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From Simon Waldman, a new blogger and the digital publisher of London's Guardian;
Too many media owners - especially newspaper publishers take a Ptolemaic view of the universe: with themselves right at the centre.
The truth, of course, is much more Copernican. We are simply a small planet spinning around.
Scoble (via bigblogcompany);
By the way, I really don’t understand why the press thinks there’s a browser war underway. The real war is between RSS and HTML. At the recent Gnomedex conference about 80% of the attendees said they were using a news aggregator. That’s a HUGE shift in behavior and has far deeper consequences than a browser choice does.
Don’t think for a minute that young people don’t read. On the contrary, they do, many of them voraciously. But having grown up under the credo that information should be free, they see no reason to pay for news. Instead they access The Washington Post website or surf Google News, where they select from literally thousands of information sources. They receive RSS feeds on their PDAs or visit bloggers whose views mesh with their own. In short, they customize their news-gathering experience in a way a single paper publication could never do. And their hands never get dirty from newsprint.
(related-ish): General thoughts on the media biz from a p.r. heavy
Fred Wilson points to data from Korea (as does Engadget) that indicates that the next generation is off e-mail;
It seems that SMS, instant messenger (IM), and blogs (called "one man media" in the linked article) are the favored forms of communication.
The synchronous nature of SMS and IM are preferred because, according to the article:
"The new generation hate agonizing and waiting and tend to express their feelings immediately," said Professor Lee. "The decline of email is a natural outcome reflecting such characteristics of the new generation."
The blogosphere was buzzing this weekend, pointing out that Target's web site has been promoting err, unexpected products.
Though not all bloggers agreed this was worth chasing, it was chased. How should Target have responded?
1. Some one associated with the company should have been tracking web and weblog comments with a keyword feed on 'Target'
2. When the first bad buzz started, a Target rep needed to reach out to a couple of the key commentators and let them know what the company was doing to correct the problem. Comment on the post or posts; use a trackback; send emails.
The difficulty was that this all happened over a holiday weekend, when Target's execs were unlikely to be working.
But it's a 24/7 world now, folks -- you can't let negative buzz spread too far too fast, at any time... As Wired said recently (via Radiant Marketing),
"The same thing will happen in business, because people know they don't need to head to branded sites for good information. Bloggers can be trusted to be independent and people will turn to self-published experts for information."
The good news is that the mechanisms to manage the message immediately and remotely are all right here, right now...
-HP has developers blogs (joining Sun, Microsoft, Apple, etc) (moonwatcher)
-Apple has a weblog for students (Rubel)
-Search Engine News article -- why your business should blog
--"I was surprised to find that over 50% of the visitors of this blog access it through a RSS reader. I guess that has something to do with the fact that all feeds for the blog have the full text of the entries, eliminating the need to visit the site, but the number was above what I would expect intuitively."
--Bill French of InfoAge is running a column on RSS
I presently subscribe to about a hundred RSS feeds and my inbox is running at about 20 to 40 messages on a daily basis; very manageable. I no longer receive email newsletters and I specifically seek out newsletter sources that are RSS-based. To put it bluntly, I have no time to surf the Web; the Web has to come to me.
...As I reflect on my decision to use this less-than-mature model for staying abreast of information, I have come to realise that many of my colleagues and other early adopters of RSS have come to depend on RSS for one very simple reason: they value their time. Many people think that RSS is simply a new model for browsing, and while it is a new way to browse information, it’s far from just that. RSS provides a way for you to save time and depending on how much time you presently spend going to Web sites or hunting down updates to information sources. The more you use the Web, the more time you will likely save if you adopt RSS.
...In 1994, if someone told you that in 10 years there would be just shy of a billion Internet users, more than 100 billion Web pages, and trillions of dollars of commerce based on a globally connected network, you might have thought the person insane. It was difficult to imagine then, as it is difficult to imagine now, that more than 100 billion RSS feeds will emerge in the next six years. It is difficult to imagine a different model of search where information (that you really want) searches for you. It’s difficult to imagine anything as geeky as RSS (i.e., machine-code in a URL) impacting non-technical users in every aspect of information and their daily personal and business lives. But it was difficult to envision a Web page 10 years ago.
Law.com Launches Blog Network with Leading Independent Legal Experts
More evidence that mainmedia are paying bloggers to blog... and that relevant content is being blogged.
PubSub now tracking 6.5 million blogs (via Ross)
Jeff Jarvis saves the committee meeting, and lays out the groundrules for ethical blogging.
1. No one can buy your editorial voice or space.
2. Anything that is bought should be clearly identified so the audience would not be confused about its source.
And, iUplog on the difference between a corpBlog, and employees' blogging...
3. Be transparent about any relationships you have that could affect what you say and about anything you receive related to what you say.
4. Be open. Be honest.
The Vision Thing, via Doc Searls;
RSS has reached the point for me personally, that if your site isn't available via RSS, you're dead to me.
InfoWorld (link via moonwatcher) (caveat: quotee runs Blogger) ;
Google, which implemented an internal Web log system behind its firewall about 18 months ago, has seen tremendous benefits from it and may in the future consider providing tools and expertise for this purpose to interested clients, a Google executive said.
"...we have seen a lot of different uses of blogs within the firewall: people keeping track of meeting notes, people sharing diagnostics information, people sharing snippets of code, as well as more personal uses, like letting co-workers know what they're thinking about and what they're up to," Goldman said. "It really helps grow the intranet and the internal base of documents."
Ideoplex suggests that RSS is not entirely an email substitute;
I think that the inner nature of RSS is that it is like email except:
- Pull not Push
- Anonymous Broadcast not Targeted Narrowcast
- Maintains History (most recent facets of a permanent store)
...Enterprise RSS is better suited for feeds that are of interest to groups not individuals. Where the ease of subscription reduces the overhead associated with people who want to be cc'ed on everything. And where the history implicit within an RSS feed becomes a tool to bring newcomers up to speed.
Instead of a Lead Generation feed targeted at an individual, how about a Sales Status feed for the team. Have sales discuss what is and isn't working at accounts. And have marketing monitor, correct, and reinforce marketing messages.
Read the post -- interesting thoughts.
Dave Winer talks about email vs. RSS here, too.
Good blog post from Scott Reynolds (corrected!) about why RSS for enterprises. Points to at least four enterprise uses for RSS (excerpts):
Leads Management --Why not tell a sales guy about a new lead using RSS?...Trigger Based and Data Mined Intelligence --Imagine a scenario where a user profiles themselves on an intranet site and subscribes to an RSS feed. A data mining engine then uses that profile and periodically matches it to data in the warehouse...Customised Report Subscriptions --With custom RSS feeds - the potential is huge...Internal Communications -- From social events to the latest revenue flash reports....
1. iUplog pointed to this article about Coke's consumer-generated marketing. Notable:
iMediaConnection: How has your job changed this year?
Dooley: Rather than just focusing on building brand Web sites, I've had to become educated about the wireless industry, mobile marketing, search, advergaming
Related; this summary about the consumer IS the medium, from AdTech
2. Rubel points to du Gardier's interview on how PR Pros can use RSS
3. Business Blogger Chamber of Commerce?
4. USA Today does RSS. As does Sony Music. And the UK Guardian's Editorial Board blogs.
5. CorpBlogs discussed on public radio
RSS Podcasting, anyone?
Chinese are buying 90M new mobile phones a year. (Compared to 80M total mobile phones in Japan.) ...China has 300M land-line phones and 300M mobile phones now
Seems to be the week of governmental RSS feeds. The Invent Blog points to freshpatents.com, which has an RSS feed organized by ..
...USPTO Class (you can set an RSS feed by technology, for instance getting abstracts to all published patent applications relating to USPTO Class 482: "exercise equipment").
Content just wants to be RSS-orized....
Via moonwatcher;
"Government bureaucracies are usually very slow to adopt new innovations. So when the National Agricultural Statistics Service began offering RSS feeds of some of its news, it was the latest sign that the technology has hit the mainstream."
More from the underlying Wired article:
To date, RSS feeds are offered by agencies such as the U.S. State Department, NASA, the state of Delaware, the National Hurricane Center, a number of state legislatures, local governments and more. However, many foreign governments, including England, France and New Zealand, are way ahead of those in the United States when it comes to RSS.
Here's the feed. Today's news; transcript of Powell's retirement briefing.
Here's another one - their blog site is intimate, visual, inviting (via RadiantMarketing);
Lincoln Sign Company is a small, custom sign shop specializing in carved, sandblasted & dimensional signs, but we will happily do just about any job (big or small) that is sign related. The company has been in operation since 1972 ...
RationalMarketing also links to this article about the 'blog marketing explosion';
Blogs are a goldmine of formerly hard to get insight from CEO's, marketing guru's and others who never used to have a public forum. These business leaders are utilizing the internet to convey their personal thoughts on happenings in their industry and life. They are blogging for the same reasons they do public speaking, to build credibility for themselves and their company's. Blogging has become a new … less time consuming and less expensive way to reach potential and current customers.
And, lest you're feeling it's all about the Benjamins...
AP - Beavers found a bag of bills stolen from a casino, tore it open and wove the money into the sticks and brush of their dam on a creek near Baton Rouge.
Excerpt from the Sony white paper (via Ross Mayfield);
Push services are on the rise on the Internet, based on the de facto standard RSS. We believe that RSS has a great potential in mobile phones, as a technology to automatically provide updated content to users - accessing the Web without browsing.
That's going to depend to a significant degree on the CEO and the industry. A running commentary on the topic has been blogged...
Regardless, more and more CEOs are blogging. Here's one list of about 60 around the world, and here's a list with another 40+ blogging CEOs in the U.S.
In this blog post by Bahar Gidwani, the CEO of a company called Digital Image Marketing, he talks about the impact of trends in his industry on its various constituents.
Blogs are a great place to convey thought leadership.
Blogs = reputation enhancement vehicles (via Rubel).
Why VCs like these new media..(Business Week) ...and the rapid Feld response
Why, exactly, you need an RSS feed.
Tomorrow's shopping experience (via Mernit via Scoble).
BrandWeek on blogs (going whole hog...);
...many advertisers are probably asking themselves the ultimate question: to blog or not to blog? In a media world where consumers can converse openly online and profanely about any product or service, should major companies risk becoming a part of the conversation? Some, including Microsoft and General Motors, already have. The prospect can be scary, but it's also the ultimate acknowledgement that the messages once so controlled by marketers and media no longer are. "The control is shifting whether we want it to or not," says Copilevitz.
Get used to it.
Steve Rubel publishes his iMedia Connection column on the 'long tail of the blogosphere'
In addition, really simple syndication (RSS) is starting to move mainstream as a tool that empowers consumers to TiVo the Web and assimilate all the content they care about onto a single Web page. In a recent report, Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley noted that Yahoo!'s recent adoption of RSS content on its My Yahoo! customized page will drive blog readership and usage. In a nutshell, RSS has lowered the barrier to entry, making it even easier for the small fries to compete with the big fish.
And Steve points to Jarvis' article on the future of Digital Media .
So now anyone can control, create, market, distribute, find, and interact with anything they want. The barrier to entry to media is demolished. Media, always a one-way pipe, now becomes an open pool. And, most important, the centralization of media -- the marketplace, the network, the monopoly -- is replaced by a decentralized universe. This changes everything. It changes the relationships. It changes the economics. It changes the power.
Still, traditional media have tremendous brand power. They need to move quickly to wrap that power around their 'readers'' choices...
Steve Rubel has a thorough post exhuming the blog-era P.R. lessons of the Krytponite lock case ...
Charlene Li has posted some bits from her recent Forrester report (ca. $400) on corporate blogging, specifically on best practices and blog codes of ethics. She links to five corporate blog policy examples, and has started a wiki which includes a list of companies with 'open' blogs. (Confused about wiki vs. blog? Read Chad's post and article)
One of the more unique corpblogs Charlene cites is Maytag's Skybox blog, which she describes as;
...a product support blog for its personal beverage vending machine ... ... In addition to providing sports-related content to "man cave" enthusiasts, a product manager dispenses advice and answers questions about the product.
GM's smallblock engine blog is personable, personal, and inviting.
Digital Web magazine (via boyink) shows that blogs and RSS accelerate the atomization of content. This graphic on 'distributed navigation' summarizes the impact of aggregators
(I think you have to click on it to read it -- struggling a bit with the wysiwyg typepad interface here...)
What's a traditional publisher to do? Adopt the technology fast. You can enhance your brand equity by migrating your 'readers' toward more custom versions of your brand first.
Move or lose...
Financial insight wants to be blogged...
The Wall Street Journal launches its Econoblog (as mentioned by Jarvis and Rubel).
And Fred Wilson points to five posts on Wall Street blogging, one of which highlights this quote from an institutional investor to a Wall Street analyst;
"I find I increasingly get a lot more out of reading blogs than sell-side
research. I am doing more and more primary research myself, and blogs form a very important part of that process."
Echoing Seth Godin's point about features of strong blogs, EuroTelcoblog also highlights what he likes about some analysts' blogwork;
...the highly individual qualities of blogs which collectively deliver what brokers' research typically lacks. All three have very sensitive BS meters, and are not afraid to court controversy. All three possess wide expertise and that rare quality of 360-degree, joined-up thinking, which allows them to consider the broader implications of what Company A is saying/doing, rather than the all-too-typical broker treatment...
and has this credible prediction;
...the message is pretty clear to me: eventually, and probably sooner than later, someone is going to pull together all these diverse angles on telecom/internet/media/hardware/applications/chips, incorporate some hard financial and technical analysis, and build a cross-sector investment research platform incorporating realtime tools (I mean blogging, IM, video conferencing and collaboration) rather than .pdfs and spam.
Update: Ross Mayfield points to another variation on the blog-based research model:
Last week I presented at KM & Intranet World alongside Mike from Techdirt -- which not only delivers public analysis, but custom corporate intelligence via private blogs. They have hit upon the beginnings of a cost effective method of delivering post-by-post analysis that engages the research client in conversation.
Ross Mayfield points to an article on the emerging wikis-for-PR phenomenon. One important point; social software provides a feedback route for recipients of corporate communiques.
More intimate relations, including with the media, can only be good for the enterprise..
Ifeedyou links to a variety of enterprise RSS resources, including Fred Cavazza's post. Both are in French. Fred suggests that multinational companies in which each country has a separate intranet should consider a single, RSS subscription-based corporate-wide intranet to publish the best of each country's intranets. "Child's play".
Fred Wilson, a well-respected NYC-based VC, blogs in praise of CEO blogs;
About a week ago, I posted that I think CEO blogs are a great idea.
Today, I was running through the various blogs I read, catching up on things, and came across this post by Steve Goldstein about the departure of Alacra's VP of Sales, Bob Delaney. This wasn't news to me, but the way Steve communicated this was great.
Bob's a great guy and was a big part of why Alacra has become such a great company. He's moving on to bigger and better things.
Steve used his blog to get the word out and communicate to the broader stakeholder base of his company.
It's a classy move and reflects well on Steve, Bob, and Alacra. A great use of a CEO blog.
Well done Steve.
Via Rubel;
Business Logs has posted a free guide to writing a business weblog. The guide covers choosing your voice and being consistent with it, understanding your audience before you begin and as you go, the type of posts will best suit your company, making things easy to read, the importance of humor and the necessity of honesty.
How to become a RSS-wielding, newsmaster, building topic-specific news feeds for your enterprise consumers, all in one nifty 30 minute audio interview
...as a Jupiter analyst points out :-)
Welcome to Charlene Li's weblog... and she has the NewsGator button, huzzah! Charlene pulls out some recos from Pheedo's Marketing VP about good corpblog practices;
To recap: 1. Focus on your core interest area to establish yourself as an expert. 2. Create at least 15-20 meaningful posts BEFORE you open your blog to the public. When people visit for the first time, you’ll have more then one post to share with them. If your blog is rich with information, most likely people will continue to read it. 3. Figure out who the a-list bloggers are in your niche and participate on their blog using comments and trackbacks. Links to your blog, outside your blog and within in your blog are all important to search engines. 4. Continue to write on target content
Other Forrester feeds here...
Myst founder (and NewsGator partner) Bill French, talked about corpblogs last summer, channeling Chad Dickerson of InfoWorld;
Chad correctly points out that corporate weblogs have a different set of requirements that revolve around security, permissions, and discovery. The blogging framework must be designed to meet these requirements.
"I think one of the biggest mistakes people in corporate IT make is wrongly assuming that documentation is something that ends at some point. In reality, IT is an organic beast, and documentation is never really complete. Fortunately, the Weblog paradigm gives corporate IT the means to create documentation that works the way people think -- in dates (When did this happen to the system?), incidents (What happened, and how was it fixed?), and people (Who fixed it?). We've used the Groove discussion to manage the IT logistics of office moves, server migrations, and the RFP (request for proposal) process for Web hosting. This method of group documentation works better in practice than anything I've ever seen."
JupiterMedia's found a way to use blogs to boost its business.
Over a dozen Jupiter analysts post blogs on the jupiterresearch.com Web site.
The at-times offbeat journals are stirring sales leads from clients who otherwise might not have contacted Jupiter, says David Schatsky, chief of research at JupiterMedia's Jupiter Research unit.
"One example is tech vendors whose marketers are checking to see if Jupiter mentions their products and what we say about them," Schatsky said.
(link via NewsGator friend (and public relations maven) Renee...)
You can find Jupiter's blogs linked from here. (Note to Jupiter; offer a all-analysts XML feed. With a NewsGator button :-))
Allen Engelhardt, CYBEA: Syndication Feeds in the Corporation:
I predict that within two years, not having a feed for your corporate news will be analogous to not having a Web site. It will mark you out as unresponsive and retrograde, writes Paul Kedrosky in the June 2004 issue of Harvard Business Review.But if you think it is just about providing a RSS feed for your press releases, you are very mistaken. It is about making all you data-generating transactions available to your customers. If you don't, then they will leave you.
And it doesn't stop there. If [in two years] you're not aggressively tapping feeds yourself, you'll find that you're a step behind your more aware customers, suppliers, investors, and competitors. A strong statement? Not strong enough, we would suggest. The future is not two years away, it is here, now. We work with customers who are now getting a real and measurable competitive advantage from using these technologies to change the way they work. The increase in productivity is dramatic and sustained.
Paul Kedrosky offers three practical steps your company should take to begin exploring syndication and some pointers to tools:
"First, make sure the executive team understands syndication and its implications.
Next, make sure your IT people keep syndication top of mind as the refine your systems and infrastructure. You are soon going to be a de facto broadcaster, and your technology infrastructure must be able to support that role.
Finally, think about what information you could feed. Consider what event data you generate, who would want it, and how you could benefit by syndicating it. Ask yourself, why not? "
A search of Kedrosky's site for 'RSS' yields this page...
Moonwatcher chides us for being six months later than his site, devoted to "Tracking the emerging Enterprise Weblog Management market."
He's right -- we weren't blogging about all this six months ago!
We're also interested in RSS beyond weblogs -- it's increasingly the lingua franca for all sorts of content communication and collaboration...
Much coolness chez Moonwatcher, including this one from last month highlighting the fact that stock analysts are shunning the enterprise content management sector -- even as VC's worry about those companies entering the space of their shiny new start-ups...
Check out the tabs at the top to track posts about vendors, the industry, customers, requirements, et al... or just subscribe to the feed in NewsGator (we'll see about getting that NewsGator one-click subscription button up on the site!)
Remember Mary Meeker? Morgan Stanley's all-star internet analyst is ba-ack (via lockergnome) ....
She recently completed a research piece on the next drivers for online services -- and it's extremely bullish about RSS. Excerpts;
Three factors are combining to drive online momentum: 1) rising usage of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) by content providers as a standard distribution platform for online content; 2) ramp in creation of blogs and other user-generated content and 3) Yahoo!’s easy-to-use integration of RSS feeds with My Yahoo!....In general, we believe ongoing improvements in the following areas will be important to
watch: 1) search; 2) personalization; 3) user-generated content (including blogs, reviews, images and audio); 4) music; 5) short- and long-form video; and 6) accessibility (including mobile devices and the PC desktop). Net, we are moving nicely down a path toward every Internet user, in
effect, having a personal media server…...RSS has become shorthand for syndication, in the same way that MP3 was
shorthand for digital audio for the longest time. We believe that the simplicity of RSS is reminiscent of the
simple user experience popularized by Google Search.
What about enterprise RSS portals, too?
Stay tuned!
From marketingsherpa, February 2004. Excerpts:
RSS is about to hit the mainstream. In fact, companies such as Amazon, Walt Disney, and Macromedia are already testing RSS to distribute news and info to customers and business partners....big companies are starting to use RSS in two ways: to improve in-house communications and to send out marketing and public-relations information previously relegated to email newsletters and news releases.
...The person who runs your company's intranet will probably benefit sooner from RSS than you will. More companies use RSS to manage internal communications and keep remote employees such as salespeople and field-office personnel in the loop without drowning in irrelevant information.
Technology companies such as Macromedia, maker of Shockwave, Flash and Dreamweaver programs for Web programming, use RSS feeds to pass on software beta versions and product updates and changes.
Dave Sifry of Technorati has four key data posts on blog traffic. Highly cool graphics included!
1. Corporate blogging. Growing fast from a small base. Note; my guess is the number is much larger but it's hard to identify someone as a corporate blogger vs ... just a blogger....
2. Big media vs. the blogs. Blogs are increasing the share-of-web-mind vs. big media. This political season a tipping point?
3. 4.6 posts per second. Note the huge spike in posts when a corporate 'event' (the Kryptonite lock problem) exploded first in the blogosphere.
4. 12,000 new blogs per day. 4.5 million tracked, a new weblog every 7.4 seconds.
The Software Marketing Newsletter looks to be an active source for current news and info about blogs, rss, software, and marketing.
(Note; found this via an 'RSS' keyword search set up in NewsGator. Further note; the prior post in that feed was from Der Spiegel's RSS feed, entitled "Islamkritischer Filmemacher erschossen". Wheat and a bit of chaff ... ...).
Highlights:
-- Article Syndication -- Key to Content -- argues that RSS is found money for web sites which depend on fresh content
Triple Point Technologies is an Inc.-100, 150-person private commodity trading solutions firm on the East Coast, and a NewsGator customer. Triple Point cooperated on a case study with us a few months ago. Their adoption of RSS as a standard for collaboration and communication highlights some interesting facts:
1. Corporate knowledge tied up in Outlook and Exchange is difficult to find, difficult to search, and generally not available to all users who need access to the information in a convenient way.
2. "The idea is to free some of our content, expose it via easily searchable XML and HTML via HTTP, and reduce the amount of information "hunt and peck" that currently goes on, thus increasing productivity and improving the quality of our work," says CIO Allie.
3. They wanted to leverage the fact that employees already spend significant time using Outlook, and also build upon intranet work they had already done with SharePoint.
The solution was multi-fold: weblogs were created for employees to publish to, business systems were modified to leverage RSS, intranet sites now notify via RSS, and NewsGator delivers the content to the desktops.
4. ...automated business systems are being retrofitted to generate data in RSS format. For example, Triple Point uses StarTeam for source control and release management. Using the StarTeam API and some XML savvy, they have built dynamic RSS feeds based on changes to the projects managed by StarTeam. In the past, developers were required to produce email announcements of each source code change; now that process has been automated via RSS.
5.... intranet content is being enhanced with RSS. For example, content in SharePoint is being enhanced to generate RSS change notifications, and other systems have been so modified as well. Whenever existing notification systems were inadequate, clumsy, or manual, Triple Point has built RSS generation systems around them to enhance and automate the process.
6. "We started enhancing our systems to work with RSS in September 2002, and used stand-alone news aggregators on the desktops," says Allie. "By February 2003 less than 5% of potential users were reading these feeds regularly." Triple Point switched to NewsGator in March 2003, and within two months saw adoption increase to about 35%. "The key for us is the tight integration with Outlook and the stand-alone tools never became popular with our users."
We'll post these as they come, but this presentation by Disney VP Mike Pusateri and his associates, about his company's use of wiki, blog, and RSS reader technology at a O'Reilly conference offers strong pointers to why enterprises should consider RSS now.
Mike is responsible for about 800 desktops at Disney. Is RSS a department-level pheneomenon right now? How about Microsoft's 1,000 bloggers?
(Thanks for the link and mention, Steve!)
Scoble and Jarvis note that GM has a blogger ... and a place for bloggers.
And, that there's an upcoming Blog Business Summit.
Directed, subscription-based interactions with external constituents is a vital competitive tool. Not everyone's comfortable blogging, but it's easy to learn, and the value in a controlled dialogue with your market and others can be immense...
Steve Rubel points to this primer on corporate blogging;
Basic, but worth checking out.
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