT also reports on this project.

Link

AdTech is the leading conference for Internet advertising and marketing professionals, with some 3,000+ attendees expected for the next three days in San Francisco. I am one of the co-creators of the AdTechBlog, along with the other folks from MarketingVox and a team of volunteer bloggers. We pioneered it in November at the NY show, and the folks who run AdTech liked it enough they agreed to let us partner with them again.

It’s an interesting partnership whereby they retain “ownership” of the product, at least in as much as the domain name, yet they cede to our team total editorial independence. They make a handful of free passes to the three-day show available to our team (which otherwise sell for $1,500 each), and we agree to write something (as we see it) about many of the show sessions, as well as the after-hours party scene, the buzz at the exhibit hall, etc. Promised to be fun.

Frankly, I think it’s a model that would make sense for a lot of industry conferences.

Link

I’ve been a fan of Seth Godin‘s since his days running the one-time online marketing agency Yoyodyne, before it was acquired by Yahoo and he became a guru author of umpteen marketing books. (I even happen to know a piece of useless trivia that the name Yoyodyne comes from Thomas Pynchon’s novel The Crying of Lot 49.)

He recently sent me a review copy of his new book, Free Prize Inside. I haven’t yet had a chance to get into it, but the title and packaging alone are so clever I’m sure it’s destined to be another winner for him. Meanwhile, he also just released an unrelated free e-book BullMarket 2004, a long list of marketing resources (I’m pleased to say my ExecutiveSummary.com site was among them, although when Seth and I exchanged email a few weeks ago about it, I had hoped he’d also include Business Blog Consulting, but it seems he hasn’t; oh well).

But what I really wanted to note here was this: Just when you think the guy has got to be out of great ideas, I see he’s now on a virtual “Business Book Blogging Tour.” Details on the initiative are thing (Godin himself has only a short note about it on his blog), but it seems that for the next two weeks he’s blogging on various other business blogs as a guest blogger. [UPDATE: Todd S. of A Penny For.. notes that details of the program are here.]

First stop is at A Penny For… (here’s Godin’s last of several post today). Michelle Miller, who will also be hosting Godin next week, offers a schedule of Godin’s blog stops.