Marketing Pilgrim

Two weeks ago, I gave a class on blogging. No, don’t worry, you didn’t miss the announcement and the chance to rub elbows with my fabulousness, it was a class for my sister’s church, as only a handful of people had expressed interest. She and I weren’t sure anyone would come at all. However, nearly twice as many people as we expected showed up. Of those, only one didn’t have a blog.

This year’s State of the Blogosphere report from Technorati says that blogs have “arrived”—”blogs are a global phenomenon that has hit the mainstream.” Last issued in April 2007, the S/B is an annual yardstick of the trends in the world of blogging at large.

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My original angle for Google’s new "Follow This Blog" widget announcement was going to be how this might effect Yahoo’s MyBlogLog service. At first glance, it looked like it might be a real threat:

To further that goal, we’ve introduced a new feature that lets you easily follow your favorite blogs and tell the world that you’re a fan. To follow a blog with the Followers’ Gadget, simply click the “Follow This Blog” link. You can show your support for the blog by following it right from your Blogger Dashboard or in Google Reader.

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If someone asked you today what your blog does for your site and your business, what would you say? MarketingSherpa asked almost 4000 people the same question (free access for a limited time). The number one response? The blog “improves our web presence through search/feeds.”

Other important benefits from blogs cited in the survey included access to journalists and customers, establishing thought leadership, and generating leads:

MarketingSherpa cited three important factors that contributed to a blog’s success:

1. Genuine, heartfelt content
2. Regular updates
3. Focus

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Today I wish I were a political blogger. I supposedly had a ticket to the Democratic Convention, which fell through. Then I had the misfortune (in this situation) to live in a state that didn’t get a lot of tickets. Some lucky bloggers - one from each state - were also part of the State Blog Pool or Corps (here’s a list of the bloggers by state).

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This Washington Post piece about business blogging both perplexes and delights me.

Why perplexed? It opens and closes with a case study about Jason Calacanis. While Calacanis was at the frontier of blogging for dollars–and extremely successful with Weblogs Inc–the case study talks about Calacanis’s decision to dump blogging in favor of a newsletter. It simply doesn’t fit with the remainder of the article. It’s almost as if the journalist had the interviewing lying around and decided to push a square peg into a round hole.

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The government can’t be all that bad. They Twitter. They don’t make us practice until we’re almost dead for the Olympics. Plus they use other social media sites to communicate and encourage freedom of press. Now, if they could just let reporters live twit during press conferences it would look just like BlogWorld - speakers could look down at an audience of laptops.

Silicon Valley nerds may be early adopters of social media - but the government is not only twittering, they are blogging and using other social media platforms (and maybe they should subsidize it too!).

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Generally, the US is one of the most litigious countries in the world–like you needed me to tell you that. However, when it comes to defamation, it’s often a tough argument to win simply because the constitution promises citizens the freedom of speech–you won’t win, simply because you don’t like someone’s published opinion of you.

So, it’s interesting to see that Google has been sued by an Indian construction company, trying to get the identity of an anonymous blogger. The defamation lawsuit claims the blogger–known only as "Toxic Writer"–has attacked the company with his "hate campaign."

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A blog (a contraction of the term web log) is a website, usually maintained by an individual, with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse chronological order.

That’s how Wikipedia defines a blog. Apple doesn’t have an official blog and, according to reports, even goes to great lengths to prevent some employees from blogging about Apple on their personal time.

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By Frank Reed.

Leave it to bloggers to find a way around censorship.

On the heels of the Olympic Games in Beijing riots broke out in the Guizhou province of China over the death of a teenager according to the Wall Street Journal. While the Chinese government worked hard to prevent this from becoming a political and PR black eye before they parade themselves on the world stage that is the Olympic Games bloggers appear to have gotten the best of them.

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There’s been a lot of discussion recently about how to measure the value of blogging, including in B2B organizations. Forrester Research recently released a study entitled “How to Derive Value from B2B Blogging,” and it contained many valuable insights into the state of B2B blogging and its adoption today.

Some key findings from the report include:

• While adoption of corporate blogging has been growing over the past few years, the number of new blogs established in 2007 took a nose dive.

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It makes sense when you think about it. While Technorati is a great social media search engine, it doesn’t exactly have a sound revenue model. Until today.

TechCrunch is reporting a 9am PST launch of Technorati Media, a new CPM ad network for blogs of all sizes.

The company has been testing the new sales product with a number of partners, including BlogTalkRadio, BlogCritics, BlogCatalog, BlogTV, Technabob, GPSMagazine, GeekAlerts and NerdApproved. CEO Richard Jalichandra says these blogs reach a combined audience of approximately 17 million unique monthly visitors.

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If you happen to have a life outside of the internet, you likely missed the blogstorm this weekend over the Associated Press’s attempts to force the Drudge Retort to stop quoting AP stories–it even sent a cease and desist letter to the blog.

Well, how do you think the blogosphere reacted to that? Yep, you guessed it. Just about everyone, who’s not AP, went on the attack, accusing the AP of being out of its mind and trying to re-define the legal definition of “fair use.”

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