Someone asked me yesterday where to go for a "blogging 101" and I was momentarily stumped.
There’s so much information out there it’s hard to know where to
begin. I decided to be literal and look for resources labelled Blogging
101… or close to it.  Here are a few 101 links to get you started. I include RSS and podcasting because they fall under
the umbrella of corporate blogging.

Blogging 101

Blogging 101 by Rebecca Blood (on MSN Spaces)

Blogging 101 by Kari Chisholm

Blogging 101 v. 1 on BlogWriteForCEOs

Blogs 101 by Rich Meislin in New York Times’ Technology section

Blogging 101 by Technorati

Business Blogging 101 on the NEWPRWiki

Global Voices’ Intro to Blogs

Weblog Basics on About.com

Wikibooks’ Blogging 101

Wikipedia definition of Weblog

Click "Continue reading" for Podcasting 101 and RSS 101 resources…

Podcasting 101

Podcasting 101 on MacZealots.com

Podcasting 101 on TechWeb

Podcasting 101 by Merle Stinnett

How to Record a Podcast by Glenn Fleishman

RSS 101

RSS 101: "Really Simple" 5-Step Guide to Get Started

RSS 101 Screencast by Alex Barnett

RSS 101 for Marketers (Forrester report, July 2005)

RSS Marketing

These are by no means the only 101 resources for blogging,
podcasting and RSS. If you know of others  titled "101," leave a note in
the Comments below and I’ll add them.

Using the word "mainstream" when it comes to blogs is now, so last
year.
But, based on the frequent questions I receive from readers,
effectively employing a blog as a marketing tool is still a bit of a
mystery to most.

Many of my readers ask some variation of this question: "Should I be using a blog, an ezine, email or RSS?" And my answer: YES

Here’s my take.

By itself, a blog is probably not enough (unless you are Tom Peters or the like.)

Small businesses should take the power of a blog and combine it with
an email distribution list and weekly or monthly ezine newsletter.
When you employ all three you get the biggest bang for your marketing
effort.

A couple reasons why you still need to email delivery.

• RSS is not yet the content delivery method of choice for the average person
• Email content is pushed out to readers as a reminder that you are there – RSS doesn’t allow this same control
• Capturing email addresses allows you to market your readers over and over again

In many cases, someone will visit your blog or web site and like
what they see but get pulled away by some other distraction, never to
return to your blog again. If you capture that same person’s email and
permission to send further communication, you turn that visit into a
lead.

If
you are posting to your blog like you should (3-5/wk minimum) then you
should have plenty of content to repurpose into a newsletter. Pull out
your best posts and expand on them or do a round-up of your blog posts.
You will find that your readers will gravitate towards their reading
method of choice – RSS or email.
I love blogs, I love RSS delivery. But, don’t short your marketing
efforts. Make your message available in as many forms as possible –
that’s how you create marketing momentum.

TechCrunch has posted an excellent list of the "Top Ten Things You Can Do To Get Blogged" giving guidelines on how to get coverage on their blog. I think it’s usefulness extends beyond that though.

Build a kick ass company
Approach Bloggers Directly
Be Persistent
Start a Blog
Be humble
Be confident
Be descriptive
Tell a Story
Don’t hide information
Don’t be a Jerk

This a great list for PR professionals as well as marketers reaching out to blogs.  In fact, it provides some compelling reasons why people in public relations doing the pithcing should have their own blog.

For bloggers that have problems with an abundance of crappy pitching by PR firms, why not publish a guideline like TechCrunch has?  It could lead to a more productive interaction for both the blogger and the person making the request.

Last Friday, Duncan Riley from The Blog Herald posted a short item about another blog stealing his content. Today, Duncan follows-up with his case against WebProNews. In a lengthy post, Duncan provides a number of examples of how he feels that WebProNews has stolen his content without proper attribution.

Sure, a lot of bloggers are ametuers and don’t know any better, or if you dug through the archives of the Blog Herald I’ve probably done it by accident once or twice as well, but when your a paid writer for a leading internet portal you shouldn’t just know better, you do know better, and when you don’t play by the rules its not an accident, its a concious decision.

Duncan also provides examples of quotes taken from other publications without credit being given to the original source.

Update: Jason Lee Miller of WebProNews has provided a well-written response in the comments.

I’m usually quite a proponent of LinkedIn, as readers of my weblog are aware, but I find it quite fascinating that the desire to have the LinkedIn site ranked highly in an influential BusinessWeek Best Of the Web poll is showing a bit of the seamy underbelly of online networking.

Four times in the past week I’ve received email from one of my LinkedIn connections asking me to pop over to the BusinessWeek poll and vote for LinkedIn to help it rank well in the results. The intention is splendid and the slightly questionable tactic of trying to either (depending on your viewpoint) encourage voter turnout or stuff the virtual ballot boxes is no different from many of the other nominated sites posting “vote for us” articles too (even Om Malik, one of my touchstones for professionalism in the business blog space, couldn’t resist when he added “Vote for GigaOM” to his busy weblog).

Ordinarily, receiving four messages like this in the never-ending tsunami of email I get every day wouldn’t be worthy of note, but I find it quite fascinating that…

After blogging on how to save a step with Ping-o-Matic and use it for multiple blogs, Denise Wakeman and Arnoud alerted me Pingoat, a competing ping service.

So far, it’s been a great experience.

ss Blog ConsulFirst off, it’s much faster than Ping-o-Matic. It pings about 50
different services, categorized into General, Non-English &
Special.

The site is clean and fast-loading. It’s got a blog, a community forum, and even a Google sitemap generator, if you’re so inclined.

But perhaps best of all, it appears that Kailash Nadh, the site owner and a recent high school graduate from Kerala, India, is adamant about keeping spam blogs from using his service! He regularly blacklists blogs that appear to be automated, with no original content.

He even has a section of his Pingoat forum
dedicated to people who have been blacklisted feel they have been
wrongly accused. It makes for great reading, even when you should have
gone to bed hours ago. Here’s a typical rejection slip:

First i would like to welcome you to the pingoat.com community forums.

After reviewing your blog, and reading your dispute statement in detail, we have come to this conclusion:

Your blog will remain blacklisted. your blog is very blatantly fed via
a content generator, however if this is truly not the case, this would
be required to be proven on your end, it may not be fed via a content
generator, however it strongly appears as so, please re-evaluate the
blog and adjust whats needed

Our suggestion to getting your blog removed from our blacklist:

If it is spam and you have no intention upon creating your own
unique content, then i am sorry to tell you, that pingoat will not
allow you to ping the blog

And last but not least, stop spamming

That’s just great stuff.

After all the discussion about the lawsuit and legal liability that bloggers apparently have with the comments on weblogs (see my earlier piece on Blogger sued for comments on his weblog), I’ve decided to add a small disclaimer to this blog to help protect myself in case anything untoward might occur in the future.  Should you add one on your site? Maybe, maybe not.

To get the full scoop, and to help write a disclaimer that will actually protect me against potential lawsuits, I’ve asked attorney Daniel Perry to help with this particular entry. My prose is in black, Daniel’s is presented in blue.

Here’s my first stab at a disclaimer:

Daniel responds: First, a disclaimer: there is no such thing as a perfect blog comment disclaimer. Each blog may require its own individualized disclaimer. Moreover, a comment disclaimer should be a living part of your blog which might change as we learn how these disclaimers are treated by courts. 

Fortunately, there is a wide body of caselaw and law review articles concerning website disclaimers. It is not necessary to reinvent the wheel. Caution is appropriate when applying those case precedents, however. Blogging is…

RSS is a wonderful thing as it allows us to easily distribute content. On the other hand, it allows slime balls to rip content off at will. Sites are cropping up like mushrooms that do nothing more than scrape the feeds of blogs, press release distributors and article publishers to repurpose this information, often as their very own, on a blog.

These sites have no user value as they are often written by robots and don’t make much sense to the human eye. They do however, generate some cheap search engine traffic and AdSense clickthroughs for the owners.

I guess these folks figure that since you publish an RSS feed, it’s
not really stealing. These are the same people that would reason,
"since you left your door unlocked I thought it was okay to take your
new big screen."

Here is a Scam Blog
(no follow tag used) that appears to take every single one of its posts
from other blogs – word for word – and gives no credit. You will notice
also that there is no person to contact regarding the blog and even the
comments sections are monitored so that no one can post a cautionary
comment.
One way to locate these types of blogs is to do an exact search on the
title of your blog posts and see what comes up.

Now, what to do about it.Some have proposed putting really
nasty copyright notes in your XML file that will be written when
someone or something merely republishes your RSS feed.

Something like:

"This content is copyright Bill Blogbucket and if you are
reading it on someone else’s site then they simply ripped it off and
are violating every known copyright law in the free world. The fact
that you are reading this makes you a criminal too."

There, that ought to keep the scammers away.

The problem I have with this any other form of policing is that it
sort of defeats the purpose of RSS. I want people to read what I write,
I want people to use what I write, I want people to aggregate what I
write and I know that some may rip me off along the way. To me, I don’t
have to be happy about it, but it’s part of the price of admission.

There are a host of other solutions, such a making people register
to view or publish your RSS feed or setting your RSS to show only
headlines. The problem I have with any of these fixes is that they make
it harder for legitimate users to get the content. I don’t think the
trade-off is worth it.

When I can find the guilty party I send them a note imploring them to stop at once and leave it at that.

I choose to view it as a compliment I guess. I wouldn’t dream of
doing it myself but I’m not going to lose any sleep over it either.

I believe these folks will rot in hell someday, so that’s good enough for me!

On the other hand, these scam artists may someday pose such a
problem for the search engines that they may be forced to view RSS
feeds, good and bad, in a different light than they currently do – that
may be a really bad thing.

Please, bloggers and any other form of Internet marketer, have the
decency to give credit where credit is due. And, stop spending your
money on those software programs that promise to create thousands of
high quality content pages for you in minutes and just do the work.

And on that note: Darren Rowse at ProBlogger is the source for some of this rant and good source of information on all things blogish.

And some other thoughts on Blog rip-off and blog content copyright

• Creative Commons
• Marketing Sherpa
• Read/Write Web

Many of you bloggers may already be familiar with Ping-o-Matic. It’s an online tool that lets you ping several news aggregators at once. For me, it’s become part of my posting routine; once I’ve saved my latest post I just visit their site to let the world know.

But there’s some cool ways to get even more out of Ping-o-Matic, especially if you have more than one blog.

Instead of bookmarking the home page, bookmark the results page.

Ping-o-Matic, as cool as it is–or maybe because it’s so cool–often suffers from slow downs. I’ve waited sometimes 30 seconds or more for the page to load. (OK, so I’m part of the "Now" generation.) By bookmarking the home page you’re doubling the amount of time you need to wait for your pings to be sent out.

The other benefit of bookmarking the results page is that this allows you to save multiple ping blasts…one for every blog you contribute to. For example, the ping for my blog, flyte: what works online, is:

The ping for Business Blog Consulting is:

By bookmarking the results page, I can quickly ping all these resources for either flyte: what works online or Business Blog Consulting. Now, if I could just find a couple more hours in the day to blog the way I want to….

One last thing I would recommend: occasionally check to see if Ping-o-Matic has added new sites to the list they ping; I only discovered they added News Is Free and Topic Exchange while putting together this post!

Rick Bruner, a trusted business colleague, emailed me a pointer to an article on blog search engines published by the Wall Street Journal, with a caveat that the link would only work for seven days before the article was pushed into the paid member archive. I’m a paid subscriber, so I don’t much worry about that, but he also told me something I hadn’t realized that won’t mean anything to you unless you too are a subscriber: the “email this story” URL is actually a publicly accessible link.

When I cite the Wall Street Journal, I include the link to the story itself — not using the “email this story” URL — and simply add [members only] or [pay site] or similar.

Two ways to link to the story, but both have their limitations, problems that I really encountered when researching business articles recently for my upcoming IBM trade business book (whose name might well be changing, so I won’t list it her). Bloggers like to talk about permalinks, permanent page addresses that will always point to the article referenced, but I’d like to ask a different question: how do we link to ephemeral items or information behind a wall of one sort or another?

here’s something dissatisfying about linking to a temporary URL with a note like [note: this link will only work until 17 September, 2006] somehow. It seems to violate the whole spirit of the Web, somehow, particularly as a business communications vehicle.

Consider the reference section for my upcoming book: one of the unstated assumptions of any citation is that unless it’s a “personal interview”, someone else can always dig up the article, story, book or blog entry cited and see if they agree with the conclusions and derived facts and quotes in the new material. In academia especially, information is expected to be permanent.

But what happens if I have some outrageous claim about…

If you’re looking for an entry-level/introductory article on search engines for blogs, check out the Personal Journal section of today’s Wall St. Journal (9/7/05). Alternatively–for the next seven days–you can follow this link to read New Search Engines Help Users Find Blogs online.

The article focuses its attention on blog search engines such as Technorati, IceRocket, Feedster, DayPop and Bloglines. It looks at how they differ from traditional search engines like Google and Yahoo, and how they differ from each other.

Since this article appears in the Personal section of the WSJ,
its focus is on how this affects you…personally. It’s not an in depth
look at the marketing strategies of these companies, their business
plans, or target audiences.

There are, however, some good
examples how current event searches–such as "William Rehnquist" and
"video music awards" pull better results at the blog search engines
than at Google.

One thing that does seem to be overlooked is the
impending entry into this arena of Google, Yahoo and MSN. Once these
three giants jump in, it’s hard to know if there will be room in the
pool for some of these upstarts. More likely, some or all of these
companies will be acquired as these new media giants look for new areas
for expansion.

I had lunch today with an interesting chap who is between gigs (a fancy way of saying “unemployed”, I know) and we started talking about his deep and extensive knowledge of the medical and pharmacological industries from a marketing and business development perspective, and how it overlapped with his background and legal training too.

When he got around to explaining how he’s trying to find a job but hasn’t landed anything yet, I wasn’t surprised when he asked for my suggestions on how he might leverage the blogging phenomenon to help generate both visibility in his target marketplace and some income.

What stuck in my head, however, was that his background gave him a unique ability to tell an interesting story. After all, isn’t the best marketing and, yes, even public relations, fundamentally all a throwback to our days around the campfire trying to influence and sway people based on our ability to communicate in a more interesting and engaging manner than the next person?

Then I thought about how some work I’m doing with entrepreneur and gadabout Jeff Miller on his Senior Safety Blog really boils down to the same thing: while his company may sell emergency notification devices for the elderly and infirm, it’s the stories that…

Although there are plenty of tools for checking the popularity of your blog, for many of us Google provides much of our blog traffic.

Darren Rowse of ProBlogger reports that Google’s currently updating their backlink and PageRank. What does this mean to you?

Backlinks, also known as incoming links, are the number of links from
other Web sites or blogs that point to your Web site (or blog.)
PageRank is Google’s rank from 0 – 10 of the value of incoming links
and is part of their algorithm for determining how your blog ranks.

To determine your backlinks type "link:www.yourdomain.com" into the
Google search box. (Do I really need to say "without the quotes?") As
you may know, the number and quality of incoming links effects how your
blog ranks at Google and other search engines.

(In case you’re interested, Business Blog Consulting has 3,260 incoming links and a PageRank of 7.)

Darren goes on to talk about one of my favorite page rank tools, Keyword Tracker.
With this tool you can find out how your blog ranks for specific terms,
such as "business blog" or "blog marketing". Darren says you have to
run the report each time you want it updated, but if you have access to
a cron you can have your server run the request for you.

A while back I wrote a Keyword Tracker tutorial that will walk you through the setup process.

A new conference is being held in Austin, TX, on November 2nd, called The Blogging Enterprise. A blurb from the site says…

"The Blogging Enterprise is a one-day conference that will explore blogging, podcasting and video podcasting and their potential benefits and value in building brands, educating prospects, making sales and cultivating customer loyalty. Attendees will depart with new ideas and a better sense for how to implement this new technology successfully."

They are looking for speakers for the event and had asked me to consider it. But, I declined saying I new at least a half dozen people per topic much better qualified than me, most of whom are contributors to this site. If you’re interested in speaking, contact Steve Farrar. They’re looking for sponsors too, btw.

While battling reliability and scaling issues Technorati is forging ahead with new services. David Sifry announced the launch of their Blog Finder service. The basic premise is to rank blogs by category or technically speaking, by tags. David says in his blog that new service answers the question, “How can you find authoritative blogs on a subject?” This is what Robert Scoble was asking for on Monday.

I took a quick look around at the new service this evening and here are my initial impressions.

The initial version of the listings was built by using category and tag data that blogs had already submitted. Right out of the box, the lists are very BETA. For example, some bloggers use the category ‘PR’ instead of ‘Public Relations’. As such, Neville Hobson’s blog is listed as the Most Authorative blog on ‘PR’ but is nowhere to be found on the list for ‘Public Relations’ blogs. Fellow Business Blog Consulting contributor BL Ochman is listed as the Most Authorative blog for ‘Public Relations’.

My blog is listed as the Most Authorative blog for ‘Orlando’ even though I rarely write about Orlando. Why? I guess becuase I have tagged more posts Orlando than other bloggers.

There are other issues as well. In the ‘PR’ search, Neville’s blog is listed in three places, under three different URLs. (nevon.net/nevon/, nevon.typepad.com and nevon.typepad.com/nevon/) This is due to the fracturing of data within Technorati’s index. If you remember Neville discovered this when he was having problems with Technorati’s search tool.

In addition, Steve Rubel is not listed under ‘PR’ or ‘Public Relations’, but he is second for ‘Podcasting’ behind Dave Winer.

If you have a Technorati account and have claimed your blog, you can specify the tags you want associated with your blog. I looked at this option and it does allow you to specify up to 20 tags for your blog. One problem I noticed though was it didn’t always save my changes. I removed a few generic tags such as ‘Stuff’ (one of my categories) and replaced it with something else. A few minutes later I returned to the entry screen and a number of tags were repeated and some of my original tags were no longer there. Hopefully they’ll fix this.

Overall this should be a very talked about feature. The initial bugs I noticed should be able to be cleaned up. We’ll see how the rest of the blogosphere reacts in the coming days. And unfortunately, we’ll also see how soon the spammers begin to manipulate the results.

Update 9.2.05 I have posted some futher analysis of Blog Finder.

From the press release: "washingtonpost.com today announced that it has partnered with blog search company Technorati to offer its readers the opportunity to view comments and opinions about washingtonpost.com articles and editorials from around the blogosphere." Very cool. More on MarketingVox.

To feature a banner like this on your blog, click here.

If you’ve been reading my Intuitive Life Business Blog, you already know that it’s become a hotbed of discussion about the lawsuit that Traffic Power sent to Aaron Wall, and its implications about our responsibility as bloggers for comments left on our blog. That article is Aaron Wall sued over comments on his weblog. As it happens, I also just wrote about how adding comments on other people’s blogs should be a cornerstone of your own blogging strategy too: How do i get more traffic to my blog?

But lawyer Daniel Perry has the best testimonial I’ve seen yet about why commenting on other blogs is such a good strategy. In less than a week he went from adding comments on my blog to being quoted in the Wall Street Journal.

I’ll let Daniel explain what happened…

A few weeks back I blogged some advice here for business bloggers who might want to consider text link advertising as part of their blog marketing mix.

Well, there’s been a lot of controversy as of late about buying text links. Blogger Phil Ringnalder published a scathing post accusing publishing house O’Reilly of being a search engine spammer. O’Reilly’s founder, Tim O’Reilly, responded to the accusations on his own blog. Google engineer Matt Cutts posted a comment to Tim’s post admitting that Google has decreased the voting power of sites like perl.com and xml.com and downgraded the reputation of some of their outbound links. Ouch!

Matt’s (and presumably Google’s) position was loud and clear:

If you don’t want your own site to suffer the same fate as O’Reilly, you better tag your link ads with a rel=nofollow attribute so that you don’t pass any PageRank score to your advertisers.

In my mind, that doesn’t seem quite fair. Website owners and bloggers work hard to build a content-rich site with good PageRank score. Google’s black-or-white stance on this equates to a diminished earning ability for these websites by insisting webmasters cut off the flow of PageRank to their advertisers. This of course decreases the value of the link ads to those advertisers, and consequently the revenue likely to be realized from them. Granted, no savvy advertiser is going to buy a text link ad solely based on PageRank score, but PageRank does factor into the equation.

This makes me wonder what Google’s position is on BlogAds.com is, which is part banner ad, part text link ad. A good blog ad contains useful content. Why shouldn’t the blogger be allowed to “vouch for” (by not tagging the link with nofollow) the links contained within that ad if they so choose?

Most “white hat” SEOs such as Christine Churchill believe text link advertising is a legitimate practice. I agree with her.

I wonder what Google would do if all the websites across the Internet decided to take all their banner ad inventory they have and bypass the click-tracker redirect that counts all the clickthroughs. Suddenly all these new votes would start counting all over the Internet for commercial advertisers and sponsors. Wouldn’t that throw Google for a loop!

So what is the bottom line here for bloggers who are looking to advertise? It’s basically this: be discriminating in your link buying. Text link advertisements are not inherently evil. Just don’t buy ads on sites where any of the other advertisers on the site are misleading, deceptive or misrepresentative. By that, I mean things like the following:

1. Setting the ad’s link text to some keyword-rich phrase that doesn’t accurately reflect the page that is linked to.
   e.g. An ad on SeacoastOnline.com proclaims “The North Face” but that isn’t The North Face!
2. Linking the ad text to a landing page that is built for search engines and not for people.
   e.g. the “Discount Vacations” ad on DailyItem.com points to one of Orbitz’s many “doorway pages”.
3. Hiding or obscuring the link so human visitors can’t see it, only search engines.
   e.g. Doing a “View Source” on the home page of PRNewswire.com reveals these hidden links:
   
</noframes>
<a href="http://www.icrossing.com">Search Engine Marketing</a>
<a href="http://sev.prnewswire.com">Search Engine News Release Optimization</a>
</frameset>


And it goes without saying that you should refrain from such practices yourself when you advertise.

This post is based on material taken from on my own blog across three separate posts: Link buying – ethical or unethical?, Buying links – Google’s perspective, and Buying link ads – the ethical debate rages.