Category: blogs

The big search engines have just announced that through the addition of “noFollow” tags in links in comments, they will no longer be weighting links that come from blog comments in their search results. This, in theory, will cause the incentive for comment spam to disappear. The big blog providers will be adding these tags to links in comments automagically.

Who’s on board:

• Google
• Yahoo
• MSN
• Six Apart
• WordPress

(hat tip: ross)

“Caffeine?”

“Check.”

“Snacks?”

“Check.”

“Notebooks?”

“Check.”

“Thesauruses?”

“I think you mean ‘thesauri.'”

“You know what I meant. Do we have ’em?”

“Check.”

Looks like the list is in pretty good shape. Now, I’d love your help.

Todd Sattersten has announced the More Space project. What is More Space? Todd:

“So, I have this idea. There are all of these great bloggers talking about the subject of business. The trouble is the format of blogging only allows for maybe 500 words in a post before most readers lose interest.

What happens if you gave these writers more space?

I know you have a ton of questions about the project. Here are the major points:

• There will be 10 writers.
• The essays will be published online in text and audio and we are going to publish a really cool book.
• The project starts today and will drop sometime in April.
• Everything will be done in the open. Bloggers are going to write their essays on their blogs. We are going to publish everything we do from vendor selection to costs to sales. The project is going to be as transparent as it can be.”

There is also an FAQ on the project here.

Other folks involved are:

• Evelyn Rodriguez from Crossroad Dispatches
• Rob May from Businesspundit
• Johnnie Moore from johnniemoore.com
• Curt Rosengren from Occupational Adventure
• Jeremy Wright from Ensight.org
• Matt Homman from the nonbillable hour
• Andrea Learned from Learned on Women
• Lisa Haneberg from Management Craft
• Todd Sattersten from A Penny For…

Now, here’s where you come in. Per Todd’s open request, I’ve submitted a proposal to join this august group. The proposal starts with the Social Customer Manifesto itself…but there are a lot of different directions where this could go. The points in the Manifesto need to be fleshed out in much more depth. There could be more reporting similar to what was done with RealNetworks a couple of weeks back. There are a whole bunch of thoughts that are starting to coalesce around how blogging, wikis, social networks, etc. help to significantly reduce the time it takes for an organization to notice and respond to customer, competitor, and marketplace issues. There is the opportunity to highlight companies that are doing these things well, and use this as the beginning for a series of vignettes on the people and organizations who are moving in this direction. But, ultimately, it boils down to the answer to this question: what do YOU want to discuss and think about? Because, in this scenario, you are the customer.

So…if you have some thoughts on where this might be able to go, the More Space blog is the place to capture them. The link to the proposal is here…would love your input!

“Here we are one day, a small company in Corvallis, OR (on a holiday!) manufacturing and selling outdoor recreation equipment, then the next day we’re asked to be experts on everything from terrorism to the Patriot Act.” – Noah Acres, Sales & Marketing, Bigha

Bigha’s doing a great job explaining to customers their (non)-involvement in the laser-on-the-airliner story. He also posts the full transcript of an interview he had with a belligerent interviewer.

Interesting bit from Steve Rubel about PR firm MWW Group‘s new “weblog marketing practice” which “will advise clients on strategies to create, participate in, monitor, and advertise in blogs,” according to MWW’s Alissa Blate.

Rubel nails it:

“Blogs are just the beginning. The bigger trend is that consumers want to have a role in talking about products and even in marketing them”

and

“Consumers are in control, and consumers are the media. It’s a paradigm shift that’s going to change PR forever. We need to be listening to bloggers as much as talking to them.”

Steve’s points are spot-on. But with respect to MWW…I am the only one that finds it really funny that MWW is doing this…and that they don’t have a blog themselves?

Neither rain, nor sleet, nor dark of night could keep the blogger crew from descending on Chaat Cafe last night. Renee Blodgett has a great writeup of the whole shebang, which migrated to Casa de Matt Mullenweg for the post dinner shenanigans (Nicole Lee captures the zeitgeist).

The whole crew*:

Robert Scoble | Steve Gillmor | Steve Sloan | Dori Smith | Farida Paramita | Michael Eakes | Dan Gould | Christopher Carfi | Masha Solorzano | Scott Rafer | Dan Farber | Lisa Canter | Marc Canter | Mimi Canter | Lucy Canter | Lyndon Wong | Ron Lichty | Tom Conrad | Marc Novakowski | Pierre Wolff | Nadeem Bitar | Kaliya Hamlin | Brian Hamlin | Ian Jones | Nicole Lee | Kevin Marks | Thomas Hawk | Neal Drumm | Tony Chang | Zack Rosen | Kieran Lal | Jasmeet Singh | Jason DeFillippo | Ian Kallen | Kevin Burton | Brad Neuberg | Renee Blodgett | Jeff Minard | Om Malik | June Parina | David Sifry | Jonas M Luster | Micah Alpern | eleanor kruszewski | Jim Grisanzio | Tantek Celik | Rebecca Eisenberg | Curtis Smolar | Russell Beattie

* – including Scoble’s jacked-up XFN tags (grin)

Stowe Boyd and the team over at Corante are working on a list of answers to “20 Questions” about the business of blogging. The questions run the gamut from the basic (“What’s a blog (or, what’s blogging), and why should I care?”) to the more abstract (” How do we successfully prevent public-facing [business] blogs from being neutered or turned into a broadcast by the marketeers and lawyers?”).

In reading through the list of questions, the eponymously-phrased Question #4 is of particular interest: “Blogging has been characterized as a ‘social medium’: what makes blogging social?”

My take:

Blogging is ‘social’ for a number of reasons.

Although becoming an almost-overused term, the fact that blogs enable a conversation on a topic makes them social. In contrast to the one-directional nature of broadcast media and traditional print, the ability for readers to instantly engage in debate or agreement with the blog author and the other readers provides a fundamental social mechanism. A blog provides a watercooler around which everyone with an interest in a topic can meet.

Another reason blogs are social is their highly connected nature. While a single blog may be a watercooler, it also provides an easy way to point to all the other watercoolers where related discussions are taking place. An individual who enters the greater conversation via a particular blog can easily “move” to other connected places via the links and trackbacks that are contained in the initial entry point.

Both of the above points, however, are limited insofar as they relate to a single conversation, at a (more or less) single point in time. The third thing that makes blogs social is persistence of relationship. After engaging in a number of conversations over time, or even by simply reading a particular blog over a period of weeks or months, an individual starts to build an understanding of the world view and internal goings-on of a particular blogger. The reader may not agree with all of the points that blogger makes, but over time the reader begins to develop a much deeper understanding of the “who” behind a particular blog. The converse is also true: a blogger begins to develop a picture of who a particular commenter is as well, based on that individual’s partipation in the community over time (a great example is the Ed Cone post here). Additionally, the common practice of hosting a persistent blogroll as well the ability to subscribe to a particular blog are tactics that, by their very being, promote persistence and “social” links between the members of a community.

Some interesting discussion going on over there. Check it out.

(hat tip: NevOn)