Shame on the Red Cross

I'm with Seth Godin on this  What to do when you are wrong

The Red Cross got sued by J&J yesterday.

It turns out that in the 1800s, Johnson & Johnson had used the Red Cross symbol for more than a decade before the US non-profit started using it. It also turns out that they generously gave the organization the right, for free, to use the symbol for its work, forever, as long as they didn't use it for reasons not directly related to their mission.

Mission? The Red Cross recently licensed their logo to a brand of surgical gloves, for example. And first aid kits that a licensee sells at Target.

In the press release, Mark Everson, the Red Cross' president, is quoted as saying, "For a multibillion-dollar drug company to claim that the Red Cross violated a criminal statute, . . . simply so that J&J can make more money, is obscene."

I think that's a typo. My guess is that Mr. Everson meant to say, "Oops! J&J is a good corporate citizen, a significant donor to the Red Cross and the original and rightful owner of the trademark. We'll unwind our deals as soon as we can and go back to focusing on what we do best."

That's what I would do, anyway.

Moms Turn to Blogs

Women, the principal audience for morning TV, are tuning out in increasing numbers in a Wake-up Call to A.M. News.

"Watching morning television for me is the equivalent of reading People magazine in the dentist's office," said Lauck, who writes for websites from her home in Santa Rosa, Calif. "They don't have anything new or particularly relevant to my life. It seems like a lot of fluff. I feel like I can get information faster and cleaner on the Internet."

They are turning the TV off and turning to  Mommy blogs  to swap tales about the pressures of modern motherhood.

"Now that I've been blogging, the morning shows feel like they're staged to me, whereas the mommy blogs are pretty authentic — to the point of being almost too honest some times," said Blecherman, a former senior manager at Deloitte & Touche who now does part-time consulting from home. "It's a way to get really fresh information from other moms, kind of like a virtual moms group. I don't see a need to watch the morning shows."

Social Networks Useful to Share Identity

Sharing video, photos and music with friends and family online or How Social Networks Became Useful.

According to a November eMarketer report by senior analyst Debra Williamson, 2007 ad spending on U.S. social-networking sites will jump to $865 million from $350 million in 2006 a close to three-fold jump. By 2010, the report estimates, spending will reach $2.15 billion.

Meanwhile Bruce Nussbaum calls Identity, the New Paradigm.

A while back, I posted an item on "identity" as a new paradigm that could replace "experience" in our business culture. Academia, especially linguistics, has been talking about the shift from experience to identity for some time. The idea is that the concept of "experience" is passive.
--

But life really isn't like that. People are not passive--they make their own lives. People interract with their environments to create their distinct identities. Let me repeat that--people interract with their environments to create their own identities. This amounts to co-creating your own products and services.
--
YouTube, MySpace, Flickr, Second Life and in the gaming world, you create an identity. Yes, there are avatars and they are the purest form of identity. But for me, it is the identity you build in the real world working with tools provided by companies that is the most interesting. How you configure you iPod or how you organize your cell phone defines you and reflects who you are. TiVo, Nikes, the sessions and workshops you chose and listed at the World Economic Forum, etc. That's your identity. None of that is passive.

Report from Le Web 3

Two thoughts from Hugh McLeod's wee talk  at Le Web 3, he of the Gaping Void.

This new media is both intimate and intuitive.
--
This market and communication transition we're going through is not about technology, and it sure as hell isn't about marketing. It's about Love. Love enabled. Love re-asserting itself in the business between people.

Business Exchange

Last Friday, I had the pleasure of speaking to the Boston Business Exchange, a group that is in the process of changing its name and its meeting venue, so no link.

Suffice it to say, they are business men and women who want to go a step beyond traditional networking, so naturally they are interested in blogs.

I spoke on Getting Naked and Blogging for Business, but in only 15 minutes time, I had to severely limit what I said, so I limited it to a few stories.

Instead of telling them all the benefits of business blogging, I pointed them to the Small Business Blog of the Day and its 101 reasons to blog.

As for consultants, here are some additional benefits.

You choose your niche and focus

o Write about what you feel passionately about.  It’s how you’ll attract  readers
o Position yourself as an expert
o Differentiate yourself for competitive advantage
o Write often, write short.
o Make your blog part of your overall marketing plan
o Think of it as managing your public reputation

Increase your visibility as an expert.

o Give away your resources as links
o Be a trusted filter of news in your industry or niche or neighborhood
o Point out important articles, news and resources
o Give your clients and prospects a reason to visit often
o Blogs are “word on mouth on steroids”
o You’ll get noticed and journalists will respect you.

Increase your sphere of influence  - Connect with Others

o Reach beyond the people you know
o Reach people in the future
o Reach around the globe
o Connect to people you respect and admire with your blogroll
o Be generous with links and credits
o Collaborate and cooperate on projects
o Your value is in your relationships, your value in trust,  not your exclusive knowledge

Make a chronicle of your professional life

o Content management system –great for notes .
o You set the categories
o When you read something you can make note, opine
o Corporate memory

Build your brand

o What’s your story? What’s your talent?
o Who do you INTEND to Be?
o What’s the POINT of what you do?
o Show how you think innovatively
o Let your personality shine through with all its passion and enthusiasm
o Share your knowledge and expertise and let people get to know you

Become a Better Communicator

o You will be exposed to more different points of view
o You will read more and write more clearly
o You will understand other groups/cliques better
o Listen to your readers

Intellipedia

Using open source collaboration software used by Wikipedia, spy agencies are now assembling intelligence reports in a new way.

Spy Agencies now share the wikipedia way

The system allows analysts from all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies to weigh in on debates on North Korea's nuclear program and other sensitive topics, creating internal websites that are constantly updated with new information and analysis, officials said.

The system, which the public cannot access, is divided into classification categories starting with "sensitive but unclassified" and ending at "top secret." The program is still being developed, officials said, and has not replaced procedures used to create intelligence reports for President Bush and other policymakers. But it is being used to assemble preliminary judgments for a National Intelligence Estimate on Nigeria and may replace unwieldy methods for creating such reports.

Socrates on blogs

I like Jeff Jarvis's post, Is writing the highest form of speech commenting on Nick Lemann's New Yorker article, On the Internet, everyone is a millenarian

As the flood of responses and comments to Nicholas Lemann’s “On the Internet, everybody is a millenarian” article in the New Yorker continues to flow, bend, ripple and eddy, one can’t help but notice how Lemann’s piece simply stands there, mute, defunct. Sans capacity to comment, respond, defend, link. It’s Plato’s old distinction in the Phaedrus“>Phaedrus: blogs are the speaking voice, alive and self-present. Lemann’s article belongs to the world of print, of writing.

Socrates talks about the written word as a lesser form of shared knowledge. He praises conversation, teaching, humanity.

Well worth reading in its entirety.

FeedBurner Networks - Venture Capital

There's so many new tools for blogs, I can't keep up. 

The new Feedburner networks look very interesting.  Take a look The Venture Capital Network

A FeedBurner Network is a collection of blogs that fit within a particular topic. The goal is to create high quality collections of similar types of publishers. For example, if you are interested in reading Venture Capital bloggers, you currently have to manually poke around to find them. Some bloggers have taken it upon themselves to compile a list of Venture Capital bloggers (65 – where did all those come from?) and you can use Technorati to find Blogs about Venture Capital. But – none of these approaches is particularly organized, scales, or is really manageable.

A FeedBurner Network is managed by a coordinator. At this stage the coordinator is the gatekeeper for the network, although it will evolve so that all members of a network can promote other potential members. As a result, the content is "filtered and selected" by the network coordinator (and ultimately members) so that there aren't "fake" Venture Capital blogs as part of the network. The result should be a higher quality network and a quick and easy way to find “Venture Capital bloggers.”

Blogosphere 60 Times Larger Than Three Years Ago

Via Joe Katzman who notes Marketing Vox

"The blogosphere is doubling in size every six months and is now 60 times larger than it was three years ago, according to the latest quarterly installment of David Sifry's "State of the Blogosphere" report. He writes that Technorati now tracks over 35.3 Million blogs."

Businesses Can't Shut Out Their Customers Anymore

More and more businesses are paying attention to what blogs say.
They can't shut out their audience any more.

Business bites the blogging bullet

more and more firms are paying greater attention to what blogs are saying about them - and even trying to meet the bloggers halfway.
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Companies have been used to a level of control, and it's been very much a one-way street," says Matthew Yeomans of Custom Communication, an agency which seeks to help businesses navigate their way around the burgeoning blogosphere.

"For years, they've shut out their audience and hidden behind the world of PR. That's all blown out of the water now. They can't do that any more."
-----
It can be an amazing piece of market research that you can get for free," he says.

"The more enlightened companies are not trying to control this conversation, because they realise they can't. The web is out there for anyone to see. But the best companies are seeing that as an opportunity, not a threat."

Enter Zoomba

I've been wondering how book clubs were going to survive the disruption of the Internet.

If you're a big reader like I am, you used to join book clubs to read about new books coming out on a regular basis and to get the four free books you got for joining. Of course, you had to fill out those reply cards or you got their book of the month on a regular schedule which if you didn't want it was a pain-in-the-neck to return.

Amazon changed everything. Not only could you get books whenever you want delivered to your door, you could find all the information you could ever want about any book whether you ordered it or not, including professional reviews and reviews by other readers. Amazon taught me how mathematics could be a competitive advantage with algorithms that looked at what I read and recommended new books. With its size and scale, Amazon could create the largest inventory and realize the enormous profits that could be made by catering to the long tail.

Netflix catered to the long tail as well. But the reason I joined was "no more late fees ever". I liked too the single price per month no matter how many DVDs I ordered so long as I only had three at a time. Like Amazon, Netflix had information on every movie and an easy way to create a list, a queue which I could add to and reorder any time. Easiest though was the delivery in thin, red envelopes that became the postage-paid return.

Since book clubs can't compete with Amazon, why not model after Netflix? That's what Zoomba does. Create a reading list of booksellers, get one a month for $9.95 - no shipping & handling, no reply cards, no book that you didn't ask for.

That's smart. Now they just need some blogs to get people talking about the new best sellers.

Click for Design

Design blogs are "equal parts bulletin board, cocktail party, garage sale and aesthetic manifesto."

They're a great interactive resource," says interior designer Ky Ta of the District. By posting questions on blog comment boards, he says, "you can basically leverage the entire design community to solve problems. They're also a great buying guide for people who don't necessarily know where to go to look for certain things. So they're really providing a free service, and anyone with an Internet connection can use it."

Read more about people obsessed with design and the wonderful, terrible development of design blogs in The Washington Post, Blog Wild.

The CIA blogs

The CIA is blogging! Probing Galaxies of Data for Nuggets.

The CIA has debuted its Open Source Center, part of the reorganization following the failures of intelligence collection related to 9/11. (Good thing Open Source Media, OSM changed its name back to Pajamas Media, or it would be called a CIA front!)

It even has a blog on blogs, dedicated to cracking the code of what useful information can be gleaned from the rapidly expanding milieu of online journals and weird electronic memorabilia warehoused on the Net.
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By adding the new center, "they've changed the strategic visibility," said Douglas J. Naquin, a CIA veteran named to direct the center. ". . . All of a sudden open source is at the table."

Blogging in China

So who are the leaders of the online revolution in China? It's party member and dance girl and the New York Times has the story, Party Girl and she's a blogger.

What I find wonderful is the irony of people speaking their truth to each other in personal weblogs can undermine a rigid, authoritarian regime.

"The new bloggers are talking back to authority, but in a humorous way," said Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at the University of California, Berkeley. "People have often said you can say anything you want in China around the dinner table, but not in public. Now the blogs have become the dinner table, and that is new.

"The content is often political, but not directly political, in the sense that you are not advocating anything, but at the same time you are undermining the ideological basis of power."

Sly and sardonic, Chinese blogs are growing quickly, already 1 to 2
million, despite censorship

What I found surprising to me was the notion that in China, the concepts of private life and public life have only emerged in the past twenty years.

Turnkey blogging systems for verticals

Kevin O'Keefe has done a fine job providing lawyers and law firms with at urnkey blogging system at LexBlog.

Now Paul Chaney, at Radiant Marketing is introducing something very similar for another vertical, the real estate and mortgage industries, at Realtors Conference & Expo.

It's called Blogging Systems and you can read what Paul has to say about it here.

Congratulations, mazeltov, best of luck with this new venture to a vertical that sorely needs it.

My Butler Blogs

Was blogging predicted in the 19th century in Russia?

Well the Russian Prince Vladimir Odoesky in 1837 did predict something like blogging - for the year 4338.

“The thing is that many households here publish such journals that replace common correspondence. Such journals usually provide information about the hosts’ good or bad health, family news, different thoughts and comments, small inventions, invitations to receptions.”

However, Odoevsky, a prince and a wealthy man, could not imagine people taking so much bother to keep their acquaintances updated on their daily affairs. He suggested the job would be carried out by the butler.

“The job of publishing such a journal daily or weekly is carried out by the butler. It is done very simply: receiving an order from the masters, he makes a notice of what they tell him, then make copies by camera obscura and sends them to the acquaintances.”


Hat tip Steve Rubel, From Russia with Love

Why People Blog

Fascinating blogger study by Edelman and Technorati, Why People Blog.

34% blog to increase their visibility as an authority in their field.
32% blog to create a record of their thoughts.
20% blog to connect with others.

Bloggers trust other bloggers when it comes to new products (63%), far more than company websites (26%) for the best advice on new products.

Tara says the study justifies her cult of Cluetrain. She also has a wonderful Dave Weinberger quote, "We're writing ourselves into history one blog post at a time."

1000% circulation boost

Daytrade team reports that its "Trading Tips" article feeds have increased in circulation by over 1000% since being produced in RSS/XML formats.

People Blog as Therapy

Via Blogspotting's Heather Green (who also has the download link for a summary of the study), a new AOL survey on blogging that finds most bloggers aren't wannabe journalists or political activists, they blog as a form of therapy.

• One third of bloggers write about self-help and self-esteem topics.
• 54 % like to share their thoughts and feelings with others.
• 43% like to chronicle their life and interests.
• 31% turn to blogs for help and counseling.

In times of need or high anxiety, one-out-of-three people (31%) say they turn to either writing in their blog or reading the blogs of other people who are experiencing similar issues; that's six times as many people who prefer to seek help and counseling from a professional (5%). The No. 1 answer was seeking advice from family and friends: 32% vs. 31% who turn to blogs

Conversation is the Kingdom

A not-to-be-missed post by Jeff Jarvis, Who wants to own content?

Distribution is not king.
Content is not king.
Conversation is the kingdom.
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In our media 2.0, web 2.0, post-media, post-scarcity, small-is-the-new-big, open-source, gift-economy world of the empowered and connected individual, the value is no longer in maintaining an exclusive hold on things. The value is no longer in owning content or distribution.

The value is in relationships. The value is in trust.

Jeff says there is no scarcity of good stuff out there, the value is in the conversation, in the relationship.

You want to join in on what people do on their own.  You want to help people make and find and remake and save the content they want.

Better to be part of a fluid network, better to gather than create.

If I have to pick sides, you can guess what side I pick: small, not big; open,not closed; shared, not owned; enabled, not excluded.

Yet once you think about it, this isn’t so new, really: Isn’t journalism supposed to be about building trust (so how did it become so untrusted?)? Aren’t brands supposed to be about communicating trust (so how did so many of them become so untrustworthy?)?

In the end, isn’t the only asset worth owning trust? Content is not king. Distribution is not king. Trust is king in the kingdom of conversation.

Transcending time and space

I like what Ann Althouse has to say about blogs. 

[B]logging is just writing, and like other writing, it has aspects that are better than conversation:

It can reach beyond the people you know.

It can reach people in the future, including the people you know.

It can reveal things that cannot come up in ordinary conversation.

It can allow one person to contribute a larger share of the ideas than would be seemly in conversation.

It lets you leap over your immediate physical environment.

If I stuck to face-to-face conversations, I'd be talking to people in Madison, Wisconsin all the time!

Her commenters add: 

[B]logging has made [me] more communicative than I used to be (not that I was shy about talking, being a professor and all...).

I have also found that because of blogging I have likely read more news and commentary on a subject than most people, even my peers. Because, if I am going to argue in public about something, I need to be informed.

Another says

I also find by either writing or reading blogs and their comments, I read more and get exposure to a more diverse range of opinions and insights than I received from reading the same newspapers as everyone else or only talking to nearby folks. The exposure has reformed some of my own opinions -- and in some cases -- helped me become more tolerant of the differing view because of greater understanding of why some people think like they do. In others, it's helped me identify issues that I oppose and that's stimulated me to be a more active opposition voice.


Still Another says
Blogs let you see into cliques that you can't really get at any other way. I have learned far more about libertarians and lawyers, for example, than I could ever find out through my social contacts.

For me, blogging has made me a better writer.  I have learned much more about Catholicism, marketing, doctors, technology  because I read so many blogs by so many smart writers.  It has opened my world immensely.

Global Thought Bubble

From the New York Times' editorial on blogs, Measuring the Blogosphere.

It's natural enough to think of the growth of the blogosphere as a merely technical phenomenon. But it's also a profoundly human phenomenon, a way of expanding and, in some sense, reifying the ephemeral daily conversation that humans engage in. Every day the blogosphere captures a little more of the strange immediacy of the life that is passing before us. Think of it as the global thought bubble of a single voluble species.

Agents for all

An agency for citizen journalists.  Take a great news-worthy photo?

Send it to Scoopt who will sell it to the press and then split the proceeds 50:50.

Full story in the Guardian. via Jeff Jarvis whose longer post on Agents for All is here.

BlogHer Con -

This is the start of Blogher live blogging.  I've got my coffee, the room is packed and a video Sheryl Crow is playing on the big screen. Now it's Tina Turner, 63 and looking  great.

A long jam-packed day means an early start.  Attention to detail highlights:

• good breakfast, lots of fruit,  small sized muffins, bagels already.
• wireless throughout the lobby and the entire tech center provided by Google
• good looking and skinny folders with all the information we need and no more
• lots of small tables for small groups to talk
• the variety of women from around the country is astounding - a punk rocker next to a middle-aged marketing professional behind a fashion model behind a mommy blogger, in front of the techie, with a lawyer on the side.
• Best tote bags ever from Google
• power strips everywhere

The four co-mothers of the conference, Lisa Stone, Elisa Camahort, Jory des Jardins and Katrin Verclas.  Congrats to all of them for all their good, hard work in record time.

Lisa Stone begins
Taking women blogging to a whole new level, pushing way past where are the women bloggers. 
We know 43-56% of all bloggers are women
At the closing session, we'll create the mother of all to-do lists
Three questions we'll be asking

• what have you learned
• what will you do with this information
• what would you tell other women not here

She thanks all the women who came and showed up. She  thanks the sponsors.

Elisa Camahort, reports on the survey.  Jory on the guidelines.
________________________________________
Next up
Halley Suitt and Charlene Li debate "Playing by the Rules"

Lisa Stone say  women bloggers are not showing up in the search results.  They're not on the top 100 bloggers on the Technorati lsit.

Charlene Li, from Forrester.  There is a game out there, characterized by the 80/20 rule.  Some of us want to be on the A list, others blog for their own personal satisfaction.  You have to play by the rules .

Haley: Wasn't blogging begun so as not to play by the rules.  Weren't the personal stories told by Jeff Jarvis and others influential in changing even the New York Times to

Charlene Li 's rules
1. Be good at networking

We're not as good at networking as the men are.

• Tell people what you can give.
• Ask people for what you need.

Haley says ask for links.  ASK.  Women don't ask.  ASK again.  ASK the third time.
2. Be relevant
3. Be unique

Will men only link to other men?  Do you have to write about politics?  Who cares about the Technorati 100? Don't we have all have our own A list?

Audience says it's key words and search and you can always find the blogs who write on the subject.

Another says traffic is not an end in itself, your goal is.  Think about what you want to achieve, traffic is just the means to get there.

Dina another become credible in what you care about.  She gives her example of a citizens group in Texas fighting an attempt by local phone companies to ban broadband.

A female tech CEO says its your own sphere of influence that counts.  Let's come up with a new metric that measures female bloggers - a new code.

Another Everyday Goddess:  let's have more versions of the lists.

Another: join up in networks for woman bloggers

Complaints about Technorati's reliability in posting all the posts tagged Blogher.

Mary Hodder who once worked at Technorati, is working on a community algorhythm that looks at more than inbound links. 

Miriam, who speaks five languages, can write in only one - even though she writes primarily about Africa and Asia and people of color.

Mena Trott, President of Six Apart

Live Journal 72% women and under 21
Typepad about 50/50 women, men.

She says she, Meg (founder of Blogger), Katherine of Flick'r are often dismissed, sometimes by other women

Mark:  Empower yourselves, all these companies have open APIs, create your own BlogHer 100.

Amber, a teen blogger says send postcards, offline means work too.

Summary
Halley.  Blog-whoring  - isn't that a female derogatory term.  Let's not use it.
Charlene,  Ask for links when it's relevant
Halley.  Push the medium.  Start your own companies. 

Technorati Tags: BlogHer, Bloghercon

BlogHer -Session #1 Political Blogging Grows Up

Moderator Courtney Lowery
Roxanne Cooper
Ambra Nykol

Courtney is a former AP writer and editor who's interested in the intersection of politics and environment and launched a network of blogs called New West .net to talk about growth and change in the Rocky Mountain West.

Roxanne writes at Rox Populi and is the director of sales and marketing for the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies.

Ambra from Seattle works at Google and writes a political blog - Nykola.com  and wants to steer people away from the lemming mentality and encourage them to think independently.

Courtney.  We're still compartmentalizing political discussions and taking our talking points from the top political blogs.  How can we open up the discussion.

Amber.  I'm from the more conservative side and I find a lot of the political blogs very boring.  They're reporting, not opining.  I'm black, Christian, 23, and most interested in opinions, not what I can hear on CNN.  I

Roxanne.  People who repeat messages in the "parrotsphere" get links.  If you have your own voice, you don't get linked.  It's too much of an echosphere.

UPDATE 1

Courtney.  You can make politics sexy again by bringing the personal back.  The personal resonates.  What politics means in your everyday life counts. 

Amber.  People who don't vote because they don't see the relevance in their own lives.  Blogs have the ability to make it real.  I've gotten more understanding about social security by reading blogs than by reading any party's website.  People are numb to copy written messages.  Too many people don't  understand and are intimidated by complexities.

Q.  How do you break things down for your readers.

Amber.  I just write for myself, but what I can do is come at it from a philosophical standpoint.  What's the philosophy behind a proposed law And I like to critique political leaders' fashion.
I hear from my emails that people really respond to that.

Q. What can we do to write in a more common language?  As a librarian, we need to teach critical thinking.  We need to teach what are credible sources. 

Roxanne - Who are the experts?  I think that expertise can come from a two-way discussion

Q. Bill Clinton tried to start a discussion about race.  But it never happened.

Amber.  Don't be an anonymous blogger.  I emailed one and said you can't keep this up because what you think comes from who we are.
I put up my photo as a black woman and what I think for most people doesn't track.  I'm a deviant from black people, I'm a deviant from conservatives.  I'm a deviant from woman.  Or at least what most people think black, female conservatives should think.  I'm myself.

Roxanne.  Engage people more from the other side.  They're just yelling at each other.  I comment a lot on other blogs and ask them - respectfully - why do they think the way they do.

Audience.  When I read bloggers on either side, they're much too hostile to the other side. 

Amber.  If you think that yelling at people will convince them. There is too much mud-slinging.  I hate Ann Coulter. 

Audience member.  She needs a sandwich.  She needs a makeover.

Roxanne.  But people like conflict, they like drama.

Audience Matthew.  He's from England and sees America is a very apolitical country, apart from the 15% who read and write in the blogosphere.  How do you get people to get interested in politics?

Courtney:  We make it personal.  Isn't that what women are really good at.

UPDATE 2: 
Audience member.  Apart from making it personal, let's get more facts.  The news focuses on the polls.  Those aren't the facts that people need to make a decision.

Courtney.  Where do we want political blogging to go.  How do we break out of the echo chamber.

Roxanne.  It's marketing.  Give them sugar.  Weave politics into culture blogging.

Amber.  I don't think that people need sugar.  They need the truth.  I think you just have to be who you are.  I'm come across far more interesting pro-life blogs then any

Roxanne.  Blogging about Ann Coulter's clothes is the sugar.

Courtney.  Too much of the mainstream press dumbs down the issues.

Amber.  Everyone should understand politics if they're old enough to vote.    The black community often doesn't understand the issues.

Audience member.  I'm part of a group blog focusing on second generation South Asian Americans.  We have bloggers from all sides of the aisle.  It's a unique niche, a void that's become a gathering place for all sorts.  It's real, with a variety of voices.  Sepiamutiny.com. 

Roxanne.  You're providing a real service that the mass media isn't. 

Audience member.  I'm black, married to an Italian, just back from Kenya and I'm really interested in South Asian Americans.  Now I know where to go.

Technorati Tags: BlogHer, Bloghercon

Blogs in Space

BloginSpace.com is beaming web feeds of blogs into deep space using a powerful satellite broadcast.

So when the aliens come, they will know all about Hampsterdance, the Dancing Baby  and probably will be singing, "This Land is Your Land, this land is my land"  which they will have learned from Jib Jab.
Just  some of the top ten web fads according to CNET.

If you want them to know what you're thinking and writing about, add your feed and beam it into deep space and whatever alien life force is out there.    Mindcomet says, "Aliens Love Blogs too."

Via BL Ochman's What's Next

It's Public Relationships

Terrific post by Dave Weinberger on Joho saying it's not public relations, it's public relationships.

PR needs to get out of the intermediation business. It means that more voices have to be allowed to speak from within the corporation, since relationships based on a committee-produced controlled voice will fail. It explains why blogs are such a useful tool: They are public relationships. It assumes there's persistence to the relationship, not merely press releases thrown in our faces whenever the company has some new crap to flog. It assumes mutuality. It relies on the relationships being based on frankness and transparency.
Building public relationships seems to me to be a useful rubric for all that PR agencies do, including the traditional services they will continue to provide.
------
For example, PR agencies are going to continue to scan editorial calendars looking for opportunities to get coverage for their clients, and they'll continue to monitor and measure what's being said. But if they do that within the context of building public relationships, perhaps they can help their clients get past their obsession with column inches. It's not about that and it never was. It's about building long-term, continuing, honest, mutual public relationships

Part of the Corporate Memory

A salute to IBM who will be adding blogging tools to its forthcoming 2.5 Workplace collaboration platform.

Interesting that corporate officials see the main benefit to incorporating blogs into business communications is that they become part of the corporate memory

Word of mouse

Are Internet searches overtaking personal recommendations, long considered the best source of word of mouth?

In the travel industry, consumers around the world are turning to the Internet first as they figure out where they want to go on vacation.

As blogs continue to evolve as personal filters, presenting only choice bits and commentary, I expect their recommendations and their slams to become more powerful.   

If I weren't a Mac addict, and I were shopping around for a new computer, I sure wouldn't buy a Dell after the Dell Hell Jeff Jarvis experienced.

Word of mouth, word of mouse.

BBC Hails Blogs

After the London bombings, the BBC calls blogs, the "ideal news resource."

All of a sudden, the blog turned out to the ideal news resource. At their most mundane, weblogs record the minutiae of the author's day; on Thursday, this trivia became the biggest story in the world.

Every feature of blogging found a new use. Comments sections became "Are You Alive?" sections. PayPal accounts became donations to buy beer for the emergency services.

And long before politicians had a chance to make a statement, Londoners' own reactions were being quoted as the voice of Britain around the world.

As the media and emergency services tried to work out what was going on, many of the clues came from the bloggers.

______

Acts of violence can cause damage in their aftermath; they can frighten people, and they can turn them against each other. This time, there was a new tool available - blogs - and they've been used for communication, help and humour. So much for terror.

via BL Ochman's What's Next Blog

Wiki for A Killer Flu

I am happy to report that the wiki I suggested the writers of Effect Measure put up in my post On Borrowed Time has been up now for about a week under the instigation of bloggers at Effect Measure, The Next Hurrah and Just a Bump in the Beltway. 

The Flu Wiki is a wonderful experiment in collaborative problem solving in public health and self-reliance.

A Wiki is a form of collaborative software that allows anyone to edit (change) any page on the site using a standard web browser like Explorer, Firefox or Safari.The purpose of the Flu Wiki is to help local communities prepare for and perhaps cope with a possible influenza pandemic. This is a task previously ceded to local, state and national governmental public health agencies. Communications technology has now become sufficiently available to allow a new form of collaborative problem-solving that harvests the rich fund of knowledge and experience that exists among those connected via the internet, allowing more talent to participate.

Already there have been 23,000 page views with contributions from scientists, epidemiologists, sociologists et al according to the DemFromCT, the contributor from the Next Hurrah.

Declan Butler emailed me from Paris as soon as it went up.  He's the senior reporter for Nature magazine and the author of the fictional blog that first alerted me to the danger.  It's still the best piece for imagining what it will be like when a pandemic breaks out.

If you can contribute do so.  Otherwise, just read so you know what's happening and what's not.    Here's some other links to get you up to speed.

From Trust for America’s Health, June 2005,  A Killer Flu, which projects over half a million Americans could die and 2.3 million could be hospitalized if a moderately severe strain of a pandemic flu virus hits the United States.

In Foreign Affairs, July-August, 2005, The Next Pandemic, by Laurie Garrett.  If the H5N1 virus becomes "capable of human-to-human transmission and retains its extraordinary potency, humanity could face a pandemic unlike any ever witnessed."

Avian Flu blog - What we need to know

It's cheap to be an entrepreneur

From the entrepreneur's channel and Boopy, It's a great time to be an entrepreneur.

His top four reasons;
1. Hardware is 100x cheaper
2. Infrastructure software is free
3. Access to Global Labor Markets
3. Search Engine Marketing changes everything

SEO marketing=blogs and Blogs are changing everything

Don't Follow Dell's example

If there ever was a good example of asymmetrical warfare, of a single blogger fighting a large company and drawing other readers and commentaters to his cause, it's Jeff Jarvis's battle with Dell Computer.

Take a look at Dell hell, neverending.

It's everything a company shouldn't do.

Variety Bloom

J.D. Lasica posts a very interesting summary of Chris Anderson's talk at Supernova. 

Anderson who coined the term "long tail" is now writing a book about the phenomenon.

Chris: The Long Tail is basically about a variety bloom. We've had a variety bloom for decades in this country, centered on products. Today, there's also an explosion of information about products. So you don't just have variety but you have information about that variety.

Three forces that make for a Long Tail market: (1) the tools of production have been democratized, we've made it easier and easier to make stuff; (2) the Internet has lowered transaction costs so it's easier to buy stuff; (3) finally, there are new ways to connect consumers -- word of mouth, recommendations, search, techniques that drive demand.
"Filters are the most powerful new opportunity in the Long Tail."
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We've had filters in the past, but they've been pre-filters. Now it's about post-filters.
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Pre-filters include Editors, A&R guys, studio execs, buyers. In the post-filter word, it's the marketplace that decides. Post-filters include peers, recommendations, word of mouth, sites like CD Baby, collaborative filtering, mp3 blogs, viral videos.

Online Anthropology

"We look at the blogosphere as a focus group with 15 million people going on 24/7 that you can tap into without going behind a one-way mirror," says Rick Murray, executive vice president of Edelman, a Chicago public-relations firm

Marketers Scan Blogs for Brand Insights in today's Wall Street Journal.

New technology like Intelliseek's Blogpulse, free online services like Technorati and Yahoo's Buzz together with improved methodology and more expensive technologies such as "natural language processing" help marketers decode what's happening among different demographic groups.

Blog-monitoring services charge big companies $30,000-$100,000/year

Successful Baboons

As boomers grow older, we can expect more research and information on successful aging and  The Wall Street Journal has already begun with its Journal Report on The Secrets of Successful Aging.

It may surprise you to learn that aging is about a body that doesn't deal well with stress anymore says Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford University neuroendrocrinologist and leading stress researcher.

How well we deal with stress is one of the most significant factors for predicting how well we age.  People who deal well with stress tend to have a lot of social support.

Successful agers are not loners. People who age well tend to be close to extended family and have a strong network of friends and social relationships. Marriage in particular protects men from the perils of aging. (Among women, it doesn't seem to matter if they are married or not, as long as they have other close relationships.)
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In primate studies, relationships also make a difference in the quality of old age. "One of the crappiest positions you can get late in life is to be an old baboon in a troupe where you were once a young baboon," says Dr. Sapolsky of Stanford. The reason: Baboons, particularly high-ranking ones, spend their lives terrorizing those with lower rankings. But rankings slide. Powerful baboons get old, and the young baboons they once terrorized eventually end up in a position to get revenge.

But there is one subset of male baboons that escapes the stress of old age. These are the animals that spent their middle age establishing close relationships with the females in the troupe. Late in life, these baboons get harassed just as much as any other baboon, but they stick around anyway, because they've got a network of nice, female baboons that keep them company, groom them and generally act as a buffer against what would otherwise be a miserable life.

"Connectedness in old age is enormously important," Dr. Sapolsky says.

In sum, be nice to the women in your life and blog.  No better way to stay connected and grow old successfully.

Naked Conversation and Interview

Transparency is one of the things I love most about blogs.  You learn about the writer, what he or she cares about, whether they correct mistakes, how they respond to feedback, those little things which are everything when it comes to building trust.

Shel Israel  is one of those people I've come to trust without ever having met him, simply through his blog and emails.  Since I'm going to the  the Blogher conference at the end of July, I'm looking forward to meeting both him and Scobel, who will be attending and easy to spot in a room full of  women.

I first came across the Red Couch, now named Naked Conversations, when he and Robert Scobel posted chapter one, Blog or Die, in their new book, now title Naked Conversations, how blogs are changing the way businesses talk to customers.    The book itself is being posted chapter by chapter online for feedback in a remarkably transparent, real time experiment in publishing with each chapter only whetting my appetite for the whole thing.  Feedback, conversation and promotion all at the same time.  There you go, another reason for blogs.

I was pleased, honored and delighted to take part in an interview for the book when Shel contacted me.  I'm even more honored  and pleased that he's posted the interview even though it's not going to fit in the planned structure of the book. 

You will learn a lot more about me and what I'm doing and what I think about blogs, if you read the  Interview: Jill Fallon.    If you get the sense that I'd rather talk about other people than myself, you're right, so that's why you should read the interview.

cross-posted at Legacy Matters, Business of Life and Estate Legacy Vaults.

Party Poker very rich

All that spam - comment spam and track back spam that drives bloggers mad is making some people very rich. 

Party Poker,  - you certainly know the name as the leading site for online poker - I refuse to link to it - is a Gilbratar-based company that didn't exist 5 years ago.   

Today they announced there going public in the London stock exchange, "planning a flotation amounting from eight to ten BILLION dollars.  Link to press release on PR Web. 

Can't some lawyer dream up a cause of action for all the time party poker has taken from our lives in deleting their commercial spam and  start a class action on behalf of us bloggers?   

Calling Kevin and  Larry  Surely you know of a firm willing to take this on.

Blogs as Filters

One of the things I love about blogs is the good ones, the ones I like, point me to interesting sites and information I most likely would not have found on my own.  Because someone else whose intelligence and "take" I like reads a lot and points to the good stuff, I'm confident that it won't be a waste of time.

Take Tom Peters and his terrific new aggregator called the TP Wire Service

Here are a few gems  I found through it - on blogging, the Internet  and women.

Eight Ways to be a Good Customer.  Good customers make better companies

Yahoo Serious About Employee Blogging  - Posts blogging guidelines

Miami bombshells.  Soon the Red Hats vs.the Bombshells.
We’ve captured the full breadth of what it means to be a woman in the 21st century, and we are exhausted. But – now we’re exhausted together!.  ....Start your own bombshell circle - a gathering of overworked, under-appreciated, guilt- ridden, stressed out women ready to unleash the wild woman inside our souls.

Web-driven entrepreneurs now comprise 25% of all small businesses.  Thank eBay and Google.

Women "better investors than men"  We knew that here, and it's true in the UK as well.  "They take a more balanced and considered view and time and again, it pays dividends."

The Talmud and the Internet

Thanks to David Boxenhorn, I found this startling metaphor - The Talmud and the Internet - that works astonishingly well.  He quotes from the Industrial Standard Review and so shall I.

The Talmud is a sprawling text that addresses every aspect of Jewish life: from dietary laws to animal husbandry to what God and Moses really talked about on Mount Sinai. It began as an oral tradition and was first transcribed during the Roman era, but the rabbis continued inserting commentary through medieval times. In the process, God was transplanted from a stationary home of bricks and blood sacrifices - the Temple - to a portable, "virtual" home with a shifting architecture of words, thought and prayer - the Talmud.

The Internet has numerous parallels to the Talmud. Both are the products of countless contributors, both aspire to be perfectly encyclopedic and both express their wisdom in an ad hoc web of references to other authorities (the Hebrew word for a passage from the Talmud means "webbing"). They even use similar visual strategies to represent the simultaneity of their voices. A page of the Talmud resembles a Web page, explains Rosen, in that "nothing is whole in itself. ... Icons and text boxes are doorways through which visitors pass into an infinity of cross-referenced texts and conversations." Rabbis who lived centuries apart appear on the same page, conversing across time, commingling with Biblical excerpts, parables and bits of history.

The Talmud, like the Internet, "talk[s] about God one moment, sex the next and commerce the third."

Far from "a broken-down state of affairs," this strikes Rosen as "astonishingly human and therefore astonishingly whole." By relating absolutely every idea from all possible angles, without passing final judgment on correct or incorrect, relevant or irrelevant, the Internet and the Talmud each invest their shattered, centerless cultures with a kind of mosaic unity. The Internet, like the Talmud, becomes "not merely a mirror of the disruptions of a broken world," but something that "offers a kind of disjointed harmony." No matter how ridiculous or vulgar the parts, the whole cannot help but make sense.

From the Amazon review by Michael Joseph Gross. 

The Talmud and the Internet by Jonathan Rosen is a small, wise, ingenious meditation on faith, technology, literature, and love. .. Rosen finds a real parallel to the Talmud, "a place where everything exists, if only one knows how and where to look." The literary resemblance has a cultural resonance, too. Rosen observes that "the Talmud offered a virtual home for an uprooted culture, and grew out of the Jewish need to pack civilization into words and wander out into the world." And the Internet suggests to Rosen "a similar sense of Diaspora, a feeling of being everywhere and nowhere. Where else but in the middle of Diaspora do you need a homepage?" In Rosen's analysis, the Internet and the Talmud signal and salve social and spiritual isolation -

On Borrowed Time

It was a fictional weblog that got me interested in avian flu.

Its imaginative putting me in the place where a pandemic is happening, telling me a story in other words, made me begin to grasp the seriousness and the likelihood of a global flu pandemic in the next few years.

Like most other people, I'm the victim of my own experience. Never having suffered a public pandemic, it's hard to imagine one. Never having experienced public panic or a breakdown of essential services, it's hard to imagine them. Somehow, I expect that all the wonders of our modern age from medicines to the Internet to an abundant supply of food, will continue without interruption forever into the future. I fancy myself a student of history, so you would think I'd know better.

Didn't the 9/11 Commission point to a "failure of imagination" as a principal reason that kept US officials from understanding the al Qaeda threat?

I think we are at a similar point now.

Have you heard anyone in the Centers for Disease Control talk about this? Maybe they are ashamed about their obesity fiasco. You remember that or do you? In 1999, the CDC director said obesity was epidemic in the United States, accounting for more than 300,000 deaths a year. Last year in a widely publicized study , the CDC upped obesity-related deaths to 400,000 until the figures were exploded as the whoppers they were. A embarrassing comedown for the CDC who had to admit only 25, 815 obesity deaths. Nevermind

It took a magazine, not a government agency, to alert me. And they did it with a story and a weblog.

Nature magazine is devoting its current issue to highlight progress and "incoherence in the world's response to a potential human pandemic."

From its editorial

Millions of people killed in highly developed countries within months. Tens of millions worldwide. The global economy in tatters. A Hollywood fantasy? No — it's now a plausible scenario. The first act, the spread of avian flu to, and probably between, humans, has already started across Asia. Unless the international community now moves decisively to mitigate this pandemic threat, we will in all probability pay heavily within a few years. Then, hard questions will be asked as to why we were not prepared.

Sceptics abound, convinced that talk of a pandemic must be scare-mongering, or scientists crying wolf. Surely with support care, drugs and vaccines, at least the rich world can easily stand up to a flu virus? After all, this is 2005, not 1918, when a flu pandemic killed up to 50 million people worldwide. But while the science and medicine of flu have advanced substantially, our ability to mount an effective public-health response has made remarkably little progress over the decades, and the potential for panic is, if anything, greater given the impact of television and the Internet.
...........................
The time for diplomacy and denial is over. It is time for advocacy and action.

The avian viruses in Asia are evolving: they've jumped the species barrier to infect pigs in Indonesia and human-to-human transmission may well have occurred. According to World Health Organization earlier this month, the H5N1 viruses "are continuing to evolve and present a continuing and potentially growing pandemic threat."

I'm in no way qualified to assess this threat, so I went to Effect Measure whose editors are senior public health scientists and practitioners who write anonymously and link to all the blogs writing on avian flu. They call the conclusion of the WHO report "chilling"

Evolution of a pandemic strain of virus may be preceded by numerous small steps, none of which is sufficient to signal clearly that a pandemic is about to start. This poses a difficult public health dilemma. If public health authorities move too soon, then unnecessary and costly actions may be taken. However, if action is delayed until there is unmistakable evidence that the virus has become sufficiently transmissible among people to allow a pandemic to develop, then it most likely will be too late to implement effective . . . responses."

WHO is openly admitting that everyone is unprepared.

"We are working on pandemic preparedness on borrowed time," the WHO's top influenza official, Klaus Stohr, told the meeting, reiterating that conservative estimates indicated that up to 7.4 million people might die.

"The objective of pandemic preparedness can only be damage control. There will be death and destruction."

"National pandemic response plans are the key," he said.

If millions of lives could be lost, if state and local governments don't know what to do, why in God's name has the CDC been more concerned about obesity and even getting that wrong. Not until this week did the CDC Director Julie Gerberding say

Even a "medium level pandemic" in the United States could result in 89,000-207,000 deaths and up to 734,000 people people being hospitalised...... According to Gerberding, between 15 percent and 35 percent of the US population would be affected by a flu pandemic and the cost to the US economy would be between 71 billion and 166 billion dollars.

The US has only a draft pandemic response plan, and has ordered only 2.3 million doses of Tamiflu, the only antiviral medication that seems to work.

It's Decisive Inaction.

The US pandemic influenza plan, in the works for five years and in only in draft form since last August will be completed in final form "by the end of the summer."
Marcia Cross, the [the Government Accountability Office's] director for health care, told lawmakers that federal officials have yet to determine what role the federal government will take in purchasing supplies of vaccine against bird flu and other flu strains. The government has also not cemented which population groups would be priorities for emergency vaccination in the event of an outbreak or finalized plans for possible quarantines or travel restrictions.

The delay has left state health departments unable to properly plan for flu emergencies, she says. (Via WebMD).

If there is a pandemic, it will be everywhere.
The scene of the disaster will be everywhere.
Everywhere is local. All the battles will be fought on the local level.

So, if the government is not prepared, what can ordinary people and businesses do to prepare? What will happen when 25% of the workforce gets sick

Effect Measure has begun a Pandemic "To-Do" list which I hope they make it a public wiki.

1. Rationing. Who gets what first? Who gets what at all? Who secures scarce supplies?

2. Care-giving. There are simply not enough hospital beds. There are not enough nurses. There are not enough caskets.
Time NOW to offer minimal nursing training for volunteers and a way to keep track of them. One commenter said many died needlessly in 1918-1920 from lack of hydration and nourishment.

3. Emergency equipment
and I'll add

4. Emergency plans to carry on essential services like water, electricity, fuel, banking and food supply. It's time for businesses to review their emergency contingency plans as well as their business continuity plans NOW. Time NOW to establish policies for people working at home and the means for them to do so. Time NOW to introduce Wikis to capture the knowledge necessary to keep businesses going. Time NOW to prepare crisis management blogs. Time NOW for people to assess their own personal and family preparedness.

If you need more to break out of your complacency, read Canada Sue's imaginings of what would happen in her hometown of 100,000.

World wide blog count

Now over 60 million according to Duncan Riley at The Blog Herald.

Democratizing Innovation

Fortune has a wonderful article, The Amazing Rise of the Do-It-Yourself Economy.  Call them citizen engineers.

a number of factors are coming together to empower amateurs in a way never before possible, blurring the lines between those who make and those who take. .....they’re simply finding a way—in this mass-produced, Wal-Mart world—to take power back, prove that they can make the products that they want to consume, have fun doing so, and, just maybe, make a few dollars.
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Bloggers, those do-it-yourself journalists, showed big media that the barriers to entry (like owning a printing press, say) didn’t much matter. Podcasters took radio into their own hands, creating audio shows and putting them online. Amateur music producers, using software that was once the province only of major labels, invented mash-ups: combining songs into totally new ones, then giving them away or selling them. And with the advent of services like Google AdSense, which let people easily put advertising on their sites, these tinkerers could—while not vaulting themselves into Bill Gates territory—at least break even.

Blogs are serving as an R&D center & focus group as well as identifying potential customers.

HT Instapundit.

A Hard Lesson

Ingersoll-Rand learned a hard lesson when it failed to respond to a digital assault by a blogger.  It cost them $10 million.  Now they have a person monitoring blogs. 

How long before other companies realize that monitoring blogs is essential for a company's health? 

They might want to read how bloggers can lay waste to a product by Joshua Jaffee in today's C/NET

Today, most corporations still do little, if anything, with blogs, wikis and social networks, but that will change quickly over the next few years as more companies integrate these technologies into their daily routines. And if early signs are any indication, the evolution will lead to blogs replacing blast e-mails, wikis strengthening collaboration software and social networks taking conversations around the water cooler to a meta-level never envisioned by the most enthusiastic evangelist of the Internet boom.

Monster Blogging

So why is Monster.com blogging?  It isn't as if they needed to attract visitors.  It's about bringing greater value to their customers with personal stories.  Monster's blog  does it right.

The interview at Diva Marketing tells all. 

It's the Blogs, Stupid

"Blogging is forcing firms like ours to shut up and listen." says Mike Manuel in the latest interview posted over Naked Conversations, formerly the Red Couch.    If you don't listen, you WILL LOSE.

Like it or not, we are living in the next generation of marketing characterized by networks, connectivity, decentralization, easily available content and knowledge management tools, swarm attacks, memes and guerillas.  Companies would do well to learn from the lessons of the  Pentagon.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, the Pentagon began to adjust its thinking and infrastructure.  A decade of terrorist attacks culminating in the unbelievable horror of watching the World Trade Center's two towers collapse before our eyes, exposed our vulnerability to small cells of fanatical Islamofascists or other terrorists using easily available weapons.  The lesson the Pentagon learned at a terrible cost was expensive, high tech surveillance can not beat "humint" - human intelligence from people on the ground and in the secret cells.

The power of a networked meme shared by ordinary people changed governments in the past year.  In Georgia, the students said "Kmara" -Enough and the Rose Revolution began and resulted in honest elections in March.  In the Ukraine, it was "Pora" - It's Time and the Orange Revolution began with free elections last December.  In Lebanon, the Cedar Revolution with its "Independence 05"  banners mostly ended Syria's occupation.  Free elections in Iraq and Afghanistan were unthinkable a few years ago.  Everywhere people are speaking freely, many for the first time.  Free Iraqi blogs with a banner, "I was not living before the 9th of April and now I am, so let me speak".    What we thought was not what people in their heart of hearts hoped for and wanted.  The Arab Street is quite different from anything we had been led to believe and is now a vanquished cliche

Enough networked people speaking their minds and the result is whole countries have changed and are becoming real democracies.  It's called freedom.  And it's happening here too.  In the US, we have a political and economic democracy, but until recently, the mass media was a dictatorship of culture.  Oh, there was competition but it was ABC vs. NBC, Universal vs. MGM, the New York Times vs the Washington Post, Time vs Newsweek, Coke vs Pepsi.    Today, an attack can come from anywhere, by a single nobody on a blog, connecting to other nobodies with more information and expertise, creating together a body of facts that can topple a network news anchor like Dan Rather or a cable news producer like Eason Jordan. 

Today,  John Podhoretz writes about the democratization of the media causing a mass-media melt-down,  Hollywood, newspapers, television, talk radio and the music industry are all suffering rapidly declining audiences.  The market now speaks in a million different voices to say in countless ways they don't like what they are getting. 

Or as Hugh McLeod in the Gaping Void writes, the external conversations of the market are talking back to companies that used to talk only to themselves in self-referential internal conversations.    This is not bad news for companies, this is GOOD and IMPORTANT news.

Just as the Pentagon had to discard its MAD theory of Mutually Assured Destruction, companies are having to discard their MAD theory of Mass Audience Demographics.  There are hundreds of thousands of niches to be listened to and served and it can be done with a healthy profit.

How can a company possibly keep track of and listen to thousands of niches? 

To rework a cliche that won a Presidency - IT'S THE BLOGS, STUPID. 

If you use Technorati to follow blogs,  employ search feeds and allow corporate blogging, you've got your human intelligence.  When you comment on other blogs, you're playing court to and building relationships with other bloggers, each of whom is the tribal chieftan of its own audience.  You also have the tools to deal with blog swarms or a corporate attack.  While you have to get used to a lack of control, you get a much better grip on reality and what's happening on the ground. 

There has been an astonishing collapse of trust by Americans in traditional sources of authority.  People are placing more trust in people like themselves according to Dick Edelman and are creating their own Personal Web of Trust.  The only way to get into anyone's personal web of trust is to listen, to be real and honest, sometimes fallable, and always learning.  Most importantly, it's being on their side, not just your side.  It's being their advocates, putting their interests above yours.  It's doing well by doing good.

So get out in the countryside, listen and serve to win over the hearts and minds of the people.  They are not just wallets.  They want to be known and dealt with as the complex people they are, not just as consumers who buy products.  The reward is much bigger.  When you align with your customers, understanding where they are and what they need, and then giving them solutions to problems they have, making their lives easier, you've created customer evangelists who will do your marketing for you, just by word of mouth. 

This new generation of networked marketing is collaborative, It's Blog or Die.

Great Hidden Tech Boom

Are blogs the Great hidden tech boom? 

Michael Malone, once called "the Boswell of Silicon Valley" and most recently editor at large of Forbes ASAP thinks so.

Blogs are the demand side supplying itself

Here are some takeaways from Doc Searls closing keynote at Les Blogs in April in Paris.

Authority is earned, and granted.  It is not delivered.  The blogosphere is a vast and growing meritocracy.  Not just a democracy, though it may be that too.

Blogs are the demand side supplying itself.  No big brand company invented blogging,  Just as none invented Wikipedia. Or Flickr, or Six Apart. Or the Net.  Or the Web.

Blogs don’t have to be sticky.  Leaving is more important than staying.  What’s sticky are ideas not bounded by any blog, any domain, any owner.

Blogging is about rolling snowballs downhill, not pushing rocks uphill

Bloggers on Corporate Management

For those of you who are new to blogging and don't know,  the "godfather" of the blogosphere is Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee who writes the influential Instapundit blog as well as a weekly feature called "Reynolds' Wrap" at Tech Central Station. This week it's called The Unbearable Rightness of Nick Denton.

Even as a columnist, he writes like a blogger, liberally quoting what Nick Denton wrote two years ago.

... Modern communications, and the growth of weblogs and web bulletin boards in particular, have also given power to bitter employees.... Asymmetric warfare has come to the workplace: managers may sometimes have the power to hire and fire, but the peasants have the internet now.

Then relating it to an earlier story in the New York Times about how the  U.S. government is  having fits over the employee bloggers at the Los Alamos National Lab and from which he quotes.

A blog rebellion among scientists and engineers at Los Alamos, the federal government's premier nuclear weapons laboratory, is threatening to end the tenure of its director, G. Peter Nanos.

Four months of jeers, denunciations and defenses of Dr. Nanos's management recently culminated in dozens of signed and anonymous messages concluding that his days were numbered. The postings to a public Web log conveyed a mood of self-congratulation tempered with sober discussion of what comes next.

And tying it together with his own thoughts.

Things will be different, and already are. Even in the military, email and chatrooms are flattening hierarchies and changing power dynamics....-- employees don't necessarily resent managers who run a taut ship, so long as they feel that merit is being rewarded over sucking up....

The smarter managers will read blogs, looking for real problems that need to be fixed, and they'll respond (perhaps on their own blogs?) to the critics; the smartest ones will even realize that employees know the difference between the chronic bellyachers and the people who have serious complaints, and will respond accordingly.

Reynolds concludes.

How many managers are this smart? I guess, thanks to the Internet, we'll find out.

Managers not only have to worry about what their customers are saying about their products and services, they have to worry about what their employees will say about them.  Out Loud and on the Internet.    The transparency of the Internet now reaches behind the firewalls. 

UPDATE:  Better managers make for better companies and happier employees.

In a study by Sirota Consulting, the firm examined the stock prices of 28 companies that had tracked their employee morale during the past four years. The results: The 14 companies with "high morale" saw their stocks increase more than 5 times those of the half-dozen companies with "low morale" (16% vs 3%).

Via Kevin Salwen at the Worthwhile Blog

Online advertising set to explode

From Frank Barnako's Internet Daily, a summary of Forrester's latest survey.

A survey of 99 leading marketers finds almost half of them plan to cut their ad spending on traditional media and spend more on online advertising. Total U.S. e-marketing spending will reach $14.7 billion this year, a 23% increase from last year, according to Forrester Research (FORR). Principal analyst Charlene Li added that almost two out of three advertisers want to spend money on blogs. New advertising channels will draw "interest and spending from marketers," with 64 percent of the surveyed advertisers saying they are interested in spending on Web logs, and 57 percent through RSS, she said in a statement. This is a very bullish time for online advertising overall, she added. "Online consumers spend more than one-third of their time online, roughly the amount of time they spend watching TV. Yet marketers spend only 4% of ad budgets online versus 25% on TV."

Charlotte Li even has her own blog at Forrester

More Lawyers Blogging

Some interesting new legal blogs by lawyers and law firms.  It amazes that more lawyers aren't taking advantage of this essentially free marketing.

Mediation blog  - alternative dispute resolution by Diane Levin
New Hampshire Law Blog  by Burke & Eisner
BenefitsBlog - tax, benefits and ERISA by B. Janell Grenier
Arbitrary and Capricious - criminal law  by Skelly Wright
Blond Justice - an anonymous, young, female criminal defense attorney in a big city
DUI Blog - drunk driving laws by Lawrence Taylor
Corporate and Technology Law by Stephen Meltzer in Concord, MA
Antitrust Law Blog by Robert Doyle from Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton LLP
Commercial Law, From Bricks to Clicks by Jay Hollander in New York City
Deal Attorney - Contracts, M&A by Anthony Cerminaro in Pittsburgh, PA
Financial Institution Law Blog by Sheppard Mullin
Brain Injury Blog by Michael Kaplan,  of De Caro & Kaplen New York City
Electronic Discovery Blog from Preston, Gates and Ellis LLP
How Appealing appellate litigation by Howard Bashman, Pennsylvania
Insurance Defense Blog by Dave Stratton in Washington, D.C.
Safety Lex -torts, rights and accountability by John Philo in Detroit, MI
Illinois Trial Practice
Notes from the (Legal) Underground
Illinois Personal Injury Blog all three by Evan Schaeffer at Schaeffer & Lamere in Illinois
Environmental Legal Blog - developments in environmental law by Stephen Holzer from Parker,Milliken et al in LA
Death and Taxes - estate planning, administration and real estate by Joel Schoenmeyer in Chicago.

Many at Blawg which THE source for law and legal related weblogs

Expect increase in online ads

Is the Internet about to come into its own as a valuable marketing medium?  Highlights from the Economist's Online Ad Attack from the Blog Business Summit, Blogs, traditional sites taking eyeballs (and ad revenues) away from television.

Advertising Age says the combined advertising revenues of Google and Yahoo! will rival the combined prime-time ad revenues of ABC, CBS and NBC, and the internet has become the fastest growing advertising medium. ZenithOptimedia says ad revenue on the internet grew by 21% in 2004 and that we can expect that type of growth to continue.  As we mentioned in a prior post, they describe how Google advertisers will now be able to select the specific sites where they want their ads to appear, and advertisers can now pay for ads by impression. Google will now also offer animated ads.  Yahoo’s Terry Semel says the opportunity for growth is significant. Many firms allocate only 2-4% of their marketing budgets to the internet while it represents about 15% of consumers’ media consumption. 

Boing Boing, one of my favorite sites, is already making $40,000/month in ad revenue according to BusinessWeek's new blogspotting blog

Defense Industry blog

Blogs are replacing trade journals.  It's easy to see why more updates, more news, more resources and less cost appeals to trade associations. 

Take a look at  Defense Industry Daily.  60,000 page views a month with no promotion.

Procurement officers from all military branches and top defense industry players are already reading it, he notes, including "all the big guys like Boeing, Raytheon, etc." A project manager for a multi-billion company "actually emailed me about the details of a story. I was amazed he was reading it."

Industry bigs are finding the Defense Industry Daily posts in search engines because "we're writing about a topic that people are spending hundreds of billions on and yet nobody is writing anything about it online. So we are often top 10 in Goggle because there is a vacuum in free public information on the industry."

And who had the scoop?  A female blogger.  BL Ochman

BusinessWeek: Blogs Are a Business Prerequisite

Businessweek's cover story this week is Blogs Will change your Business.  Their advice: Catch up...or catch you later.  And it's written like a blog, and they've started their own blog, blogspotting to follow up.

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.)
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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.
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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.

Over the Wall

From Dick Edelman in Over the Wall

Buzzmetrics' review of mentions of the 20 top global brands indicates that corporate generated content is responsible for only 12-14% of search results, while consumer generated content is 26%. The consensus is that a company's goal should not be CONTROL, it should be AWARENESS of what's being said and fast RESPONSE.
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some of my advice for PR people trying to adapt to a fast-changing environment. We have to be operating in parallel universes, continuing to do a great job with traditional media, while engaging with new media. We should help our clients create original content, and advise them to engender conversations on-line but be honest about our inability to control outcomes. We must be on top of the breaking news in companies, because news is being filled by the person who has the newest information. The coverage of tsunami initially came from survivors with cell phones or mini-cams, and delivered across the Web. Our tone in new media must reflect the different expectations of the audience, which is to demand authenticity, individuality and transparency.

The Power of Personal Testimony

So how are non-profits using blogs to support their marketing goals?

Toby Bloomberg at Diva Marketing has another great interview up with Lisa Meyers Brown, the VP of Marketing, American Cancer Society.

Key takeaway: blogs are examples of how social networks can develop online and facilitate grass roots mobilization.

One key way we can continue to elevate awareness is through the personal experiences of those touched by cancer. We all know there's tremendous power in stories like this and blogs help us tap into this important part of raising awareness.

We are a community-based organization so blogs offer us another touch-point to raise awareness of early detection and prevention.  (See their first use of a blog - the colon cancer awareness blog -  Fabulous at 50, ) I should point out that this was our first time using blogs this way and that we learned a great deal. Primarily the importance of having volunteers update the blogs regularly and the importance of linking into the blogosphere.

Bill Ives on Blog Excitement

Following the Jarvis post, I want to point to Bill Ives, who continues to write superior posts on the trends in blogs with a reach that extends to RSS and knowledge management.  It's always a pleasure to read this experienced, thoughtful and erudite writer.  His week end restaurant and music reviews aren't bad either.  He thinks and he links. 

Using content to create connections among people - Sales support people are using them to great success both internally for product issues and competitive intelligence and externally for customer support.

Adding syndicated content to your blog - New features all the time at the speed of light.

A great disclaimer and blog policy statement  An excerpt - "Don't come crying to me if you lose your job following my advice."