Marketing Pilgrim

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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Over the last 3 years, UK internet traffic to blogs and personal websites has grown by 208%, according to new data from Hitwise.

The web intelligence company has just released new data on blog readership in the United Kingdom which shows 1.19% of all UK web traffic flowed to a blog. (Not a single blog–that would be a great site to own–but to blogs in general)

This chart shows just how much blog readership in the UK has grown…

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We thought that we might have seen Google AdSense for Feedburner at the beginning of this week, but better late than never.

Checking my Feedburner account today, I noticed that the option to display AdSense ads in my RSS feed, is now live!

FALSE START: I just noticed that the AdSense option is below the “On Your Website” heading, not the “In Your Feed” heading. Oh well, we know it’s coming, so hold tight.

I’m all for freedom of speech, but does it seem to you that us "bloggers" are getting just a little too big for our boots?

I ask, because there seems to be some kind of uproar over a US blogger in Singapore, who was arrested and released on bail after taunting a judge.

According to a court document, [Gopalan] Nair is charged with insulting Justice Belinda Ang Saw Ean last week by sending an email which said she "was throughout prostituting herself during the entire proceedings, by being nothing more than an employee of Mr Lee Kuan Yew and his son and carrying out their orders".

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Last Friday, a scant eleven months after Google’s acquisition of FeedBurner was confirmed, the FeedBurner blog announced that the two sites have finally begun their integration:

In the coming weeks, upon visiting www.feedburner.com, selected publishers will have the opportunity to sign in using their Google Account and experience FeedBurner, now as part of the Google.

FeedBurner says that the early changes won’t be very noticeable, though “it may look a bit Googlier around the edges.” Eventually, it “will start to look and feel more like a set of Google services.”

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A little over a year ago, I asked readers to share their RSS feed with me.

I did this out of concern that my news sources would consist of nothing but “A-listers” and I’d miss out on the insights of those that wrote fantastic posts, but hadn’t yet found the spotlight.

It’s time to do it again!

Here’s how it works. You leave your RSS feed URL in the comments below (no other links please, just the RSS feed). I’ll subscribe to the first 100 and will continue to do so for the next two weeks. After the two weeks are up, I’ll keep subscribing to anyone that really added value to my daily reading.

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How would you like to create a blog widget and then sell it less than three years later for $25 million? Ah yes, the dream of all internet marketers.

Well, Sphere–the creator of the Sphere Related Content Widget–was just acquired by AOL for a rumored $25 million. At this point, you’re probably asking yourself one of two questions (maybe both):

1. I’ve never heard of Sphere, what does it do?
2. What does AOL want with Sphere?

That first question is easy to answer. You’ve probably seen Sphere in action, but perhaps never paid much attention to it. Here’s how the company describes itself:

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This is tip #2 in my series of “Blog Marketing Tips Even the ProBloggers Won’t Share” series. See tip #1: How to Optimize Blog Post Titles.

In tip #1 I warned that changing your blog post slugs–also known as permalinks or post URLs–is to be avoided, once you’ve published your blog post. While you can use 301 redirects if you do need to change your slug–more on that later–even that can have an unfortunate effect on your post’s ranking in Google.

In this tip, I want to share with you a practice that I often use here on Marketing Pilgrim–optimizing my slugs before I hit “publish.”

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You can’t blame the NYT for its weekend piece entitled "In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop." The article isolates a couple of unfortunate deaths in the blogging community, then selects a handful of juiced-up bloggers to prove it’s theory that blogging can lead to bad health, or even death.

Why can’t you blame the NYT? The newspaper is a mainstay of traditional media and everyday it "wakes-up" to find another hot new blog–with attention grabbing headlines–chipping away at its readership. It’s not that the Times wants to take pot shots at bloggers, it’s just that it thinks that, by writing controversial articles, it can get a pass to the bloggers’ lounge.

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