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

A handy list of newspapers that syndicate their content in XML.

MediaDrop: Newspapers with RSS: A List

Two updates:

• I just updated my earlier post on the list of many marketing blogs with dozens of examples
• I’d love for someone to review MSN’s Spaces blog platform for me (for 25 big ones!)

More newly noticed big-shot blogs:

• Tom Peters
• Laura Ries
• Eliot Spitzer

For those of you who have enjoyed my sparring in recent weeks with direct marketing copywriter Bob Bly, a big name in his field, over the utility of blogs in the marketing mix (e.g., here and here and here), now you have a chance to see the sparks fly in person, courtesy of the American Marketing Association.

I’ve wormed my way into the AMA’s all-day seminar Blogs: Marketing Beyond the Website, moderating the panel at the end of the day for the NY event, January 21. Originally scheduled panelists will include blogger and marketing experts Toby Bloomberg, Steve Rubel, Bill Flitter, Ben McConnell, Dana VanDen Heuvel and Dave Williams. And just to keep things interesting, I recommended we include blog skeptic Bob Bly, to which he graciously agreed. Promises to be lots of fun.

Granted, it’s not a freebie ($695 for non-AMA members), but if you can’t afford to attend, at least give us some linky love, so more marketers with actual conference budgets might get tipped off to the opportunithy.

Nothing-special review of the viability of ad models for blogs. Nothing really on using blogs as a marketing tool. Usual suspects featured ‚Äî Copeland, Denton, Calacanis ‚Äî as well as MayItPleaseTheCourt.net‘s J. Craig Williams. Also, a spokesman from Audi comments on its sponsorship of Denton’s Jalopnik.com.

BusinessWeek: The Business Of Blogging

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

The American Marketing Association is holding a three-city seminar in the coming weeks about business blogging in Seattle (Dec 17), New York (Jan 21)  and  Chicago (Feb 18). Chaired by business blogger Toby Bloomberg. From the sales copy:

Internet surfers, advertisers, journalists and even politicians do it. But are blogs a credible marketing strategy for your brand or company? Experienced bloggers answer your questions and show how to incorporate the newest internet-based strategy into your organization’s marketing plan. Leave this marketing blog workshop with innovative ideas and specific techniques to apply directly to your own marketing strategy.

Costs $695 to attend for non-AMA members (only slightly cheaper for members).

AMA: Blogs: Marketing Beyond the Website

My new favorite sport is antagonizing direct marketing guru (read "dinosaur"; JUST KIDDING!) Bob Bly, who suggests in his latest blog post that there are only a couple of dozen marketing blogs out there. I know there are a heck of a lot more out there than that, but I’m too busy/lazy to spend a couple of hours compiling a huge list of them.

So it occurred to me that maybe you’d all help me with the work. Please list your blog in the comments field if (and only if) it’s a marketing-oriented blog (I’ll delete submissions I deem off-topic). Feel free to add others you know of. (<a href> tags are allowed in comments.) And spread the word; if successful, this post can serve as a resource to those looking for such blogs. If enough participate, I’ll update this post with the list so it’s easier to scan.

Otherwise, I’ll just look like a dope if only four of you bother… <gulp>

UPDATE:

The response to this challenge wasn’t quite as overwhelming as I’d hoped, so like usual, if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. Therefore, I spent the last hour surfing marketing blogs, and let me tell you something, there are a lot more than a couple dozen marketing blogs out there. Suffice it to say this is just the tip of the ice berg, but one that I’ll update from time to time (it’s a TypeList, so that’s easy).

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

I could be wrong about this (and I’m sure I’ll hear from you about it if I am), but as far as I’m aware, this in the first blog out of the Gray Lady. Sure took her time about it, no?

NYT Blog: Pogue’s Posts

Amusing. After lecturing us that blogs are stupid, Bob Bly has launched his own blog. Who’s surprised? Resistance is futile.

Link

Various blog stats. Use at your own risk.

ClickZ: The Blogosphere By the Numbers

This could easily be my favorite blog if they published one.

Well…okay, top 10, anyway.

Link

I have been woefully remiss in not yet pointing out this event, scheduled for Seattle next January 24-25:

This event will show you how your business can leverage current real-world blogging techniques, tools and platforms to promote and enhance your ventures.

Speakers include Brian Alvey, co-founder of Weblogs, Inc., Glenn Fleishman, old buddy and tech guru (I love the photo of you with hair, Glenn!), Robert Scoble, Microsoft’s tech evangelist and biz blogger supreme, Steve Broback, co-founder of the summit and formerly co-founder of Thunder Lizard Productions, where I had been a regular speaker ‚Äî among others. I had also been invited to be a speaker, but unfortunately with the new full-time job, I couldn’t get away. Lots of great sessions. Sounds like it should be a winner.

UDPATE:
I just read an email Broback sent me several days ago explaining they have a cool sponsorship policy offering multiple levels of recognition, from a link on their site to the ability host a reception, with a clever twist: while the high-end sponsorships cost up to nearly $10,000, they can also be had for free by bloggers, so long as you drive a certain number of visits to their site. At the low end, a "Blogger" sponsorship requires no amount of clicks, you just have to link to them. For the Platinum sponsorship, where you get all the opportunities to be recognized, including the hosted party in your name — a $9,900 value — you just have to drive a mere 25,000 clicks to the site.

Only strange thing is they don’t actually lay all this out on the site, so far as I can see. Broback emailed me a PDF that explained it all. Odd. Not really in the spirit of the blogosphere to make you request a PDF via email.

UPDATE:
The PDF describing the terms of the sponsorship thingy is now online.

Link

Michael Gartenberg, VP and research director at Jupiter Research, writes this piece with three key pieces of advice:

1. Know what’s being said about your company on other people’s weblogs
2. Go slowly when creating official corporate blogs
3. Establish guidelines for workers who identify themselves as company employees while doing personal blogging

Computerworld: Business Weblogs Are Double-Edged

AdWeek has gotten into the blog game, with something cheeky and Adrants-esque. Seems to be experiencing launch technical hiccups (domain AfFreak.com takes forever to resolve actual ULR adweek.blogs.com/adfreak/ and the page comes up with code garbage like this

‘
  document.write(markup)
–>

but we imagine that too shall pass).

Steve Hall at Adrants provides more perspective.

Link

I know I should just let it go, but I can’t.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a screed here in reaction to an opinion piece in DMNews about how useless blogs supposedly are for marketing by direct marketing copy writer Robert Bly. Then, DMNews’s editor, Tad Clarke, followed that up with another commentary about the stink bloggers raised in response to Bly’s column, in which Clarke said Bly found "not one iota of proof" that blogs were "the next big thing in marketing."

Well, I’m not sure who suggested blogs were the "next big thing," but the idea that Bly had since found "not one iota of proof" that they were a good marketing tactic, after I’d given at least one iota if not several to that effect, got me all miffed again. So, I wrote Clarke a letter to the editor with further a piece of my mind. Not only has he not yet published it, but he didn’t even acknowledge receipt of it. So, rather than let a good rant go to waste, I offer it to you, below:

I know that Mr. Bly read my blog post in response to his article (because he emailed one of my friends about it, with his panties all in a twist).

Granted, I was juvenilely sarcastic, but such is the prerogative of bloggers. Nonetheless, I cited more than a dozen examples of companies and individuals making money off of blogs or at least credibly citing their marketing power, from Bill Gates and Jonathan Schwartz (president of Sun Microsystems) down to several one-man brands. What would convince him, I wonder? This is his idea of being open minded? Who exactly has he interviewed on the subject who is credibly an expert?

Bill Gates, founder and chairman of Microsoft; Jonathan Schwartz, president and COO of Sun Microsystems; Richard Edelman, president and CEO of Edelman PR; Stephen Jurvetson, managing director, Draper Fisher Jurvetson (leading Silicon Valley VC firm); Mary Meeker, senior analysist, Morgan Stanley; Alan Meckler, CEO of Jupitermedia; Charlene Li, principal analyst with Forrester Research; George Soros, billionaire financier and philanthropist; Mark Cuban, billionaire entrepreneur; Seth Godin, best-selling author, marketing guru and former VP of direct marketing at Yahoo!; Jerry Michalski, president of Sociate and former managing editor of Esther Dyson’s Release 1.0: all bloggers and/or blog evangelists. All of these folks know less about marketing and the value of a dollar than Robert Bly?

No, blogs are not going to steal huge share of marketing dollars from traditional marketing tactics, but they don’t really need to in order to be effective, as they’re redonkulously cheap to operate. And granted, their best application may not direct marketing (despite a few examples I cite where they are being used effectively for that). I’m not aware that blog evangelists are claiming that’s what they’re best at. But they are good for many purposes in a marketing context, including brand evangelism/thought leadership (akin to Mr. Bly decision to advance himself as an "expert" by writing a column in your publication; "dead tree medium" was a joke he apparently didn’t appreciate), customer support, dynamic content for otherwise static site, Google fodder, and an opportunity to join in a genuine conversation with customers and prospects outside of the intolerable din of marketing garbage we’re all bombarded with every day (dare I say by the likes of Mr. Bly’s customers), which we’ve all been conditioned to ignore or at least treat with great skepticism.

Mr. Bly is presumably one of those died-in-the-wool DMers who sees the world in black and white: direct response good, all other marketing a waste of time. I don’t disparage direct response, but I believe that the way customers buy is a bit more subtle than that. I believe that trust in the integrity of a company is going to becomes ever more important to the bottom line in our media- and marketing-saturated world, which is exactly where blogs can be effective. He may want to stick his head in the sand and ignore the validation that companies like Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, Nike, General Motors, Audi and countless other companies large and small have provided for the effectiveness of blogs because he feels personally threatened by them or whatever, but you’re doing a disservice to your readers to let him advance his evidence-free opinions on the subject without taking seriously the proponents of this burgeoning medium.

Continuing to demonstrate that it understands and values blogs, Microsoft has launched a blog to complement its new search service.

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