BizBlogs Express

What is a BizBlog? So What?

2007-12-31T08:40:00.000-05:00

BizBlogs is Your Business' Global Presence on the Internet... and You Own It, Control It-- No Strings Attached!

Before Weblogs were Invented, in order to attain presence on the Web you had to Hire an Army of IT Geeks to Make it, Manage it, & Update it... with Power providers like Google's Blogger-- You don't need Expensive IT Geeks for Routine Stuff. Plus, Google gives you FREE webspace to Park your BizBlog... for $2 or more you can obtain a ".com" or ".net" web address from Yahoo & Others.

Bells & Whistles that you Add to your Bizblogs structure are 99% FREE like: Site counters & analysis, link counters & analysis, Global Presence Graphic Displays, etc.

Wanna Go eCommerce? No Problem-- Paypal offers FREE Buttons & Shopping Cart Scripts to Help You Grow Your Business!

Most of All... the More you Work your BizBlogs with Update-to-Date Content--- the higher you are in Rankings on the Top Search Engines-- like Page #1 & # 2. Professions charge $299 & Up for that Continual Page Ranking and You can Do It Yourself!

It's Your Business... It's Your Money... Are You Driving the Marketing Bus for your Business or Not?

Contact Us for More Inspiration.

PS: See a Real Live, Active Mail Order BizBlog at www.britishmcce.com NOW!

A BizBlog on Steriods!

2007-07-04T10:24:00.000-05:00

http://tv.winelibrary.com

Source: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1638446,00.html
------------------------
Vaynerchuk may be the best wine salesman in the country, but he's even more interested in selling himself. A kid who franchised lemonade stands when he was just 8, he built his Russian-immigrant dad's New Jersey liquor store into a business that rings up $50 million a year in in-store and online sales after reading Wine Spectator and figuring out that some people collect wines just like he collected baseball cards. In 1994, when the magazine named Caymus Special Selection Cabernet Sauvignon the wine of the year, he persuaded his dad to let him buy a whole mess of it and sell it at cost. "I'm beating everyone else by 40%," he recalls.

"Because everybody else wants to buy a boat. I want to be famous." He gambled on a full-page ad in the New York Times, changed the name of the store to Wine Library and taught himself enough about wine to impress the resulting flood of customers. "I was 19, but I looked like I was 11. It became a circus act because people wanted to hear me talk about Burgundy."
[snip]

So, What are You Waiting for?

Is the Future Ready for This?

2007-03-09T07:46:00.000-05:00

The TriCoder, Star Trek, circa 1968

A Future for the iPhone?

Enabled for Wide Area Multi-Wireless WiFi & Telecom Networks,

GPS Mapping like TomTom & Magellan , Large LCD... The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy-- Don't Leave Home without It ;-)

Just Imagine the Usefulness of this Virtual Guide when You are Passing by or Visiting Places Unknown to You Before...

The Sony Mylo looks like it will be a pretty incredible device and we will see it sooner rather than later. In my own personal opinion this device may have just bested the iPod. With Wifi(complete with Opera Browser of course), Mpeg4 playback, Audio playback, Qwerty keyboard, Streaming music, Skype, 320x240 Screen, 1gb of Flash Storage with a Memory Stick Duo Pro Slot, and an all around low price of $350 this is looking like it will be one extremely hot handheld device.

It appears that Sony has taken a bit of the psp styling and incorporated it into this device as well as some completely original ques. Overall this a beautiful unit that I am extremely excited to see. Sony, I welcome you back to the media playing game.

Now, You will never Miss your Favorite Places to Shop, Eat, or Hang-10 for awhile with your HH Guide... Imagine the Possibilities for Small Business Owners that can Compete with the Big Billboard Guys on the Block ;-)

Discover A New Way to Market Your Restaurant, Retail Shop, or Venue

2006-09-21T10:31:00.000-05:00

BizBlogs Wheel of Deals

Lets Face it... sometimes we don't know where to go for Dinner, Shop, or Hangout-- a Coin only has (2) sides... not Enough Options there.

But What If we had a Spinning Wheel of Fortune to Help us Decide where We will Spend the Afternoon and/or Evening?

That's Right-- Spin the Wheel of Fortune to Find Great Deals that are Fresh Minute by Minute, Day by Day... But remember this:

The More Times You Spin, The Smaller the Deals Become! Don't Over Spin ;-)

Business Owners, Imagine having to the Power to Offer Coupons and/or Discounts from your Finger Tips-- at any moment during the Day? Place Offers-- Pull Offers... How much is that Power Worth to You?

Once a Potential Customer has Landed on your Offer, why not offer the Customer more options than just "Exit"?

For example: Lets say you offer the Customer a Half-Off deal. Common options for the Customer would be: (1) print coupon & Exit or (2) Pass & Exit.

The BizBlogs WOD would attempt to Retain the Customer's Attention,

Print coupon

Let's Make a Deal

Exit

Now, how many people would You venture to guess would choose #2 if they didn't go for #1?

Wikipedia - Let's Make a Deal

Let's Make a Deal is not a Sweetener... it's another Layer to the Game-- and you could Lose! I don't know how many of you remember the Monty Hall show on TV by the same name-- it was one of the most Entertain Game shows of its Time! The Model of the Show was Risk & Reward... Door #1, #2, & #3-- and Sometimes, whatever is on Jay's Table ;-)

So, in our Example they choose "Let's Make a Deal" and (3) doors shows up, and they have to Pick a Door. Behind one of the doors would be your Sweetener Offer and behind the Others would be Worthless Rewards like a Mule & Cart.

The Customer chooses door #2 and behold there is a Mule pulling a Cart... Disappointment, Game Over! But No... the Merchant offers another Chance--- Jay's Table! And the Merchant offers a Guaranteed Treat There-- either as another Coupon in Exchange for what's hidden on Jay's Table or the Hidden Treat on Jay's Table... Exciting for the Customers!

But what if the customer picks the right door with the Reward? The Merchant can offer Jay's Table too! -- Keep the Excitement Going & Going!

Bottom Line for Business Owners: Make it Fun for the Customers-- Help them make Decisions! Marketing 101, Folks...

Also Remember: Your Business is Tied to a Zip Code-- this Greatly Narrows Down your Competition when Customers search by Zip Code or a Mile Radius around their Zip Code.

Contact your BizBlogs Agent for More Information regarding this Novel Marketing Concept Today!

Stream, Baby, Stream Those Pics

2006-05-26T08:05:00.000-05:00

The Future of Political Campaigning: One-to-One... is Here!

2006-03-06T09:51:00.000-05:00

It doesn't get any better than this, Folks...

The Future is Hear to be Heard & Replied To!

A New Dawn Is Just Beginning... WiFi Zones

2005-12-29T15:30:00.001-05:00

Finally, something GOOD is planned for New Orleans!

Free Wi-Fi in New Orleans
Free Wi-Fi News, Tuesday, November 29, 2005, by Jim
New Orleans has started the nation's first free wireless Internet network owned and run by a major city by providing free Wi-Fi in the central Business District and in the French Quarter. More areas will be added over the next year.

That's Right! The entire French Quarter Zone.

What does this mean for the future? Try to image 100s of billboards & high aerial signage to compete for your attention and lure you to their particular location of business-- "come to see us because we are different and a better choice for you!" -- they all attempt to convey.

Just imagine what WiFi + BizBlogs can do for your business.

Here's a peek at the future of things to be...

Gilligan's Choice

See for yourself by browsing the possibilities with the WiFi FreeSpot Directory launching around the World. Are you listed?

BizBlogs For eBay & Retail Slideshows

2005-11-21T09:49:00.000-05:00

Now BizBlogs and Photobucket can provide our retail customers the ability to post daily blog updates regarding certain items of interest to their customers along with a slideshow link to display those items.

Consider this a simplistic, less crowded form of online eBay merchandising for your customers.

Sales Is Gonna Be HOT!!!! -- Cash Bonanza!!!

2005-11-02T09:42:00.000-05:00

Source: http://www.rssmarketingtips.com/?hop=rssking

says...

"Catch Up... or Catch You Later"
Blogs & RSS Will Change Your Business Forever !

The BUZZ about Blogs & RSS Feeds are REAL! Hundreds of thousands of business owners are jumping onto the traffic band wagon each day as news of these industry secrets were revealed last year. Business owners have now come to the realization of how powerful these syndication breakthroughs have become for their online businesses. Usage of these strategies are exponentially EXPLODING each day.

If you haven't taken any action to learn about these powerful marketing strategies, then you're digging your business its own grave. You have to incorporate Blogs & RSS Feeds into your business now! Want proof? Just Take a Look at Business Week's May cover issue. Pay attention to what it says...

Front Cover of: Business Week May Issue 2005

Here's your chance to take action now and catch the fasting growing tidal wave of FREE Targeted Traffic for your business.

-Imagine getting into Yahoo's Directory for FREE. This technique alone will save you $299 on Yahoo's inclusion fee.

-How about being able to Blog and Ping the search engines anytime you want and get their spiders crawling your site right away. Now, That's Powerful!

-Realize now, you can broadcast your new products or services to your customers anytime, without being penalized by email blockers and spam filters. Reach Your Subscribers 100%

-Learn how to Harness the Power of Blogs & RSS Feeds, the most powerful viral marketing syndication technology breakthrough since email, to dominate any of your niche markets. Yeah, it's that Phenomenal !

-Hold your breathe for what I'm about to share with you. Imagine...Boosting your website ranking in just 48 hours and get listed on Yahoo, MSN, or Google's organic search pages. Not weeks or months, but in as little as 48 hours! It's Insanely Incredible !
[snip]

Folks, this innovation is a welcomed breakthrough for Small Businesses, everywhere. This innovation will incorporate the latest in media technology in the hands of the small business owner at a cost effective price... Salespeople - Read more

The possibilities are endless: How many Zip Codes are in the US? 1,000s? How many Small Businesses are there per Zip Code? 1,000s?

Blogs are talking over the globe. The definition of a blog is basically self publishing on the net, anything... text, pictures, sound, and yes -- video. The people that do this are called, "Bloggers". Truly amazing stuff! It's is so exciting that not to long ago Google bought Blogger.com, and they are very excited with the venture thus far by promoting it and expanding the product line.

This is where BizBlogs comes in...

In the old days you have to make a substantial investment in order to launch your own business web site and incur the ongoing costs associated with content updates, licensing, & web space. Not with BLOGS! Blog technology has removed this barrier and replaced the webmaster role with a simple to use online publishing interface.

It's so easy that if you know how to find an item on eBay, Checkout your Basket, enter your method of payment... you can setup up BizBlogs for your clients and then hand them the keys!

Blogs come in all sorts of colors and sizes. From FREE to under $20 per month to buy-your-own. FREE is nice for BizBlogs. FREE also allows BizBlog franchisees to solicit clients with no out of pocket expense. The only cost incurred per new account is your time.

Here are some examples I have stumbled upon so far, Portfolio of Our Clients.

If you advertise already -- you need a BizBlog. If you can't afford to advertise --- you need a BizBlog. A Win-Win... all the way around.

Here's how it works...

-For each BizBlog account there is a $35 setup fee
-Mr. Customer -- here's the keys to your new website -- ENJOY!
-Need anything extra? Buy a $35 BizChip (1 Hour Pre-Payment) today and I will be available to service your needs on a minute by minute basis with no minimum time limit -- that's 58 cents per minute, not bad.
-Mr. Customer -- you don't have the time and resources to update your blog? Buy one or more BizChips today, send me your updates, and I will be glad to post & format them for you.

Is this simple or what?

Any Questions? If you are interesting in learning more about BizBlogs, please feel free to email me directly.

Regards,

Mike Masters
Principal
BizBlogs

BusinessWeek: Small Business Blogging Is Here!

2005-08-04T07:32:00.000-05:00

MAY 2, 2005

COVER STORY

Blogs Will Change Your
Business

Look past the yakkers, hobbyists, and political mobs. Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our
advice: Catch up...or catch you later

Monday 9:30 a.m. It's time for a frank talk. And no, it can't wait. We know, we know: Most of you are sick to death of blogs. Don't even want to hear about these millions of online journals that link together into a vast network. And yes, there's plenty out there not to like. Self-obsession, politics of hate, and the same hunger for fame that has people lining up to trade punches on The Jerry Springer Show. Name just about anything that's sick in our society today, and it's on parade in the blogs. On lots of them, even the writing stinks

Go ahead and bellyache about blogs. But you cannot afford to close your eyes to them, because they're simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself. And they're going to shake up just about every business -- including yours. It doesn't matter whether you're shipping paper clips, pork bellies, or videos of Britney in a bikini, blogs are a phenomenon that you cannot ignore, postpone, or delegate. Given the changes barreling down upon us, blogs are not a business elective. They're a prerequisite. (And yes, that goes for us, too.)

There's a little problem, though. Many of you don't visit blogs -- or haven't since blogs became a sensation in last year's Presidential race. According to a Pew Research Center Survey, only 27% of Internet users in America now bother to read them. So we're going to take you into the world of blogs by delivering this story -- call it Blogs 101 for businesses -- in the style of a blog. We're even sprinkling it with links. These are underlined words that, when clicked, carry readers of this story's online version to another Web page. This all may make for a strange experience, but it's the closest we can come to reaching out from the page, grabbing you by the collar, and shaking you into action.

First, a few numbers. There are some 9 million blogs out there, with 40,000 new ones popping up each day. Some discuss poetry, others constitutional law. And, yes, many are plain silly. "Mommy tells me it may rain today. Oh Yucky Dee Doo," reads one April Posting. Let's assume that 99.9% are equally off point. So what? That leaves some 40 new ones every day that could be talking about your business, engaging your employees, or leaking those merger discussions you thought were hush-hush.

Give the paranoids their due. The overwhelming majority of the information the world spews out every day is digital -- photos from camera phones, PowerPoint presentations, government filings, billions and billions of e-mails, even digital phone messages. With a couple of clicks, every one of these items can be broadcast into the blogosphere by anyone with an Internet hookup -- or even a cell phone. If it's scandalous, a poisonous e-mail from a CEO, for example, or torture pictures from a prison camp, others link to it in a flash. And here's the killer: Blog posts linger on the Web forever.

Yet not all the news is scary. Ideas circulate as fast as scandal. Potential customers are out there, sniffing around for deals and partners. While you may be putting it off, you can bet that your competitors are exploring ways to harvest new ideas from blogs, sprinkle ads into them, and yes, find out what you and other competitors are up to.

More tomorrow.

Tuesday 6:35 a.m. How big are blogs? Try Johannes Gutenberg out for size. His printing press, unveiled in 1440, sparked a publishing boom and an information revolution. Some say it led to the Protestant Reformation and Western democracy. Along the way, societies established the rights and rules of the game for the privileged few who could afford to buy printing presses and grind forests into paper.

The printing press set the model for mass media. A lucky handful owns the publishing machinery and controls the information. Whether at newspapers or global manufacturing giants, they decide what the masses will learn. This elite still holds sway at most companies. You know them. They generally park in sheltered spaces, have longer rides on elevators, and avoid the cafeteria. They keep the secrets safe and coif the company's message. Then they distribute it -- usually on a need-to-know basis -- to customers, employees, investors, and the press.

That's the world of mass media, and the blogs are turning it on its head. Set up a free account at Blogger or other blog services, and you see right away that the cost of publishing has fallen practically to zero. Any dolt with a working computer and an Internet connection can become a blog publisher in the 10 minutes it takes to sign up.

Sure, most blogs are painfully primitive. That's not the point. They represent power. Look at it this way: In the age of mass media, publications like ours print the news. Sources try to get quoted, but the decision is ours. Ditto with letters to the editor. Now instead of just speaking through us, they can blog. And if they master the ins and outs of this new art -- like how to get other bloggers to link to them -- they reach a huge audience.

This is just the beginning. Many of the same folks who developed blogs are busy adding features so that bloggers can start up music and video channels and team up on editorial projects. The divide between the publishers and the public is collapsing. This turns mass media upside down. It creates media of the masses.

How does business change when everyone is a potential publisher? A vast new stretch of the information world opens up. For now, it's a digital hinterland. The laws and norms covering fairness, advertising, and libel? They don't exist, not yet anyway. But one thing is clear: Companies over the past few centuries have gotten used to shaping their message. Now they're losing control of it.

Want to get it back? You never will, not entirely. But for a look at what you're facing, come along for a tour of the blogosphere.

Wednesday 7:38 a.m. Hmm. How to start this post? Idle talk about the weather, or maybe that red wine with dinner last night? No. Let's dive right in: One misstep and the blog world can have its way with you -- even when the coolest, most tech-savvy companies are involved.

Google is regarded as a secretive company. So in January, when a young programmer named Mark Jen started blogging about his first days in the Googleplex, folks in the 'sphere instantly linked to him. Jen certainly wasn't dealing out inside dirt. But he griped that Google's health plan was less generous than his former employer's -- Microsoft -- and he argued, indignantly, that Google's free food was an enticement for employees to work past dinner.

Two weeks later, Google fired Jen. And that's when the 22-year-old became a big story. Google was blogbusted for overreacting and for sending an all-too-clear warning to the dozens of bloggers still at the company. A Google official says the company has lots of bloggers and just expects them to use common sense. For example, if it's something you wouldn't e-mail to a long list of strangers, don't blog it.

Jen clearly flunked that test. "As the media got hold of it, I was quickly educated," he says. He says he should have understood the company's goals and concerns better and been more sensitive to them. Still, his adventure turned him into an overnight celebrity. He was wooed by recruiters at Amazon.com , Microsoft, and Yahoo! A month later, Jen landed a job at Plaxo, an Internet contact-management company. A key part of his job, says a company spokesperson, is to help coordinate Plaxo's blogging efforts -- a pillar of Plaxo's promotional strategy. So what got him fired turned out to be his trump card. Plaxo, like many other companies, is now drawing up norms for blogging behavior, so that employees know what's in bounds, and what's not.

2:22 p.m. It sounds like the joke answer on a multiple-choice exam. Name a leading company in blog communications: General Motors?

That's right. For a company that's slipping in the auto biz, GM is showing a surprisingly nimble touch with blogs. GM uses them on occasion to steer past its own PR department and the mainstream press.

In January, Vice-Chairman Bob Lutz launched his own FastLane Blog. Bloggers applauded, and car buffs flooded Lutz with suggestions and complaints. Lutz posted lots of barbs from outsiders and won points for balanced responses. Like his answer to criticisms of new Pontiacs: "Did you take a look at seat tailoring? Carpet fits?...hood gaps, hem flanges? We used to be bad at those, too."

But Lutz is only part of GM's blog strategy. In April the company yanked $10 million in advertising from the Los Angeles Times and demanded that the Times make retractions. Journalists asked GM for specific complaints, and the car company held off. It said it wanted to work quietly with the Times and not battle it out in the press.

How to get the word out through a back channel? GM directed journalists to a blog, AutomoBear.com, that detailed GM's beef. (It had to do with a comparison between two cars, which GM thought was unfair.) Both GM and Miro Pacic, the blogger at AutomoBear, say that GM provided Pacic with information but that no money passed hands.

Fair enough. But even if GM doesn't pay for positive coverage in blogs, just consider the possibilities in this new footloose media world. There's little to stop companies from quietly buying bloggers' support, or even starting unbranded blogs of their own to promote their products -- or to tar the competition. This raises all kinds of questions about the ever-shrinking wall between advertising and editorial. We'll cover that later, when we get to the blogs' impact on our own business -- the media.

Thursday 8:56 a.m. It's the latest wrinkle on Descartes. I blog therefore I... consult. An entire industry is rising up to guide companies into this frightening new realm. And the consultants establish their brands and reps with their blogs.

Perhaps the biggest is Steve Rubel. A year ago, the exec at the PR firm CooperKatz & Co. started his blog, Micro Persuasion. He was already pushing such clients as WeatherBug and the Association of National Advertisers into the blog world. Then early one Sunday morning, as he recalls it, "my wife was sleeping, and I was sitting in the living room, laptop on my lap, and thinking if I am talking to clients and reading these blogs, I should jump in." When launching his site, he had the smarts to contact big shots such as Dan Gillmor, who was a leading blogger and tech reporter with the San Jose Mercury News. Gillmor linked to Rubel's site, and his traffic took off. It was great for his brand, and it also gave Rubel a blogger's education. "I became a living guinea pig for what I preach," he says.

Now Rubel is positioned as an all-knowing Thumper in a forest of clueless Bambis. The first job, he says, is to monitor the blogs to see what people are saying about your company. (An entire industry is growing to sell that service. Even IBM's banging at the door.) Next step: Damage-control strategies. How to respond when blogs attack. He says companies have to learn to track what blogs are talking about, pinpoint influential bloggers, and figure out how to buttonhole them, privately and publicly.

He gives the example of Netflix . When a fan blog called Hacking Netflix asked the company for info and interviews last year, Netflix turned it down. How could they make time for all the bloggers? Predictably, the blogger, Mike Kaltschnee, aired the exchange, and Netflix faced a storm of public criticism. Now Netflix feeds info to Kaltschnee, and he passes along what he's hearing from the fans. Sounds like he's half journalist, half consultant -- though he insists Netflix doesn't pay him.

Friday 10:46 a.m. The question came up at a panel discussion last week: Any chance that a blog bubble could pop? The answer is really easy: no.

At least not an investment bubble. Venture firms financed only $60 million in blog startups last year, according to industry tracker VentureOne. Chump change compared to the $19.9 billion that poured into dot-coms in 1999. The difference is that while dot-coms promised to make loads of money, blogs flex their power mostly by disrupting the status quo.

The bigger point, which is blindingly obvious when you think about it, is that the dot-com era was powered by companies -- complete with programmers, marketing budgets, Aeron chairs, and burn rates. The masses of bloggers, by contrast, are normal folks with computers: no budget, no business plan, no burn rate, and -- that's right -- no bubble.

The role of the blog startups is to build tools for this grassroots uprising. Six Apart, a four-year-old San Francisco company, leads in blog software. Technorati and PubSub Concepts are battling it out in blog search. The founders all insist that they plan to remain independent. But if recent history is any guide, most of them will wind up in the bellies of the blog-minded Internet giants -- led by Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. The latest to disappear was Flickr. A photo-sharing service that spread madly across the blog world, 13-month-old Flickr was still running its software in its beta, or testing, phase when it was acquired by Yahoo in March for an undisclosed sum. Caterina Fake, Flickr's co-founder, wrote about the deal in her blog the day it happened: "Don't forget to breathe. It's not the end, it's the beginning."

Monday 10:23 a.m. If this were a true blog, that last post would have generated a mountain of comments over the weekend, most of them with the same question: If there's no clear business model, why are the Internet giants so bent on getting a foothold in blogs? Look at it from their point of view. A vibrant community that has doubled in size in the past eight months is teeming with potential customers and has a mother lode of data to mine. "Blogs are what's causing the Web to grow," says Jason Goldman. He's project manager at Google's Blogger, the world's biggest service to set people up as bloggers.

David Sifry looks at it a bit differently. He's a serial entrepreneur and founder of Technorati , the blog search engine.

For Sifry, it's not the growth of the same Web, but an entirely new one. It's wrapped up far more in people's day-to-day lives. It's connected to time. The way he describes it, the Web we've come to know is mostly a collection of documents. A library. These documents don't change much. Try Googling Donald Trump, and you're more likely to find his Web page than a discussion of his appearance last night on The Apprentice.

Blogs are different. They evolve with every posting, each one tied to a moment. So if a company can track millions of blogs simultaneously, it gets a heat map of what a growing part of the world is thinking about, minute by minute. E-mail has carried on billions of conversations over the past decade. But those exchanges were private. Most blogs are open to the world. As the bloggers read each other, comment, and link from one page to the next, they create a global conversation.

Picture the blog world as the biggest coffeehouse on Earth. Hunched over their laptops at one table sit six or seven experts in nanotechnology. Right across from them are teenage goths dressed in black and thoroughly pierced. Not too many links between those two tables. But the café goes on and on. Saudi women here, Labradoodle lovers there, a huge table of people fooling around with cell phones. Those are the mobile-photo crowd, busily sending camera-phone pictures up to their blogs.

The racket is deafening. But there's loads of valuable information floating around this cafe. Technorati, PubSub, and others provide the tools to listen. While the traditional Web catalogs what we have learned, the blogs track what's on our minds.

Why does this matter? Think of the implications for businesses of getting an up-to-the-minute read on what the world is thinking. Already, studios are using blogs to see which movies are generating buzz. Advertisers are tracking responses to their campaigns. "I'm amazed people don't get it yet," says Jeff Weiner, Yahoo's senior vice-president who heads up search. "Never in the history of market research has there been a tool like this."

Tuesday 9:12 p.m. Back to that coffeehouse. Sitting at one large table is a collection of some of the most gifted geeks you can imagine. These folks built the blogosphere. And they're using it to link with each other. They share ideas, test them, and get them up and running in a hurry. Many of them transform the network itself, making it more muscular -- and disruptive.

The innovation that sends blogs zinging into the mainstream is RSS, or Really Simple Syndication. Five years ago, a blogger named Dave Winer, working with software originally developed by Netscape, created an easy-to-use system to turn blogs, or even specific postings, into Web feeds. With this system, a user could subscribe to certain blogs, or to key words, and then have all the relevant items land at a single destination. These personalized Web pages bring together the music and video the user signs up for, in addition to news. They're called "aggregators." For now, only about 5% of Internet users have set them up. But that number's sure to rise as Yahoo and Microsoft plug them.

In time, aggregators could turn the Web on its head. Why? They discourage surfing as users increasingly just wait for interesting items to drop onto their page or e-mailbox. Internet advertising, which traditionally counts on page views and clicks, could be thrown for a loop. Already Yahoo is packaging ads on the feeds. Google is testing the waters.

But here's the really insidious part. If you set up your own aggregator page, such as my.yahoo.com, and subscribe to feeds, you soon discover that blog and mainstream postings mingle side by side. Feeds zip through the walls between blogs and the rest of the information world. Blog posts are becoming just part of the mix, swimming on the same page with the Associated Press, and yes, BusinessWeek.

Winer also ushered in a second tech breakthrough, podcasting. A back-and-forth between Winer and Adam Curry, a blogger and former MTV host, led last year to a system that easily distributes audio files. Looking for National Public Radio's On the Media or the latest ska compilations from a disk jockey in Trinidad? Sign up on a Web page, and the program gets automatically delivered to you -- as an audio feed. Last summer, Curry created software called iPodder so these MP3s could hitch a ride on an iPod That was the birth of podcasting: radio programming whenever and wherever you want it. Since then, some 5,000 podcasting shows have sprouted up. They cover everything from yoga to the blues.

It's an overnight sensation. Before podcasting, only about 150 people a month bothered to download the audio files of Morning Stories, a show on Boston's public station WGBH. After the station switched to podcasting in October? Eighty thousand. Chalk it up to the bloggers. They pushed podcasting to their own circles, and it grew from there.

11:48 p.m. One more idea. Think of TiVo, think of the iPod. When you're using one of them, do you consider the company that provides the programming? CBS, for example? Not much. You're putting together your own package. The pieces come from lots of companies and artists. Often you don't even know where.

Aggregators do the same job for the Net. So, just like the record companies, which have figured out how to market bits and pieces of their albums as standalone songs and ringtones, the rest of the media and entertainment world is going to have to think small. Content, whether it's news or a Hollywood movie, is going to travel in bite-size nuggets. The challenge, for bloggers and giants alike, is to brand those nuggets and devise ways to sell them or wrap them in advertising.

Wednesday 6:31 a.m. A prediction: Mainstream media companies will master blogs as an advertising tool and take over vast commercial stretches of the blogosphere. Over the next five years, this could well divide winners and losers in media. And in the process, mainstream media will start to look more and more like -- you guessed it -- blogs. Clay Shirky, a Web expert at New York University, calls it "an absorption process where the thing doing the absorbing changes."

Take a look at blog advertising today, and it's hard to see a glittering future. Sure, enterprising bloggers make room on their pages for Google-generated ads, known as AdSense, and earn some pocket change. Some blog entrepreneurs, such as Nick Denton, publisher of New York's Gawker Media, sell ads for everything from Nike to Absolut Vodka . Popular blogs can land sponsorship deals for as much as $25,000 per month, say consultants. O.K. money for an entrepreneur, but a rounding error in the ad industry.

Blog power simply doesn't translate yet into big bucks. For now, it's running mostly on people's passion to communicate -- especially in developing markets. Consider Hossein Derakhshan. He's a 28-year-old Iranian blogger based in Toronto. He has thousands of readers, and politicians respond to his postings -- even as the Iranian government frantically tries to shut down the servers hosting his blog. Yet Derakhshan can't yet cash on his fame. "Google doesn't have AdSense service in Persian yet," he says.

Still, blogs could end up providing the perfect response to mass media's core concern: the splintering of its audience. Advertisers desperate to reach us need to tap niches (because we get together only once a year to watch the Super Bowl). By piggybacking on blogs, they can start working that vast blogocafé, table by table. Smart ones will get feedback, links to individuals -- and their friends. That's every marketer's dream.

The big companies have what the bloggers lack. Scale, relations with advertisers, and large sales forces. They can use these forces to sell across all media, from general audience to bloggy niches. Already, Yahoo and Microsoft have been investing heavily to position themselves for niche advertising. And in February, the New York Times (NYT ) laid down $410 million for About Inc., a collection of 500 specialized Web sites that smell strongly of blogs. "What's to stop them from turning those 500 sites into 5,000?" says Dave Morgan, founder of TACODA Systems, an Internet advertising company.

Thursday 9 a.m. Hate to get wiggy here. But if the blogs eventually swallow up ad revenue, what's going to happen to us?

Yes, we, too, are under the gun. MSM, the bloggers call us. Mainstream media. And many of them delight in uncovering our errors, knocking us off that big pedestal we've occupied since the the first broadsheets started circulating.

We have to master the world of blogs, too. This isn't because they're taking away ad revenue, at least not yet, but because they represent millions of eyewitnesses armed with computers spread around the world. They are potential competitors -- or editorial resources.

Blog reporters showed their value following the Asian tsunami in December. Thousands of them posted pictures, video footage, and articles about the disaster long before the first accredited journalists showed up. MSNBC, which ran hours of tsunami footage on its Web site, has since opened an entire page; devoted to citizens' journalism.

Dan Gillmor, who quit his San Jose newspaper job, is lining up investors for a new type of media company, Grassroots Media. He's interested in elements of an online journalism business in Korea, called OhmyNews. It mingles articles from 50 staff journalists with reports e-mailed and text-messaged in from thousands of citizen reporters. OhmyNews says it has been profitable for a year and a half and expects revenue this year of $10 million. "I keep hoping that all of the new conversational forms will augment the existing one," Gillmor says.

11:57 p.m. Thinking out of the box here for a minute. What would this article look like if it were a real blog, and not just this glossy simulacrum?

Think of the way we produce stories here. It's a closed process. We come up with an idea. We read, we discuss in-house, and then we interview all sorts of experts and take their pictures. We urge them not to spill the beans about what we're working on. It's a secret. Finally, we write. Then the story goes through lots and lots of editing. And when the proofreaders have had their last look, someone presses the button and we launch a finished product on the world.

If this were a real blog, we probably would have posted our story pitch on Day One, before we did any reporting. In the blog world, a host of experts (including many of the same ones we called for this story) would weigh in, telling us what's wrong, what we're overlooking. In many ways, it's a similar editorial process. But it takes place in the open. It's a discussion.

Why draw this comparison? In a world chock-full of citizen publishers, we mainstream types control an ever-smaller chunk of human knowledge. Some of us will work to draw in more of what the bloggers know, vetting it, editing it, and packaging it into our closed productions. But here's betting that we also forge ahead in the open world. The measure of success in that world is not a finished product. The winners will be those who host the very best conversations.

Friday 11 a.m. So why not start here? We've done our research on blogs, made our dire pronouncements. Pretty soon, someone in production will press the button. But this story should go on, as a conversation. And it will, starting on Apr. 22. We're launching our own blog to cover the business drama ahead, as blogging spreads into companies and redefines media. The blog's name? Blogspotting.net. See you
there.

By Stephen Baker and
Heather Green

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rights reserved.
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Beyond a Sales Career!...Become an Entrepreneur

2005-02-04T09:29:00.000-05:00

Source: http://www.rssmarketingtips.com/?hop=rssking

Catch Up... or Catch You Later
Blogs & RSS Will Change Your Business Forever!

The BUZZ about Blogs & RSS Feeds are REAL! Hundreds of thousands of business owners are jumping onto the traffic band wagon each day as news of these industry secrets were revealed last year. Business owners have now come to the realization of how powerful these syndication breakthroughs have become for their online businesses. Usage of these strategies are exponentially EXPLODING each day.

If you haven't taken any action to learn about these powerful marketing strategies, then you're digging your business its own grave. You have to incorporate Blogs & RSS Feeds into your business now! Want proof? Just Take a Look at Business Week's May cover issue. Pay attention to what it says...

Front Cover of: Business Week May Issue 2005

Here's your chance to take action now and catch the fasting growing tidal wave of FREE Targeted Traffic for your business.

-Imagine getting into Yahoo's Directory for FREE. This technique alone will save you $299 on Yahoo's inclusion fee.

-How about being able to Blog and Ping the search engines anytime you want and get their spiders crawling your site right away. Now, That's Powerful!

-Realize now, you can broadcast your new products or services to your customers anytime, without being penalized by email blockers and spam filters. Reach Your Subscribers 100%

-Learn how to Harness the Power of Blogs & RSS Feeds, the most powerful viral marketing syndication technology breakthrough since email, to dominate any of your niche markets. Yeah, it's that Phenomenal !

-Hold your breathe for what I'm about to share with you. Imagine...Boosting your website ranking in just 48 hours and get listed on Yahoo, MSN, or Google's organic search pages. Not weeks or months, but in as little as 48 hours! It's Insanely Incredible !
[snip]

Folks, this innovation is a welcomed breakthrough for Small Businesses, everywhere. This innovation will incorporate the latest in media technology in the hands of the small business owner at a cost effective price... and that is where our Salespeople come in.

It is up to you to educate and persuade the average business owner to take a leap of faith and really unlock the doors of their success by using this new, innovative medium to "Spontaneously... Reach Out and Touch Your Customers, Today!".

What's in it for YOU? How about the opportunity to earn $50-250 per day, working or playing at the same time?

Keep your Day Job... You can do both!

To help you succeed, Bizblogs, will invest in you. For each account you attain worth $150, you will earn $50 per account-- Land (5) Accounts in (1) Day & Pocket $250!!! Grow & Invest with Bizblogs by Recruiting & Mentoring Others and Earn $20 per Account your Recruits Sell-- You have (10) Recruits in Your Pool. The Pool on Average produces (20) Accounts per Day-- that is $400 a Day for Being a Coach!!!!

The Bottom Line is: Based on a (5) Day Window of Opportunity --YOU-- have the Ability to Earn between $5,000-$8,000 per Month--- HELLO???

Career advancement will be unlimited! BizBlogs will require Area Vice Presidents, Regional Vice Presidents, Area Presidents, & Regional Presidents. In addition to that you can open your own franchise and do what you want to do.

The possibilities are endless: How many Zip Codes are in the US? 1,000s? How many Small Businesses are there per Zip Code? 1,000s?

Blogs are talking over the globe. The definition of a blog is basically self publishing on the net, anything... text, pictures, sound, and yes -- video. The people that do this are called, "Bloggers". Truly amazing stuff! It's is so exciting that not to long ago Google bought Blogger.com, and they are very excited with the venture thus far by promoting it and expanding the product line.

This is where BizBlogs comes in...

In the old days you have to make a substantial investment in order to launch your own business web site and incur the ongoing costs associated with content updates, licensing, & web space. Not with BLOGS! Blog technology has removed this barrier and replaced the webmaster role with a simple to use online publishing interface.

It's so easy that if you know how to find an item on eBay, Checkout your Basket, enter your method of payment... you can setup up BizBlogs for your clients and then hand them the keys!

Open up your local newspaper, that junk mail that comes everyday in your mailbox. Those are your potential customers -- hand delivered to you everyday.

If they advertise already -- they need a BizBlog. If they can't afford to advertise --- they need a BizBlog. Win-Win... all the way around.

There are (3) elements of a successful BizBlog franchise:

A- An abundant resource of local customers
B- Sales & Marketing
C- Technical Know How

Some of us can do both B & C, and others can have A and do B. It doesn't matter -- the franchisee chooses the role that is best for him or her: Salesperson or Techno Geek? After considering the possible split functions of a franchisee, I would suggest that a salesperson (non-franchisee) receive attractive referral fees per new account and that's the end of the rep/account relationship. The residual account income thereafter becomes the revenue for the franchisee.

Ask me how BizBlogs will be able to be a $3.5 billion Advertising Conglomerate in just under 3 years, and reverse traditional franchise fees in the opposite direction...for as long as you own your franchise-- now that's a first!

Read More

Start Your Own Community Business With Virtually Nothing

2005-01-23T17:59:00.000-05:00

Folks,

I am starting up a new franchise business called BizBlogs. BizBlogs will empower small business from main street USA to main street Canada and beyond to communicate with their customers through a personalized gateway, a Web Log or [we]Blog for short, at their own leisure.

Blogs are talking over the globe. The definition of a blog is basically self publishing on the net, anything... text, pictures, sound, and yes -- video. The people that do this are called, "Bloggers". Truly amazing stuff! It's is so exciting that not to long ago Google bought Blogger.com, and they are very excited with the venture thus far by promoting it and expanding the product line.

This is where BizBlogs comes in...

In the old days you have to make a substantial investment in order to launch your own business web site and incur the ongoing costs associated with content updates, licensing, & web space. Not with BLOGS! Blog technology has removed this barrier and replaced the webmaster role with a simple to use online publishing interface.

It's so easy that if you know how to find an item on eBay, Checkout your Basket, enter your method of payment... you can setup up BizBlogs for your clients and then hand them the keys!

Blogs come in all sorts of colors and sizes. From FREE to under $20 per month to buy-your-own. FREE is nice for BizBlogs. FREE also allows BizBlog franchisees to solicit clients with no out of pocket expense. The only cost incurred per new account is your time.

Here are some examples I have stumbled upon so far, Portfolio of Our Clients.

Open up your local newspaper, that junk mail that comes everyday in your mailbox. Those are your potential customers -- hand delivered to you everyday.

If they advertise already -- they need a BizBlog. If they can't afford to advertise --- they need a BizBlog. Win-Win... all the way around.

Here's how it works...

-For each BizBlog account there is a $35 setup fee
-Mr. Customer -- here's the keys to your new website -- ENJOY!
-Need anything extra? Buy a $35 BizChip (1 Hour Pre-Payment) today and I will be available to service your needs on a minute by minute basis with no minimum time limit -- that's 58 cents per minute, not bad.
-Mr. Customer -- you don't have the time and resources to update your blog? Buy one or more BizChips today, send me your updates, and I will be glad to post & format them for you.

Is this simple or what?

There are (3) elements of a successful BizBlog franchise:

A- An abundant resource of local customers
B- Sales & Marketing
C- Technical Know How

Some of us can do both B & C, and others can do either A or B. It doesn't matter -- the franchisee chooses the role that is best for him or her: Salesperson or Techno Geek? After considering the possible split functions of a franchisee, I would suggest that a salesperson (non-franchisee) receive attractive referral fees per new account and that's the end of the rep/account relationship. The residual account income thereafter becomes the revenue for the franchisee.

Ask me how BizBlogs will be able to be a $2.5 billion Advertising Conglomerate in just under 3 years, and reverse traditional franchise fees in the opposite direction...for as long as you own your franchise-- now that's a first!

Any Questions? If you are interesting in learning more about BizBlogs, please feel free to email me directly.

Cheers!
Mike

Hugh Hewitt's New Book: BLOG

2005-01-01T11:21:00.000-05:00

Blog : Understanding the Information Reformation That's Changing Your World

It's Nov. 3, one day post-election, and talk-radio host Hugh Hewitt is ebullient with the GOP's victory. Broadcasting from a Southern California studio tucked into a mall behind an Asian noodle joint, the center-right conservative skips easily from topic to topic: the Bush victory, the Democrats' spectacular implosion, Osama bin Laden, the judicial nomination process. Simultaneously, Mr. Hewitt interviews guests, Googles, scans articles online, trades cues with his producer, chats with studio visitors, keeps one eye on CNN, and sips Diet Coke.

Through it all, he also blogs.

With 43,500 visitors per day, his blog, www.HughHewitt.com, has become for many a must-read stop in the new-media universe. An attorney, law professor, and evangelical Christian, Mr. Hewitt once worked as Richard Nixon's ghostwriter and served several posts in the Reagan administration. Now, he embodies the synergy between the key media developments of the '90s and the '00s: talk radio and blogging.

The radio show drives listeners to the blog. The blog raises subjects and provides information that lifts the level of talk-show discourse far above the mere trading of uninformed opinions.

Blogs are revolutionizing journalism, politics, and American culture, but many people still don't know what they are. The word blog is a contraction for "web log," which was originally just a listing, or "log," of websites that an internet surfer has visited. Some of the earliest websites back in the early '90s were merely lists and links to other sites that visitors or someone interested in a particular topic might find interesting. Soon, though, bloggers began accompanying the lists with their comments and then the comments began to take center stage

The blogosphere now offers soapbox space to everyone who cares about public opinion. Start-up is cheap and blogging technology is easy to master: "It is a marketplace of pure ideas," Mr. Hewitt says, "and not just a medium for the elite. It's no longer necessary to persuade anyone to be allowed to persuade anyone."

High-Tech Publisher Tries 'Blogozine'

2004-12-15T10:00:00.000-05:00

High-Tech Publisher Tries 'Blogozine'
High-Tech Publishing Pioneer Tony Perkins to Try a 'Blogozine' Called AlwaysOn

The Associated Press

Dec. 3, 2004 - After Red Herring sank into the dot-com morass last year, Tony Perkins considered resurrecting the magazine that helped establish him as a Silicon Valley sage. He changed his mind when his college-age daughter scoffed and told him "Red Herring is so 1990s."

So Perkins' return to the high-tech publishing scene will be more narrow and perhaps more risky for that. The new venture, AlwaysOn, will bring one of the Internet's hottest trends Web logging, or "blogging" to print.

The quarterly magazine, scheduled to debut early next year, will draw heavily from material that has already appeared online at www.alwayson-network.com a technology-focused blogging community that Perkins created after Red Herring's collapse.

About half the so-called "blogozine" will be devoted to the most provocative posts on his Web site, like a recent debate about whether a new computer video game re-creating the assassination of John Kennedy should be rated more obscene than online pornography.

The rest of the magazine will feature longer articles about technology's future and interviews with the likes of Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates and Hewlett-Packard Co. chief executive Carly Fiorina.

Perkins, 46, hopes to make money through a combination of advertising and an annual $49 subscription that delivers copies of the blogozine and special privileges at the AlwaysOn Web site.

Even before the blogozine hits the newsstand, Perkins is aggressively promoting it as a breakthrough development in "open-source media."

"It makes my heart go pitter patter when I think about it," Perkins said during a recent interview. "I really think this is where the media is going to go in the future."

Others aren't so certain.

Jason Pontin, Red Herring's editor during the San Francisco-based magazine's heyday, is among the skeptics, although he still praises his former boss as "a very brilliant man, a beloved figure in Silicon Valley and an extraordinary self-promoter."

Pontin has serious doubts about whether the raw, openly biased observations that attract loyal followings to the online "blogosphere" will fare as well in the more circumspect realm of magazines, where full-time reporters routinely spend weeks researching stories and then submit their findings to rigorous fact checking.

"The blogosphere doesn't have the capacity to produce analytical, well-researched journalism," said Pontin, now editor in chief of Technology Review, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's monthly magazine. "If you believe there are enough people interested in reading a magazine devoted to bunch of insiders writing with great jubilation about the importance of their own community, then Tony's approach could be quite effective."

Magazine industry expert Samir Husni says the odds are stacked against Perkins, citing the failed attempts of other popular Web sites that have tried to repackage their online content into magazines, such as Travelocity, Expedia and Slate.

"If his idea is so good, you have to wonder why no one else has been able to do it successfully," Husni said.

Venture capitalist Tim Draper a former investor in Red Herring is among the Silicon Valley cognoscenti who say they can't wait to see Perkins's latest brainchild. "It's a great idea," said Draper, managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson in Menlo Park. "Tony has a really good feel for this market. He always seems to 'get it' before the rest of us get it."

After starting out as a banker, Perkins emerged as a publishing pioneer in the 1990s by launching two magazines, Upside and Red Herring, with a zealous focus on high technology.

Perkins spent a short time at Upside before departing to start Red Herring adopting the same name used by investment bankers to describe the prospectus for an initial public offering of stock.

While much of the mainstream media brushed off Red Herring as little more than a publishing sideshow for geeks, the magazine steadily grew then became red hot during the dot-com craze of the late 1990s as high-tech companies filled the magazine with often outlandish advertising. One issue surpassed 600 pages and ad revenue in 2000 ballooned to $87 million, more than quadrupling from 1999.

But Red Herring slowly faded away after the advertising dried up in the dot-com bust. By the time Red Herring closed in 2003, Perkins had already sold his controlling interest in the holding company, although he remained a regular columnist.

A new publisher, Alex Vieux, recently reintroduced a slimmed down version of Red Herring a comeback attempt that holds little appeal for Perkins.

"I look at Red Herring now and don't have any emotional attachment at all, so I don't really care what happens to it," Perkins said.

Just a few months before high-tech stocks peaked in March 2000, Perkins and his brother, Michael, released "The Internet Bubble," a book that warned high-tech stocks were bound for a painful crash.

Although his prediction proved true, Perkins says he never envisioned the fallout from the high-tech meltdown would seep into so many other industries, including the media.

This time around, Perkins vows to keep his magazine small. Perkins plans to contain the debut edition of AlwaysOn to 54 pages, about half of it advertising. He'll distribute the first edition to about 100,000 readers, all but 5,000 or so for free.

To keep costs low, Perkins plans to run the new magazine as a virtual operation with no real headquarters and a minimal staff. The conservative approach has worked so far. Perkins says AlwaysOn became profitable within weeks after he started the Web site with $50,000 of his own money.

"This isn't going to become a $100 million company," Perkins said. "It's just a great media niche for an entrepreneur like myself. I am having more fun by many orders of magnitude than I have ever had before."

Copyright 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Copyright © 2004 ABC News Internet Ventures

Fortune Mag Says: Why There's No Escaping the Blog

2004-11-30T09:46:00.000-05:00

Why There's No Escaping the Blog
Freewheeling bloggers can boost your product—or destroy it. Either way, they've become a force business can't afford to ignore.

Fortune Magazine
By David Kirkpatrick and Daniel Roth

1 Early in the evening of Dec. 1, Microsoft revealed that it planned to take over the world of blogs—the five-million-plus web journals that have exploded on the Internet in the past few years. The company's weapon would be a new service called MSN Spaces, online software that allows people to easily create and maintain blogs. It didn't take long for the blogging world to do what it does best: swarm around a new piece of information; push, prod, and poke at it; and leave it either stronger or a bloody mess. The next day, at the widely read Boing Boing blog, co-editor Xeni Jardin opted to do the latter.

She titled her critique of MSN Spaces "7 Dirty Blogs" and hilariously sent up the fickle censoring filters Microsoft appeared to have built in. MSN Spaces prohibited her from starting a blog called Pornography and the Law or another entitled Corporate Whore Chronicles; yet World of Poop passed, as did the educational Smoking Crack: A How-To Guide for Teens. Within the first hour of Jardin's post, five blogs had linked to it, including the site of widely read San Jose Mercury News columnist Dan Gillmor. By the end of the day there were dozens of blogs pointing readers to "7 Dirty Blogs," a proliferation of links that over the next few weeks topped 300. There were Italian blogs and Chinese blogs and blogs in Greek, German, and Portuguese. There were blogs with names like Tie-Dyed Brain Waves, Stubborn Like a Mule, and LibertyBlog. Each added its own tweak. "Ooooh, that's what I want: a blog that doesn't allow me to speak my mind," wrote a blogger called Kung Pow Pig. The conversation had clearly gotten out of Microsoft's hands.

Typically Microsoft would have taken the hits and kept powering forward. That is the Microsoft way. For years such behavior has done little but make people feel defenseless against the company. But this time Microsoft deployed one of its most important voices to talk back: not Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer, but Robert Scoble.

Scoble has been at Microsoft only 19 months and has neither a high-ranking title (he's a "software evangelist" who works with outside programmers) nor such corporate perks as a window in his office. What Scoble does have is a blog of his own, Scobleizer, on which he weighs in daily with opinions about happenings in the tech world—especially the inner world of Microsoft. On a recent day he posted nine remarks, each averaging a paragraph, on topics ranging from how a company programmer had fixed a security bug to the fact that his wife is becoming a U.S. citizen. Nothing too profound or insightful, yet Scobleizer has given the Microsoft monolith something it has long lacked: an approachable human face.

When it came to the criticism emanating from Boing Boing, Scoble simply... agreed. "MSN Spaces isn't the blogging service for me," he wrote. Nobody at Microsoft asked Scoble to comment; he just did it on his own, adding that he would make sure that the team working on Spaces was aware of the complaints. And he kept revisiting the issue on his blog. As the anti-Microsoft crowd cried censorship, the nearly 4,000 blogs linking to Scoble were able to see his running commentary on how Microsoft was reacting. "I get comments on my blog saying, 'I didn't like Microsoft before, but at least they're listening to us,'" says Scoble. "The blog is the best relationship generator you've ever seen." His famous boss agrees. "It's all about openness," says chairman Bill Gates of Microsoft's public blogs like Scobleizer. "People see them as a reflection of an open, communicative culture that isn't afraid to be self-critical."

The blog—short for weblog—can indeed be, as Scoble and Gates say, fabulous for relationships. But it can also be much more: a company's worst PR nightmare, its best chance to talk with new and old customers, an ideal way to send out information, and the hardest way to control it. Blogs are challenging the media and changing how people in advertising, marketing, and public relations do their jobs. A few companies like Microsoft are finding ways to work with the blogging world—even as they're getting hammered by it. So far, most others are simply ignoring it.

That will get harder: According to blog search-engine and measurement firm Technorati, 23,000 new weblogs are created every day—or about one every three seconds. Each blog adds to an inescapable trend fueled by the Internet: the democratization of power and opinion. Blogs are just the latest tool that makes it harder for corporations and other institutions to control and dictate their message. An amateur media is springing up, and the smart are adapting. Says Richard Edelman, CEO of Edelman Public Relations: "Now you've got to pitch the bloggers too. You can't just pitch to conventional media."

Of course, it's difficult to take the phenomenon seriously when most blogs involve kids talking about their dates, people posting pictures of their cats, or lefties raging about the right (and vice versa). But whatever the topic, the discussion of business isn't usually too far behind: from bad experiences with a product to good customer service somewhere else. Suddenly everyone's a publisher and everyone's a critic. Says Jeff Jarvis, author of the blog BuzzMachine, and president and creative director of newspaper publisher Advance Publications' Internet division: "There should be someone at every company whose job is to put into Google and blog search engines the name of the company or the brand, followed by the word 'sucks,' just to see what customers are saying."

It all used to be so easy; the adage went "never pick a fight with anyone who buys ink by the barrel." But now everyone can get ink for free, launch a diatribe, and—if what they have to say is interesting to enough people—expect web-enabled word of mouth to carry it around the world. Unlike earlier promises of self-publishing revolutions, the blog movement seems to be the real thing. A big reason for that is a tiny innovation called the permalink: a unique web address for each posting on every blog. Instead of linking to web pages, which can change, bloggers link to one another's posts, which typically remain accessible indefinitely. This style of linking also gives blogs a viral quality, so a pertinent post can gain broad attention amazingly fast—and reputations can get taken down just as quickly.

No one knows that better than Dan Rather. In a now infamous episode, the anchor fell like Goliath to the political bloggers during the presidential campaign. From the start, it was clear that these nobodies with laptops were going to have an impact. Conservative blogs, like the hugely popular InstaPundit, run by Glenn Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, and Little Green Footballs, written by web designer Charles Johnson, or left-leaning sites like Markos Moulitsas's DailyKos, were rallying their hundreds of thousands of daily readers to whatever cause they alighted on. Then, in mid-September, came what the blogosphere—the term used in the blogging world for the blogging world—calls Rathergate. On 60 Minutes, Rather scooped rivals with memos that offered proof of George W. Bush's dereliction of duty while in the Texas National Guard—or that seemed to. Within a half hour of the broadcast, bloggers started questioning the authenticity of the memos. Others picked up on the suspicions and added their own thoughts and findings. After denying it at first, CBS later admitted it could "no longer vouch" for the memos. Soon after the election, Rather announced his retirement and the blogosphere declared victory—to the chagrin of the mainstream press. "We used to think that the news was finished when we printed it," says Jarvis. "But that's when the news now begins."

Just as Rathergate was breaking, corporate America got its clearest sign of blogger muscle—in this case, brought on not by memos but by a Bic pen. On Sept. 12 someone with the moniker "unaesthetic" posted in a group discussion site for bicycle enthusiasts a strange thing he or she had noticed: that the ubiquitous, U-shaped Kryptonite lock could be easily picked with a Bic ballpoint pen. Two days later a number of blogs, including the consumer electronics site Engadget, posted a video demonstrating the trick. "We're switching to something else ASAP," wrote Engadget editor Phillip Torrone. On Sept. 16, Kryptonite issued a bland statement saying the locks remained a "deterrent to theft" and promising that a new line would be "tougher." That wasn't enough. ("Trivial empty answer," wrote someone in the Engadget comments section.) Every day new bloggers began writing about the issue and talking about their experiences, and hundreds of thousands were reading about it. Prompted by the blogs, the New York Times and the Associated Press on Sept. 17 published stories about the problem—articles that set off a new chain of blogging. On Sept. 19, estimates Technorati, about 1.8 million people saw postings about Kryptonite (see chart).

Finally, on Sept. 22, Kryptonite announced it would exchange any affected lock free. The company now expects to send out over 100,000 new locks. "It's been—I don't necessarily want to use the word 'devastating'—but it's been serious from a business perspective," says marketing director Karen Rizzo. Kryptonite's parent, Ingersoll-Rand, said it expects the fiasco to cost $10 million, a big chunk of Kryptonite's estimated $25 million in revenues. Ten days, $10 million. "Had they responded earlier, they might have stopped the anger before it hit the papers and became widespread," says Andrew Bernstein, CEO of Cymfony, a data-analysis company that watches the web for corporate customers and provides warning of such impending catastrophes.

Those who have tried to game the blogosphere haven't done much better. Mazda, hoping to reach its Gen Y buyers, crafted a blog supposedly run by someone named Kid Halloween, a 22-year-old hipster who posted things like: "Tonight I am going to see Ministry and My Life With the Thrill Kill Cult.... This will be a retro industrial flashback." He also posted a link to three videos he said a friend recorded off public-access TV. One showed a Mazda3 attempting to break dance, and another had it driving off a ramp like a skateboard, leading in both cases to frightening crashes. Other bloggers sensed a phony in their midst—the expensively produced videos were tip-offs—and began talking about it. Suddenly Mazda wasn't being hailed; it was being reviled on widely read blogs. "Everything about that 'blog' is insulting," wrote a poster on Autoblog. Mazda pulled the site after three days and now says it never intended it to have a long run. "It was a learning experience," says a spokesman. Tig Tillinghast, who runs the respected advertising industry blog Marketingvox.com, calls Mazda's blogging clumsiness "the moral equivalent of doing an English-language print ad that was written by a native French speaker."

"If you fudge or lie on a blog, you are biting the karmic weenie," says Steve Hayden, vice chairman of advertising giant Ogilvy & Mather, which creates blogs for clients. "The negative reaction will be so great that, whatever your intention was, it will be overwhelmed and crushed like a bug. You're fighting with very powerful forces because it's real people's opinions."

It all sounds like so much insanity: a worldwide cabal ready to pounce on and publicize any error a company makes. Yet it's not as if corporations are just sitting ducks. For one thing, not every negative voice is that influential. For every Rathergate or Kryptonite, there are thousands of other posts that disappear into the ether. Simply railing against Wal-Mart or repeating the latest conspiracy theory about Halliburton doesn't guarantee that the blogosphere will take notice.

More important, obsessive blogs can mean obsessive customers. The witty blogger behind Manolo's Shoe Blog may bash Birkenstocks and Uggs, but he drools over Coach, Prada, and, of course, Manolo Blahniks. Before blogs, finding someone like him—a person who probably helps others make buying decisions—would have been difficult and costly. Now it's just a matter of Googling or searching on any of the blog-specific search engines like Technorati or Feedster. For those who want to go deeper, firms like Intelliseek and BuzzMetrics use sophisticated software to analyze the blog universe for corporate clients. They use this growing online database of constantly updated consumer opinion for marketing and product-development ideas.

But how to speak directly to this swarm? Wary of a Mazda-like fiasco, most companies that want to blog try to walk a fine line: telling employee bloggers to be honest but also encouraging evangelism. Corporate propaganda almost always drives readers away; real people with real opinions keep them coming back. At the GM Smallblock Engine Blog, employees and customers rhapsodize about Corvettes and other GM cars. Stoneyfield Farm has several blogs about yogurt. Not surprisingly, the earliest adopters have been tech firms. The biggest chunk of the 5,000 or so corporate bloggers comes from Microsoft, but others work at Monster.com, Intuit, and Sun Microsystems—where even the company's acerbic No. 2, Jonathan Schwartz, gets in on the action. (A recent Schwartz post openly criticizes competitor Hewlett-Packard: "Yet another series of disappointing announcements.")

At best, these blogs can act like tranquilizers in an elephant: slowing a maddened charge against a company but not stopping it. Macromedia three years ago set up a few employee blogs to give customers a one-stop place for info and tech support. The blogs, and the employees running them, quickly became an important resource to customers—as well as to the company. When Macromedia in 2003 released software that was maddeningly slow, the company bloggers quickly acknowledged the need for fixes, helping ease some of the tension. "It was a great early-warning system and helped us frame the situation," says senior vice president Tom Hale. "It accrued a huge benefit to us."

"I need to be credible," says Microsoft's Scoble. "If I'm only saying, 'Use Microsoft products, rah rah rah,' it sounds like a press release, and I lose all ability to have a conversation with the world at large."

Unfiltered conversations aren't exactly the kind of things in-house counsel encourage, though. And employees have been fired at Starbucks, Harvard University, Delta, and social-networking software company Friendster for blogs the organizations apparently deemed offensive, though none will comment. Even blogging boosters Microsoft and Sun have hit bumps. Microsoft fired a temp who posted photos of Apple computers sitting on a company loading dock. Sun CEO Scott McNealy was urged not to blog after he showed trial posts to company lawyers and colleagues. "I've got too many constituents that I have to pretend to be nice to," he says.

As big companies try to maintain a delicate balance, it's often the smaller players who are nimbly working blogs to their advantage. Entrepreneurs like Shayne McQuade have learned that bloggers can be an easy—and free—marketing arm, if used right. McQuade, a onetime McKinsey consultant, in 2002 invented a backpack with built-in solar panels that enables hikers and Eurotrippers to keep their gadgets charged. He spent $15,000 getting the company up and running, outsourcing design and manufacturing to jobbers in Asia and warehousing and shipping to a company in New Jersey. The only thing left for him was getting the word out: He ended up outsourcing that to bloggers.

In late September, just after McQuade received an early sample of the Voltaic Backpack, he asked a friend, Graham Hill—who runs a "green design" weblog called Treehugger—if he'd mention the product. Start up the swarm! Within a few hours of Voltaic's hitting Treehugger, the popular CoolHunting blog mentioned McQuade's product, which got it seen by Joel Johnson, editor of Engadget competitor Gizmodo. Each step up in the blogging ecosystem brought Voltaic to a broader audience. (Yes, for all its democratic trappings, there are hierarchies of influence in the blogging world.)

In came a flurry of orders. Ironically, McQuade—who had helped research Net Gain, a seminal book on how the Internet would change business—was unprepared. "Overnight what was supposed to be laying a little groundwork became my launch," he says. "This is the ultimate word-of-mouth marketing channel."

These are still the early days of blogging, and the form is still morphing. Blogs that host music and video are popping up, people are starting to blog text and photos from their phones, and sites like NewsGator, using a technology called RSS, allow people to subscribe to blogs. Plus, an arms race is building behind the scenes. Venture capitalists last year invested a still tiny $33 million into blog-related companies, but that was up from $8 million the year before, according to research firm VentureOne. Blog ad companies, which place ads and pay per response, are enabling bloggers to earn money from their sites. And blogging publishers have emerged. Two of the most prominent, Jason Calacanis and Nick Denton, are going head-to-head with stables of popular blogs (Engadget and Autoblog vs. Gizmodo, Gawker, and Wonkette, among others). More important, some of the most competitive companies in tech are throwing their weight behind blogging.

The newest kid on the blog block, Microsoft, has already seen what the sites can do for it. Now it thinks it has a chance to grab the youth market. Blake Irving, the VP who oversees Hotmail, the e-mail service, with 187 million users, and MSN Messenger, with 145 million IM accounts, views MSN Spaces as "the third leg of the communications stool," one that Microsoft hopes to turn into an advertising-fueled business. MSN is already selling ads on some Spaces for things like Lacoste shirts at Neiman Marcus online. E-mail is for old people, says Irving; kids prefer to communicate by phone and IM, and, now, by keeping blogs. So Spaces is tightly integrated with the latest version of MSN Messenger. Says Bill Gates, who claims he'd like to start a blog but doesn't have the time: "As blogging software gets easier to use, the boundaries between, say, writing e-mail and writing a blog will start to blur. This will fundamentally change how we document our lives."

Google, the company that Microsoft is playing catchup with (its Blogger.com division is the largest blogging service right now), also expects blogs to become as important as e-mail and IM. Right now, it's working on ways to better help people find content they want in blogs, says Jason Goldman, Blogger's product manager. But if Google's internal use of Blogger is any indication, it also sees it as an essential business tool. Since 2003, when it bought Pyra Labs, the company that launched Blogger.com, Google's employees have created several hundred internal blogs. They are used for collaborating on projects as well as selling extra concert tickets and finding Rollerblading partners. Google's public relations, quality control, and advertising departments all have blogs, some of them public. When Google redesigned its search home page, a staffer blogged notes from every brainstorm session. "With a company like Google that's growing this fast, the verbal history can't be passed along fast enough," says Marissa Mayer, who oversees the search site and all of Google's consumer web products. "Our legal department loves the blogs, because it basically is a written-down, backed-up, permanent time-stamped version of the scientist's notebook. When you want to file a patent, you can now show in blogs where this idea happened."

But when you live by the blog, you die by the blog (or at least feel serious pain). Perhaps the best example comes from Mena and Ben Trott, the husband and wife team who founded Six Apart, creator of Movable Type, the blogging software that now runs some of the most prominent blogs on the web, including InstaPundit and Jarvis's BuzzMachine. The Trotts, both 27, started the company after the success of Mena's blog, Dollarshort.org. ("A day late and a dollar short," she says. "A lot of my stories were about people picking on me and being a dork.") Unhappy with the software she was using, Mena enlisted programmer Ben to design their own blog software. They announced the product in October 2001 with just a post on Mena's blog, and had 100 downloads the first hour. Companies paid a flat rate of $150 and individuals were invited to pay what they thought the product was worth. "If we got $50 or $60, that was nice," says Mena.

The Trotts soon started a hosting service for blogs, called TypePad, and lured $11.5 million in venture financing—along with some big customers, including Disney, the U.S. Air Force, Fujitsu, and Nokia. Yet until May, Six Apart was relying on its original pricing scheme. The Trotts decided to upgrade. Mena posted a long message describing the new fee structure on her company blog, Mena's Corner. Less than three hours later, the first comments started rolling in. "Looks like I'll be dumping Movable Type soon" was the first. Many others echoed that outrage in what became a total of 849 customer comments in about ten languages.

Six Apart didn't erase any of the comments, even the most negative ones. Mena read every comment in full, then kept posting notes explaining why the company had changed the pricing structure and that it was still working on revising it. Looking back now, she says, "We made people feel heard." And she knows that sooner or later, the process will start all over again. Says CEO Barak Berkowitz: "When everybody has a tool for talking to the rest of the world, you can't hide from your mistakes. You have to face them. Once you commit to an open dialogue, you can't stop. And it's painful." As the impact of blogs spreads through global business, that pain—and promise—will be something companies will have to deal with. And if they don't? You're bound to read about it in a blog.

Next: The Siren Call of the Digital Home

Oliver Ryan, reporter associate

Feedback: dkirkpatrick@fortunemail.com, droth@fortunemail.com

Bizblog's FAQ

2004-10-07T06:40:00.000-05:00

Some questions for you ...

I assume I would need to send out periodic emails alerting people to the fact the blog has been updated (vs. just hoping people go to the blog on their own). What do you think is the likelihood of people to link to a blog vs. simply opening an email attachment as they've been doing?

First of all, it appears people are moving away from email these days due to overloaded conditions; therefore, blogs are becoming more popular because it gives them the choice whether to join, continue, or dis-continue their subscription to the content. This is what is a called a "pull system". Email is a "push system". Spam & the rest are pushed onto the receiver; thus, they don't have a choice but only to create filters for known violators.

Recently, RSS has come into being (Real Simple Syndication). Basically, your own virtual newspaper that contains content you subscribed to. Since you newspaper is virtual, its content can actually change in a second. Look here to see more of the wave of the future for news. And here. Here too!

I would suggest that you keep sending emails, but only give them limited portion of the story to wet their appetite with a link to your blog at the end or around the entire piece. Give them a choice, plus they will see your blog as an structured environment they can visit at home or at work, anytime.

How do big corporate spam filters react to links to blogs?

Spam filters only service email servers. Website filters are controlled by the webserver.

Do many people understand the concept of blogs these days?

Well, it depends on who you talk to. Being on leading edge sometimes does give you an advantage :p) Look here.

Do you think people understand that they have the opportunity to post their comments?

Maybe not; therefore, eliminate the issue by having informative emails.

When comments are posted, am I alerted to this electronically or do I need to just keep checking the blog?

Again, you have a choice. In your case when I setup your blog, I did ask the blog server to notify you of any postings. You should have received your first notification when I posted the first post on your blog regarding Mr. Buffett.

What do I need to do to post my next entry?

Log in and follow the Yellow Brick road.

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2004-10-06T07:20:00.000-05:00

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BizBlogs Ideas

2004-09-25T10:30:00.000-05:00

http://www.stonyfield.com/weblog
http://channel9.msdn.com
http://scoble.weblogs.com
www.vastlyimportant.com

This is one of most Favorite Personal blogs on Culture,

http://www.lao-ocean.com

Used by Stonyfield Farm

2004-09-25T09:48:00.000-05:00

Stonyfield Farm Yogurt

Organic Communication
Blogging enters the business world

by Jason Imber
From Portals Magazine August 2004

The story of stonyfield farm is the stuff of legend for the entrepreneurial set. In 1983, friends and activists Gary Hirshberg and Samuel Kaymen decided to start an organic yogurt company in Wilton, NH. The idea behind the company was that it should have a dual purpose: to revitalize New England's dairy industry while capitalizing on the growing health concerns of the baby boomers. CEO Hirshberg has been widely quoted as saying the two started out with a yogurt recipe, seven cows, and a dream. Today, Stonyfield Farm generates more than $150 million in annual sales, produces upwards of 350,000 cases of yogurt a week, and distributes its products in all 50 states.

What looked like a business on the fringes 21 years ago is now mainstream. The same can be said of a technology combination that Stonyfield and other companies are increasingly turning to: portals and blogs. Once the arena of technology purists who used the tool as a way to quickly share new ideas and solicit feedback and angst-ridden teens whose posting ambitions were confined to true confessions, blogs are coming to be accepted by businesses for everything from external marketing to low-cost content management systems that can power employee intranets or portals (see "Big-Time Blogging" on p. 32 for more information on how blogging technology works).

In the case of Stonyfield, blogging tools are being used to create tighter relationships with its customers, and with consumers who have not yet been converted. Taking inspiration from the now-defunct Howard Dean presidential campaign, as well as tutorials from some of Dean's own bloggers, Hirshberg became convinced that blogs could be used to effectively reach out to the company's dedicated customer base.

As the third-largest yogurt distributor in the United States, Stonyfield is always looking for innovative ways to get its message across that don't require multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns. The company has several active email newsletters with more than 500,000 subscribers, and it regularly places messages and promotes causes it believes in on the lids of the yogurt cups. The lids (about five million a month) will be used to promote the blogs starting this summer.

"It is all about our relationship to our consumer. It is all opt-in--people are choosing to read it or not. We're not forcing you to buy more yogurt," says Cathleen Toomey, Stonyfield's vice president of communications. "The more you know about our company and the way we operate in the world, the more loyal we think you will be."

Available directly from the Stonyfield portal, the five Stonyfield blogs each play a distinct role. The Dairy Planet focuses on environmental issues; Strong Women Daily News provides information and updates on the Strong Women partners program; the Bovine Bugle explains how an organic dairy farm operates; the Daily Scoop features details from inside the factory; and Creating Healthy Kids provides information about the company's healthy food in schools program. All of these blogs are XML-enabled, using RSS feeds, so that a reader can subscribe to the content and automatically receive it online whenever new material becomes available. New content is posted to each of the blogs once a day, five days a week.

While each blog features unique content, it is all produced by a single in-house writer hired exclusively for this purpose. The writer, Christine Halverson, has a background in journalism and new media. Prior to joining Stonyfield, she had never blogged before, but she likens the task to a daily news beat.

In many respects, the blogs reflect the values and interests that Hirshberg brings to the company. According to Toomey, during the first month, Halverson met with Hirshberg every day to "get inside his head and hear how he says things, learning his expressions and how to represent him." Even now, Hirshberg reads every post before it goes up on the site to ensure that the content is on target.

At this stage, aside from Halverson's salary, the investment for Stonyfield has been minimal. The sites are maintained using Movable Type software, and only two of the five blogs have a budget for graphic design. The concept is a work in progress, but it is also a chance to experiment; Halverson has recently begun playing with the addition of audio posts on some of the blogs. "I hope that over time people will use the blogs as a way to talk to each other and have a relationship with one another," she says. This should lead to a lasting relationship with the company, its vision, and, of course, its products.

TECH BLOG

Though among the first, Stonyfield is not the only company looking for ways to use the portal-blog combination to its advantage. This past spring, at Microsoft's CEO Summit, Bill Gates espoused the value of blogs as a solution to the drawbacks inherent in the use of either email or a portal on its own, bringing together the best of both in a single tool.

There are already plenty of well-known examples among Microsoft employees who are actively and publicly blogging. The company's developer's forum, known as Channel 9, is a group blog that has been wildly successful. It has thousands of regular visitors who go there to learn about and collaborate on more effective application-development techniques. In addition to active posts listed in a reverse-chronological order, which is standard formatting and style for blogs, Channel 9 also features photo and video posts, as well as a wiki, which is the rough equivalent of an online whiteboarding application. Channel 9's wiki is open to contributions and changes that are made directly by the end users.

Another Microsoft example comes from Robert Scoble, a self-described "evangelist" on the Windows team. His Scobleizer blog offers the combination of an insider's view of life at Microsoft and a very personal writing style. However, it also includes links to technical information for developers and those interested in both the Windows operating system and applications.

PERSONAL BUSINESS

In the case of a business-sponsored blog or an employee blogging on behalf of that business, there are likely to be liability or risk-management considerations. For instance, Scoble's blog includes a disclaimer noting that the contents represent his personal opinion, and that it "is not read or approved before it is posted."

Similarly, Phil Libin, the president of technology company CoreStreet, maintains a personal blog that often discusses and promotes the work of his company but is not intended to be a mouthpiece for the business. Since the beginning of the year Libin has been blogging once a day, three to four times a week. He says he does most of his writing during non-business hours and typically spends an hour or so on it per day.

Libin's blog was originally used to promote a freeware download developed by CoreStreet called Spoofstick, which is an anti-phishing tool. "The blog was a perfect way to start talking about it," Libin says. By posting information about the beta release on his blog, he was able to generate interest among other bloggers, who linked to his post. Within a few weeks the software was ready for its official launch. (This was a tool that CoreStreet was giving away as a public service; it is not his company's primary product offering.) Word-of-blog created an unanticipated viral marketing opportunity that was good for CoreStreet and also served to heighten the credibility of Libin's opinions. Today, the blog is also a calling card for Libin, where clients or potential customers can learn about him prior to meeting him.

While he freely admits that his blog doesn't have legions of fans, Libin wants it to be a place "where people go to read original content." Rather than jotting a burst of short entries, he uses the blog to "articulate a thought about something important to the industry that could stand on its own." He offers insights and perspective about the technology industry while also trying to show that he has a sense of humor for the work itself. After all, his blog is called Vastly Important Notes. The costs are minimal; Libin reports that he spends approximately $14 per month for the software and Web hosting, both of which are provided by TypePad.

Whether purely personal, purely professional, or a combination of the two, blogs are becoming yet another tool in a company's collaborative kit. As with many collaborative software applications, blogs may not be particularly compelling when taken alone. However, the combination of blogs, portals, and the appropriate uses of those technologies has the potential to open the door to new ways of working with customers, partners, and colleagues.

Jason Imber is a freelance writer in New York.

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2004-09-25T09:45:00.000-05:00

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2004-09-25T09:42:00.000-05:00

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2004-08-21T13:24:00.000-05:00

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