News

Blogged out @ BBS 05

20 Aug 05 by DL Byron

And with that I’m out for a few days. The Bog Business Summit was a success, a great event, with some tweaking to do. We need to find the right mix of sessions and we’re working on that. It’s a diverse audience we’re attracting and that means more demands on what they want to learn. Tell us what you want, fill out those eval forms, and comment directly on the session posts. Later we’ll podcast some audio and video.

We’ll be back at it October 29 in Seattle for the Blog Business Summit Seminar Series. If you want to learn more about building your business with blogs, we’ll cover it for $195.00.

Thanks again for attending. I met many of you and appreciate you being there.

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Friday night stragglers dinner!

19 Aug 05 by Dave Taylor

If you’re not flying out or returning home until tomorrow, have no other plans for this evening and you’d like to join some of us stragglers for a meal, please meet in the lobby of the Palace Hotel across from the concierge desk at 6.30pm. If not, well, we’ll have dinner without you!

Traditional PR and the Blogosphere

19 Aug 05 by Will Pate

Steve Broback, Lynann Bradbury, Laurie Mayers, Rick Murray

Lynann Bradbury

What happens when the PR and blogging worlds collide?
Think strategic before tactical
Think about different ways you can reach out to the blogging community and what you can offer them.
Use the Weblogging Index to find out where you fit and what you should consider.
Prioritize bloggers and make connections with and for them
Ask for referrals to other bloggers

Rick Murray

PR is about messaging, control of the messaging has been lost
35,000 PR people worldwide, 5 billion dollar industry
Old PR is stunts, attention getting
Maybe 100 people inside Endleman that understand and are working with bloggers in a positive way
Wants to get colleagues and clients into the pro-blog camp as soon as possible
Blogger posted password for beta site of Microsoft Student 2006, torpedoed traditional PR plan
Endleman CEO is a blogger,
Get to know the new people,
Don't pitch, participate. He is trying to kill the word "pitch".
Lose the messaging, gain the tone and language of the blogger you want to get to know
Add value to the conversation, don't just talk about your own stuff

Laurie Mayers

Careful corporate messaging not dead: SEC regulations on "material disclosures" needing to be announced simultaneously
Press release isn't dead because it meets SEC requirements, traditional media still used to them, can be localized for local markets
That being said, corporate messaging is involving. GM announced management changes on their blog.
Businesses will make their own rules about comments, post length, ghost writers, etc
PR needs to learn better, faster writing

You cannot control the message on the web, but you can choose to participate and vector it
You cannot appear authentic, you either are or you're not

Technorati Tags: bbs05, blogbusinesssummit, blogging, blogs, pr, publicrelations

Blog Business Summit Seminar Series

19 Aug 05 by DL Byron

After the success of our San Francisco pre-conference seminar, several of our Summit speakers will be hosting a one-day seminar on how to get your business up and running in the blogosphere.

Get the details here.

Blog Writing Style

19 Aug 05 by Will Pate

Molly Holzschlag and Darren Barefoot

Edit your materials before you post, but don't let your own editing censor your voice
Blogs lend themselves to quick writing and shorter posts
Resisting the temptation to push "Publish" too soon can be helpful
Corrections are best handled with strikethrough text on the error. "Update:" at the end of the post works well too
Editing too many times can irritate people because subscribers to your web feed see it as a new post each time you update
Don't name people on your blog unless they are already in the public space
Don't excerpt email discussions unless you have the person's approval
Understand the blogging environment by reading for a while before you write
Companies don't blog - people blog. Passionate ones make the best bloggers.
Blogging is about telling a story, and extending that story into a conversation
Having a voice and a personality is critical. Boring or bored people aren't engaging.
The last people in the organization you want to run the blog is the PR or marketing department. They have been trained to think and speak in a certain way that doesn't work in a blogging environment.
PR and marketing people can be great bloggers if the get on the Cluetrain
The amount of time spent blogging is dependent on how fast of a writer you are and the size of the posts
Controversial posts bring traffic, inbound links
If you're not a controversial person or in such an environment, this may not be the right approach for you
Blogging is an act of courage, because you are putting things out in the public that never were before
Blogs are changing the corporate culture of Microsoft, Adobe
Define the audience, offer public feedback mechanisms and listen to them
If you don't give customers a place to talk about your products, they will make their own
Discuss your competition frankly and honestly. You become a source for information on them.
Cite other blogs, you can't do this enough
Bottom line: be transparent, be authentic, tell your story

Technorati Tags: bbs05, blogbusinesssummit, blogging, blogs

Explosion Downtown

19 Aug 05 by DL Byron

One of readers sent this in earlier …

comments: There was an explosion in an electrical vault at the intersection of Post and Kearny that may affect attendees’ ability to travel around the local area. The cause of the explosion has not yet been determined. PG&E;, the FBI, and ATF are on the scene. The Ralph Lauren store at 90 Post Street was on fire, and portions of Sutter, Montgomery, Kearny, and Post streets have been closed while investigators proceed through the area.

Reports

SFGate
SFist

Why even bloggers should attend business conferences

19 Aug 05 by Dave Taylor

I’m a strong proponent of virtual professional networks like LinkedIn but I’d like to talk a bit about why it’s still important to remember that to be plugged in to your industry and market, you need to also attend workshops, seminars and conferences.

But here’s my tip for you: conferences aren’t about the sessions, the talks, or the demos, and it doesn’t really matter if you attend the vendor exhibition. Conferences are all about the breaks, the dinners, the bar at the conference hotel after the day’s done.

Why? Because the so-called educational aspect of a conference is something you can often receive by simply buying a book or a training DVD. That’s not enough to get me to travel to another city. To me, the most important aspect of attending a conference is the opportunity to meet people that I wouldn’t have otherwise ever met. It’s the random, the chaotic, the unexpected, unplanned discovery.

Continue reading Why even bloggers should attend business conferences

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Hey I'm on stage with Molly

19 Aug 05 by DL Byron

Molly rules

Wordpress.com Announced

19 Aug 05 by DL Byron

Hey, hey! I didn’t even know wordpress.com was being announced. Matt dropped it during his demo. It’s a hosted service powered by Wordpress.

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Mena posts on Movable Type 3.2 Demo

19 Aug 05 by DL Byron

Mena Trott, a Founder and President of Six Apart, posts about the Blog Business Summit and the Movable Type 3.2 demo this afternoon at 1:15. “Anil and Jay will be onstage demoing some of the new features of 3.2 and we will then be at hand to answer your questions about Movable Type or Six Apart.” As a bonus, they’ll have copies of Hacking Movable Type and some of their Viewmaster Reels.

Business to Business blogs

19 Aug 05 by DL Byron

One of our attendees asked me last night about business to business blogs, specifically, vendors communciating directly to their business clients. I couldn’t think of any specific blogs, but I’m sure there is. Anyone have some links, examples?

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Get With The Future: It's Tiddly

18 Aug 05 by Jeremy Wagstaff

Are TiddlyWikis the future? Not just of wikis, but of blogs, and information access? Whatever, I think anyone in the blogging world, the data organizing world, the tagging world, should take a look. And learn.

I was chatting with Jeremy Ruston the other day (the man who invented the TiddlyWiki) and found myself as infected with enthusiasm after a few days’ playing with it as he must have been to have dreamed it all up. To me the TiddlyWiki is the the intersection of publisher and database: a perfect confluence of content — a la blogging — and database. Tags become ways not just to categorise stuff for readers, but ways to drill down your own stuff. As we all become publishers, so we all need to not just throw stuff out there but make it accessible to ourselves as a database. As Byron said to me the other day, his book blog is his database. But TiddlyWikis, and especially their tagging features, allow this to be much more sophisticated.

Continue reading Get With The Future: It's Tiddly

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KGO Television to Cover Blog Business Summit

18 Aug 05 by DL Byron

KGO television’s, Local ABC 7, cameras were here today and interviewed Steve Broback and Paul Rosenfeld. The story will run tonight between 6 and 7:00 pm.

Dealing With Bloggers

18 Aug 05 by Will Pate

Janet Johnson and Robert Scoble

Marqui paid bloggers to talk about the company
Received a lot of bad press, was called lots of nasty names
Positive or negative feedback aside, it did raise the level of brand awareness
Develop a thick skin, be absolutely honest, have a point of view, do your research, engage detractors, drive to closure on topics
Pitching bloggers: build a relationship by sending information that's not about your company, then pitch the blogger
Some bloggers don't want anything from PR people
Never act like you're entitled to a link
Marqui now focuses more on blogging themselves instead of paying bloggers
Steve Rubel gets his companies stories into the blog world by being a resource for information first, and inserting messages from the companies every 10 or 20 posts
Microsoft product teams are changing the way they develop products based on the feedback they get from customers on the blogs they run
Simply Hired used the blog as a way to make fun of the error messages they were sure to give users as they went into a beta product launch
Silence at a problem causes people to think that the company has something to hide
Scoble had a journalist libel him, he responded and made himself available to bloggers that linked to the story, ended up turning the tide against the journalist
People are not fanatics, they are smart about what they read
Bloggers are the kind of people who help shift public opinion
Podcasting is powerful because the human voice feels more real
The legitimacy gained by linking to someone that gets your story wrong is short term, credibility is long term
Linking to people that disagree with you also shows credibility
Businesses can also use their blogs to give the people that use their products advice on best use cases or tutorials the product and other parts of their jobs
Great amplification effect for little time and money invested
Blog search traffic is growing at about the same rate as blog writing - doubling every 5 months
When you're in a crisis - overcommunicate

Technorati Tags: bbs05, blogbusinesssummit, blogging, blogs, pr, publicrelations

Building Community and Traffic

18 Aug 05 by Will Pate

John Cass, David Wharton and Buzz Bruggerman

David Wharton

Works at Nintendo, develops online communities
Sent copies of new game to target gamers
Created a private online community for them
Members posting pictures of their real dogs, Nintendogs, sharing stories and tips
Metroid Prime 2 Echoes, big Christmas release and nobody was talking about it
Developers didn't want to say or share anything about the game
Created character Samantha Manus and her blog at channel51.org
Created site to talk about how women were better suited to space flight
Created exclusive community to engage serious gamers, get real feedback, allow profanity
These people are incredibly marketing sensitive, need to be engaged for advice

John Cass

The web is being used by customers to compare products and companies
Consumers using blogs to publish their own websites
Customers have the opportunity to create lots of buzz marketing
Search is where research begins. 64% use search engine, 19% use the manufacturer of the products site
Still in the early stages of customers using blogs
People are looking for the best products and ideas, not necessarily yours
Case studies of Indium, Intuit, Macromedia, all benefitted from blogs
Targeting influencers: target the right keywords, find your blogging customers, use blog search engines to find bloggers covering your products, comment on the other blog
The goal is NOT to spam, but to have a conversation

Buzz Bruggerman

Blogging world has leveled the online marketing playing field
Steven Levy in Newsweek "Blogs and forums are the new crystal ball"
Got over 400 requests from 28 countries from 1 podcast interview, he offered free copies of ActiveWords to anyone that had listened through to the 1 hour mark they were at
Searching for product name + problem in any search engine will customers everything wrong with your product
You better build a good product and be responsive or you won't last in today's market
One determined detractor has more power than 100 happy customers. That number is going to grow.
Boeing invited bloggers on to the Conenexion flight that had wifi during the flight
Believing that mistakes will blow over and go unnoticed is wishful thinking
Little companies can't afford bad press, Buzz constantly watches mentions of himself, the company and the products, offers personal discussion with any dissatisfied/confused customer
Getting bloggers to deliver the right message involves listening before approaching, asking them how they would make it better
The magic is coming up with the product idea, building the relationship with real people

Technorati Tags: bbs05, blogbusinesssummit, blogging, blogs

Blogs That Sell

18 Aug 05 by Will Pate

Buzz Bruggerman and DL Byron

Buzz

Markets are conversations, products are conversations
Buzz had a little company, great product and no money to advertise
Where ActiveWords downloads come from: David Allen, Robert Scoble, 43 Folders, Ernie the Attorney, Slacker Manager, Make Magazine - overall half of downloads come from blogs
Don't need to post all the time, just have to have something interesting to say
Show there is a real person about the product
Consumer product blogs suck as Treonauts are better written, provide more useful information than company marketing materials
Buzz reads journalists that cover subjects related to his product to find out what blogs they read and get on those blogs
ActiveWords has spent $600 on marketing and they have great brand recognition
Comments allow Buzz to build a better product
People inside large organizations reading blogs talking about ActiveWords
If you want to know how to market your product with blogs, learn how to watch what others are doing?
Found who he wants to publish his book about the "ActiveWords Odyssey" by reading The Average Joe: A Book Publisher Blog

DL Byron

Clip n Seal blog has sold over 50k units, 1.5 million pageviews
Great Google results for keywords like "bag clip seal", this is because they are blogging
New markets opened up: Antartica, Ireland, Caribbean, Space (NASA)
Talked to bloggers, more and more people talked about and linked to Clip n Seal
Amazon.com picked up the product on their site
With a concerted campaign blogs can bring in real sales results
The biggest benefit is search results, can't be outspent on incoming links to create high search results
Product demos in video, flash, etc can become memes that get spread around

Technorati Tags: bbs05, blogbusinesssummit, blogging, marketing

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Building Blog Traffic

18 Aug 05 by Will Pate

Robert Scoble and Dave Taylor

Being the first to link to something is powerful, you can become "the source" for that information
Tell friends if you find something first
#joiito chatroom is a great place to seed stuff - full of A-list tech bloggers
If you read a blogger, know what they're interested about and write something that might be of interest to them - email them.
Never act entitled to a link, because you're not
Long tail: millions of markets of dozens are just as important as the the head of A-List anything
Staying on topic helps readers and other bloggers find you and make sense of what themes are your beat
Recommended Wordtracker for picking keywords
Being on the top of the first page for keyword results on Google is powerful (Google heatmap)
Correct semantic markup helps for SEO, most blog tools output such code by default
Good titles for posts helps you be searchable and findable
Dave uses Google News to find fodder for his blog
Design may make me subscribe in the first place, but once the user is getting the info via RSS it doesn't matter anymore
[pointless side conversation about partial vs. full RSS feeds. I'm with Scoble, go full feed or I lose interest]
Attending geek dinners and other social events, meeting other bloggers and telling them what you do is a good way to get links from them
I'd also add that submitting how-to kinds of posts to places like Lifehacker and posts about business to the Carnival of the Capitalists can be good traffic builders.

Technorati Tags: bbs05, blogbusinesssummit, blogging, blogs

Watching the Blog Business Summit

18 Aug 05 by Will Pate

If you can't make it to the conference and want to keep up with what's going on at the Blog Business Summit, here are some resources:

BBS attendees can add their blogs, rss feeds and such at the BBS05 wiki.
Technorati has a blogbusinesssummit tag and a bbs05 tag where they will be listing posts where people use the 'blogbusinesssummit' tag and ping them. (hint, hint attendees).
del.icio.us has a blogbusinesssummit tag and a bbs05 tag where people will likely be posting links to resources related to the panels, etc.
Flickr has a blogbusinesssummit tag and a bbs05 tag where you can see photos in near real-time.

Technorati Tags: bbs05, blogbusinesssummit

BBS 05 San Fran found object

17 Aug 05 by DL Byron

While walking to Office Depot to get some supplies, I found a small blue address book laying in a gutter. I’ve been periodically flipping through it. It tells a story, in brief passages, addresses, address changes, names and notes, including this one

Remember I worked at Nordstroms on call. In Hawaii.
for pecan pies:
www.mrssullivans.com

Let us know if you find any interesting objects. San Francisco is a fascinating town.

Blog notes from the 101 seminar

17 Aug 05 by DL Byron

Blog notes from Dave Taylor’s 101 seminar

Ping us

17 Aug 05 by DL Byron

Ping us on your posts with this trackback. Trackbacks are open during the event. To read what others are posting, see

Event Blogging will blog the sessions live tomorrow and Friday.

Blogging 101 Standing-room only

17 Aug 05 by DL Byron

It’s standing room only in Dave Taylor’s Blogging 101 sessions. There’s a great turnout and really positive vibe. Tomorrow and Friday it’s all day sessions. Also remember there’s a geek meet tonight and Microsoft is sponsoring the reception tomorrow night from 5:30 to 7:00 pm.

If you just heard about the event, and want to come, no worries. You can still register for the sessions.

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The answer to "what should I write about?"

17 Aug 05 by Dave Taylor

One of the most common questions about business blogging is “where am I supposed to come up with all this interesting content?” and it’s a fair question! There’s no easy answer, but here’s one guideline that can help you think creatively about possible content:

What questions are your customers asking about your products, services or marketplace?

Imagine your company sells ice cream and you want to help communicate to your market how good your treats are and how impassioned your customers become about your products. The obvious articles to write would be “case studies” about children who are eating your treats, but what about if you stumbled across the Sea Heart Viking Ship story?

Continue reading The answer to "what should I write about?"

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Learning from the MP3 Interface

16 Aug 05 by Jeremy Wagstaff

Could interfaces on blogs and in software learn from the controls of MP3 players?

Some MP3 players have, if only because of the iPod revolution, explored more interesting interfaces. Another push factor is that MP3 players are just as often accessed via feel rather than sight. You’re jogging, you’re in bed, you’re in the dark, you’re driving, etc etc. So buttons, jog-dials etc need to be distinguishable from each other. In short, they need to be unique. The old every-button-looks-alike-because- it’s-how-they’re-made-in-the-factory thing doesn’t apply to MP3 players, and it needn’t apply to websites, blogs, or software.

Any user interface could learn from this. The analog world metaphor of most websites and software seems to me to be outdated. Buttons could benefit from being uniquely shaped, sized and designed (within some coherent larger design), which would aid navigation and make for much more interesting web-sites (and software).

Continue reading Learning from the MP3 Interface

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Microsoft Word becomes blog authoring tool (for Blogger users...)

16 Aug 05 by Steve Broback

According to Blogger Product Manager Jason Shellen, there is a new “Blogger for Word” toolbar that allows you to post to your Blogger site directly from within Word. Shellen says:

“Use Blogger for Word as a way to back up your document drafts with the ‘Save as Draft’ button or work on posts while you are offline and post them later.”

Maybe Biz will demo this at the Summit…

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Blog readership: Blogger is number one--MSN Spaces, and Fark show fastest growth

16 Aug 05 by Steve Broback

… according to Nielsen/NetRatings.

ZDNet reports that:

“The top 50 blogging and blog-related sites grew 31% to 29.3 mln unique visitors during July 2005 as compared to the beginning of this year, comprising nearly 20% of active Internet users.”

Article and detailed chart here.

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The Fundamental Difference between RSS Feed Styles

16 Aug 05 by Dave Taylor

There aren’t too many fundamental architectural differences between business blogs, even if the software might vary and the layout and design are, well, all over the map. Even the difference between a hosted solution or running your own blog on your own server end up fairly transparent as good content helps you gain readership and influence, while poor content, “me too”s and similar leave you scratching your head, wondering why your effort isn’t producing any positive results.

The areas where I see significant debate are whether to accept advertisements and sponsorships, what kind of commenting strategy you’ll use and whether to have a partial RSS feed or a full RSS feed. I’ve addressed the previous two topics (blogging for pay and comment strategies) so let’s explore the different options in RSS feeds.

Continue reading The Fundamental Difference between RSS Feed Styles

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What blogging tool or service do you recommend?

15 Aug 05 by Dave Taylor

As I wrap up my final notes for the Business Blogging 101 workshop I’ll be facilitating (oops! That’s a new age higher ed buzzword! let’s say “teaching” instead and get it over with, okay?) I am at the same spot I’ve been in for many months: what tools or services should I recommend to the audience?

I personally have my main weblogs — The Intuitive Life Business Blog, Ask Dave Taylor and The Attachment Parenting Blog — all running on an old version of Movable Type, but I also have blogs running on Blogger, Yahoo’s new Yahoo 360 and work with Typepad too.

Continue reading What blogging tool or service do you recommend?

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Jeremy Wagstaff to Guest Post

15 Aug 05 by DL Byron

During this week, the next, and maybe a few more, Jeremy Wagstaff will guest post for the Blog Business Summit. Jeremy and I have been instant messaging for over a year about business blogging and I suggested that he add his voice to our “practical blogging” topics.

Jeremy is a technology columnist with the Asian and online Wall Street Journals, who doubles as a would-be author (non-fiction, a work in progress on Indonesia).

His Loose Wire column has run in Dow Jones publications for the past five years: Online at WSJ.com, in Asia in The Asian Wall Street Journal’s Friday section Personal Journal. It appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review until the magazine shifted to a monthly in October 2004.

The Full Turn of the Wheel

15 Aug 05 by Jeremy Wagstaff

Might blogging become the thing that it set out to replace?

If blogging is a revolution, then, as with all revolutions, it will ultimately come full circle and replace — or closely resemble — the previous existing order. I think that this may already be happening, but it’s not inevitable.

Blogging has threatened the citadel of traditional journalism, not just as an alternative source of information and comment, but because businesses, PR and individuals find they can reach a larger, more engaged audience though blogs than through the media. (See Joi Ito’s piece on Hiroshima in the NYT/IHT, and then compare it to the discussion on his own blog, and tell me which is the more interesting dialog.)

Continue reading The Full Turn of the Wheel

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Google love

15 Aug 05 by DL Byron

Another topic I’ll discuss in all of my sessions with my cospeakers is Google love. Finishing the last chapter of their blog book, Naked Conversations, Shel Israel writes about how we’ve entered, “the Conversational Era.” In a passage, he quotes me

“You blog, other blogs link to your blog, you link back, and Google loves that”

I’m saying how simple it all is, just like Steve noted in his post about SEO over the weekend. For bloggers, we just blog, write passionately, and the Google love comes. An example, search for “localized blogging,” a topic I posted on a few weeks ago. As of this morning, it’s the number one hit.

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A creative medium

15 Aug 05 by DL Byron

In an interview with the BBC, Sir Tim Berners-Lee talks about how blogging is closer to his original idea for the web and says, “What happened with blogs and with wikis, these editable web spaces, was that they became much more simple.” He continues with, “When you write a blog, you don’t write complicated hypertext, you just write text, so I’m very, very happy to see that now it’s gone in the direction of becoming more of a creative medium.”

In my design session, I’m going to talk about blogs as a creative medium, how design does matter, and why it’s effective. Where some bloggers may see blogs as a conversation, another vehicle for ads or marketing, more importantly blogs are for creativity. The creativity is being expressed with personal, business, and corporate blogs.

Want traffic and great Google placement? Evidence that an expensive domain name can't compete with blogging

14 Aug 05 by Steve Broback

Here’s a tidbit to show the boss who is reluctant to start blogging, and is something I’ll be talking more about at next weeks summit.

Just ran across genuineblog, a site authored by Jim Turner (who is coming to the SF Summit) It’s a perfect example of how a two year head start, and ownership of a killer domain name can’t compete with a blog.

If you type the word “genuine” into Google, genuineblog holds the top two positions. Way down the list is a (very) static commercial site (a consulting firm) that owns “genuine.com”. Note that genuine.com also went live about two years before genuineblog.

Seems to me that frequent updating, interesting content, and a syndicated feed may be a better investment than an impressive domain name.

Want more proof? Check out how the traffic to “photography.com” (how much did that domain name cost??) compares to “photographyblog.com”.

Forget SEO people, just start blogging…

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Geek Dinner at Blog Business Summit, 17 August

12 Aug 05 by Dave Taylor

Kudos to blogger and Blog Business Summit attendee Niall Kennedy for stepping up and organizing a Geek Dinner for the evening of the 17th of August, Wednesday night, immediately following my Business Blogging 101 workshop. Interested in joining a bunch of us at Henry’s Hunan for some great Chinese food and lots of amusing and witty banter? Pop over to Niall’s blog and sign up!

Note that this event is not sponsored, endorsed, or, especially, paid for by the team organizing the Blog Business Summit, but at least one of us will be in attendence anyway! :-)

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We don't use your URLs or emails

12 Aug 05 by DL Byron

I’ve noticed some commenters aren’t putting their websites in the form or are using fake sites or strings and also using fake emails. What happens is that triggers the spam filter and your comment is denied and we don’t know you’ve been denied unless you tell us.

We don’t use your emails for anything other then to authenticate you as not being a penis spammer (and that doesn’t work so well, but it’s all we got).

We don’t use your URLs for anything other than to link to you from your comment. If you don’t have a website that use the # sign.

We’re nice people, running a blog and a conference, don’t worry.

No Sleep 'till Frisco!

12 Aug 05 by DL Byron

The BBS05 team is working hard on the event, wrangling slides, updating the site, and blogging. Here’s a few bullets for today from the blog week that was:

Scoble records a back-porch conversation with Steve Broback and Buzz Bruggeman. (I wasn’t there, but the Three Amigos comes to mind: ‘Jefe, would you say I have a plethora of pinatas?’). The 40 minute-long recording includes Broback recalling his memories of The Palace, Adobe including RSS in Photoshop, and the very positive vibe going into the Summit. Buzz discusses the Stratoblog and compares the real-time blogging with the latency of media. Scoble discusses accuracy and trusting bloggers.
I slipped the term Bennifer into a passage of the blog book and I’m watching it to see if it makes it past editing. I also realized that starting the book during the Summit was not the best planning.
Google’s News RSS continues to amaze. It’s the accuracy. I’m seeing articles I hadn’t seen before and it’s updated almost immediately.
The Chief Program Pilot for the Boeing 777 reports on how they flew low over the crowd at Seafair.

6 years of Anil

Anil posts on 6 years of blogging. Clip-n-Seal’s blogging started on Anil’s blog. He was the first blogger that posted on what we were doing. It was June 10 2003.

And finally

Part of the fun of getting a new Powerbook, is tracking it on FedEx.

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Mix & Mingle

11 Aug 05 by DL Byron

Just like last time, in Seattle, there’ll be a parrallel conference in the halls, dinners, breaks, coffee and drinks. So far Niall Kennedy is planning a Geek Meet. Please let us know what you got planned and we’ll post on it.

For me, I’ll roll all free-form with the flow. There’s much to do leading up to the event. I’ll also have my bike with me and will ride around San Fran, when I can get away. Join me for a bike ride, that’d be cool, as I have no idea where to ride in that town.

Blogs are big business in China too

10 Aug 05 by Steve Broback

news.com reports that Bokee, (Chinese for “Blog”) has received $10 million in venture capital funding from six U.S. and Chinese companies. Other Chinese firms Blogbus.com and BlogCN.com are also apparently in financing discussions with venture capital firms. In addition, Microsoft, Google and Yahoo have been offering blogging sites to Chinese Internet users.

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Business blogs and mentoring: Hillary Johnson of Inc. Magazine discusses virtual coaching

10 Aug 05 by Steve Broback

As I urged in a previous post, don’t confuse content with architecture. The Web isn’t just about physics papers anymore, and blogs aren’t just about diaries that obsess about cats.

In the article Why I Read Business Blogs, Hillary Johnson refutes the common thinking by the uninitiated that:

Most people think of blogs as public diaries kept by the kinds of egotists who make loud, inappropriate political comments at family barbecues or hog the discussion at book clubs, or wannabe journalists who post inflammatory stories with no fact-checking.

Johnson cites several business blogs that are helping her take her business ventures to the next level:

For me, a woman who didn’t graduate from Stanford and doesn’t live in Silicon Valley, reading blogs by other entrepreneurs provides unexpected access to a virtual peer group.

(Thanks to Byron for sending me this link discovered via Google’s new ability to save news searches as RSS feeds…)

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A short blog verse

10 Aug 05 by DL Byron

To lighten up the pre-conference tension and a quick break from all the business, a short verse was submitted by Erin:

I have flamed the entry
that was on
your weblog

in which
you were probably
going
for “wiseass”

Forgive me
you were so snippy
so brief
and so wrong

BBS05 | View Comments (8) | Post a comment

The importance of your blog comment strategy

10 Aug 05 by Dave Taylor

After working in the computer industry for decades, I'm used to the most seemingly benign topic exploding into a passionate - and sometimes even vitrolic - debate, from which editor you use to what operating system, programming language to which HTML mark-up standard you work towards.

In the blogging world, surprisingly, the big debate isn't about what blogging tool to use, and it's not about design or layout. It's not really even about whether to include advertising or not, as far as I can tell. The two big hot-buttons are about RSS feeds, whether to have a "full feed" or a "partial feed", and about your blog comment policy.

In this article, I'm going to talk about the latter topic, and I address RSS feed strategies in a different piece (and at length in my Blogging 101 workshop at Blog Business Summit).

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BBS 05 San Fran Discussions

10 Aug 05 by DL Byron

Blog networks are being discussed at 9rules, includes comments from Calcanis, Scrivens, Nick, and me
Business Logs is promising to go on a meet-and-greet networking binge
Will Pate and Kris Krug will blog the Summit live for us
Steve’s link experiment is getting linked

Also …

Irish bloggers discuss getting paid to post, I lost more than 45 minutes of book-writing time clicking links on Rebecca’s pocket, sipped from my coffee cup while reading the Year of Coffee blog, and expect to see more GhostCycles on my ride later today.

The next Web revolution includes 37 Signals

10 Aug 05 by DL Byron

Salon reports on the 10th anniversary of the web and gives props to 37 Signals for making applications that are, “fun and flexible as your favorite software.” We’re using Basecamp to manage the blog book project. I wouldn’t describe that process as actually fun or favorite thing to do and there are limitations, but it’s definitely useful and getting the job done for us. Where it works for us is cutting down on the email that gets lost in an inbox of 1000+ messages.

Where I think the web can be mo’ betta, is with e-commerce. It’s still too damn hard. I posted earlier about the new internet and how it was finally getting easy, but not shopping carts or shopping sites. Now that blogging is entrenched, let’s hope the next revolution is an easier way to buy and sell product.

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Blogging Business news with Google

09 Aug 05 by DL Byron

Sometimes in the blogosphere it just clicks and you exclaim, “right on or dude or shizzzam!” (other times, you ponder a post for hours at a time). Tonight, I had such a moment, when I banged out a syndicated headlines section on our sidebar within minutes of reading that Google finally introduced feeds for Google News. Using Appnel’s Feeds.app plugin for Movable Type, I added the RSS uri, tweaked a few things, and done. We’re using the same plugin for Blog Jobs.

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Podcasting business

09 Aug 05 by DL Byron

I’m publishing two podcasts, one for the blog book and another for Pug Blog. IBM announced that it’s podcasting, so did PepsiCo, GM, and Apple offers an enormous podcast directory in iTunes, which includes the pugcast. Clients ask me about podcasts, what to do with them, and how. Part of the reason podcasting has been adopted so quickly, is that it’s easy to do. It’s just an mp3 file announced by an RSS feed. Here’s how I produce a low-tech podcast:

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AnchorFree: A wifi business model that makes sense

08 Aug 05 by Steve Broback

Any good economist will tell you that in a competitive market, the price of a good is equal to its marginal cost (the cost to produce an additional unit).

In the case of an information good like wifi network access, (high cost to create first unit, but all additional units very cheap or free) price should equal average cost.

That’s why I’ve chafed for years having to pay people like T-Mobile monopoly prices for wifi access. My thinking is: Starbucks doesn’t charge to use the toilets, yet it’s many, many times more expensive to install and run bulky plumbing and fixtures than it is to toss a tiny $50.00 LinkSys router in a closet. Why isn’t an ad on a free splash screen more than fair to compensate them?

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