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Several webloggers as of this writing, including A Penny For, The Sales Blog, Wonderbranding (search term - business blog) and ElectaBlog (search term - political blog) are using Google Adwords to drive awareness and traffic. Smart idea.
Now that Bill Gates has said he's got a big eye on blogs, I thought of one way Microsoft can profit here and perhaps get a leg up in the search biz as well. It's in "the context of order." I came to realize this as I near the end of day two of my all-blog "media diet" experiment. Using blogs as my sole news source, I feel that I am staying fairly current. However, what I really crave is the "context of order" that blogs lack. This is where Microsoft can win with smart technology.
When we read a newspaper, many of us know that the top story of the day is often at the top right hand part of the front page above the fold (if it's a broadsheet) or on the front cover (if it's a tabloid). The same holds true for commercial news sites. The most important stories are listed at the top. Even Google News does a fairly good job giving the greatest credence to the most important stories of the day.
The problem with blogs - and even tools like Blodex, Popdex and Daypop that measure relevant citations - is that there is no real "context of order." It's impossible for me to tell which stories are truly more important than others. They're all listed chronologically at the blogger's discretion. If someone is relying solely on blogs for news, it's up to him/her to decide what's most important. There are pros and cons here. On the pro side readers prioritize the news themselves based on their own dispositions and interests. The big downside is that we lose the greater context that journalists can provide...unless Microsoft can help.
Microsoft's opportunity is to make easy-to-use weblog publishing tools that are sophisticated enough to enable a user to assign importance to posts using templates, fonts, headline sizes and, most importantly, order. The next step is then to develop a search tool (perhaps already in the works) that can automatically aggregate blog posts by the importance assigned by their publishers.
If they don't, then maybe Google or Yahoo will.
Computerworld has an excellent item on the basics of RSS.
TIME has a piece on vloggers, such as Steve Garfield.
Garfield belongs to a small but growing group of video bloggers, or vloggers, who are turning the Web into a medium in which it's possible that someday anyone could mount original programming, bypassing the usual broadcast networks and cable outlets.
Despite my self-imposed news diet this week, I am keeping on top of blogging, marketing and PR news using RSS feeds since I feel it's central to my job.
eWeek has an article that states that bloggers and blogging are killing journalism as we know it. The writer, Scott Petersen, notes this is scary but not necessarily bad.
Petersen writes:
Still more bloggers see themselves as the new journalists. Many readers turn to blog news sites because they disdain "mainstream" journalism, which is viewed almost as an anachronism full of lazy co-conspirators in the national decline. Who can blame them after The New York Times' fiasco of Jayson Blair, who was caught last year making up his stories? Meanwhile, as the blog sites proliferate, they become sources of their own news, a lot of it rumor, which then takes on a life of its own.
So blog on. If left to market forces, most blogs will live or die on their own. But get used to an era in which information becomes so ubiquitous it becomes almost useless. With a national election coming up, the stakes are high, so it's blogger—and bloggee—beware.
Bloggers are finding ways to make money from advertising. SF Gate reviewed the revenue prospects of bloggers, relatively few of whom have put up ads on their sites. A few are raking in a good deal more than the costs of serving the site, some in the thousands per month.
(Source: MarketingVOX)
CNET has launched news aggregator, according to the editorsweblog.
Gabe points out in an email to me that earlier today I linked to What's Making Blog News. He had originally hesitated pointing out his site, memeorandum, fearing it might bend my all-blog "rules." Once I pointed out What's Making Blog News, however, he felt completely free to do so.
To me, these two sites are weblogs that aggregate links to media news headlines. As long as I don't follow those links, I am within the purpose of this experiment. I do not extend this same latitude to true aggregation sites like Findory News, Topix.net or Google News.
Do you feel I am bending the rules?
Aww, isn't she beautiful; so cute all snuggled up in that little plastic bag. She's just dying to break free and tell me all about what's happening in my world today. Unfortunately, she refuses to talk to me. Why? Because today I begin my all-blog media diet experiment. For seven days, as described here, I am going to attempt to stay knowledgeable about US news, business news, entertainment news and sports only via what I read on Weblogs. At the end of the week I will be quizzed by members of the respected Poynter Institute, a school for journalists, future journalists, and teachers of journalists.
I start the day by heading over to Daypop's Top News Bursts. Many of the stories appear to be from yesterday -- the opening of the WWII memorial, Pat Tillman, the attack in Saudi Arabia, etc. -- so I warily keep digging so I don't fall behind. Here's some of what I found so far...
* John Robb provides some analysis on a New York Times story on yesterday's attack in Saudi Arabia that's very informative.
* Taegan Goddard's Political Wire points to a good story on CNN.com on how the major presidential campaigns engage in "media manipulation" every day. In addition, he indicates the Kerry/McCain speculation is rampant.
* What's Making Blog News has a good round up of top news stories that are being discussed.
* Wayne's Movie Blog discusses the tornadoes struck Wichita last night.
* The Post Game has added an ESPN ticker ... just in time for my diet!
* Peter O'Kelly's Reality Check notes that the Boston Herald reports today that Sony is having difficulty adapting to the digital age.
* BlogPulse top links list reveals that Al Gore's speech is still the talk of the nation, but they're a day behind too, alas.
* BlogCritics helped me get an update on the latest figures from this weekend's box office.
More to come later today.
As noted earlier, Prints the Chaff blogger Tom Mangan of the San Jose Mercury News has announced he is retiring from frequent blogging.
"I haven't given up on blogging altogether... just a certain variant of it which obliges a take-over-one's-life timesink. My homepage at tommangan.net will still have occasional postings," Tom explained to me today in an email.
"I thought I wanted to be the Romenesko of newspaper editors but my heart wasn't in it for the long haul. But it was fun till it wasn't, which is always the best time to bail. Plus there are tons of editors blogs out there now so I don't feel like there's this big unmet need."
I conducted an email interview with Tom earlier this month and was waiting for the right moment to post it. In homage to Tom, I can't think of a better time than today to do so. Tom, we will miss your regular rants. Every time I fix a spelling error or cut a comma I will always think of your postings and how they made me laugh and think. Keep in touch.
MP: Are bloggers journalists, editors or....?
MANGAN: Bloggers are just people using the Web to spread their voice to an audience. Some do journalism, but some do poetry and pictures of their housecats. Lots of lines of work have had volunteer and professional components -- firefighters come to mind. Desktop publishing made it possible for anybody to become a journalist, but you had to figure out a lot of cranky, difficult software, so few people exploited the opportunity. Blogging software has made it possible to be a volunteer journalist with far fewer technological hurdles.
You can't say bloggers aren't journalists or editors or anything else. There are too many kinds of blogs to say what they are definitively. The key distinction is that so long as they are volunteers with no financial stake in their blogs, they can quit at any time -- and many of them do. But then again, volunteer firefighters often stay with it for decades and pass it along to their kids, so there's more than money at work here.
MP: How are blogging and participatory journalism changing professional journalism?
MANGAN: Not much is happening beyond a few working reporters checking blogs and discussion areas. It won't be "participatory journalism" until audience give-and-take becomes integral to news coverage, and the audience voice becomes part of the story. We're seeing enough bits and pieces of this to recognize fascinating possibilities, but not enough to say it's "changing professional journalism."
Participatory journalism exists in a few specialized areas -- it's rampant in some segments of media and technology, but there are vast swaths of regions, topics and careers that are essentially unblogged. When blogging crosses those frontiers, we'll have a far better idea of how "participatory journalism" will shape up.
MP: What should PR people keep in mind vis-a-vis these changes?
MANGAN: Blogs offer a new way to find targeted audiences; name your audience and start looking for blogs. If you can't find one, it's a good excuse to start one. The great thing about blogs is that the well-done ones manage to attract a devoted, insightful audience to their topic. Thing is: it has to be updated at least daily; it has to have distinctive voice, and it must have a no-bullshit attitude. So, if you're gonna start one you have to be committed to keeping it up. It's not a trivial commitment; it could last years. So think about that, too, before diving in. I know a lot of PR folks are wondering if they can pitch stories to existing bloggers -- that's sorta the old-fashioned way to do it, and most blogs have such small audiences that it might not be worth the effort. I wonder if you wouldn't be better off just starting a blog on the topic you're covering -- that way you can frame the story you want to tell, and let the audience fill in the gaps.
A good blogger can become the online voice of a product, service or personality. To date this is mostly untried, but when branding and advertising budgets run into the millions, how expensive is it to have somebody blogging full-time on some company's behalf? You'd have to be savvy to the Web audience, treat them as equals, be a bit sassy and so forth, but it seems to me it could be done. The trick is matching talent with client.
MP: In Dan Gillmor's new book it mentions your urging newspapers to start instablogs. Why hasn't the Merc done this yet for a big local biz story like Google's IPO? How far away from seeing this used as a regular practice? Does the Merc have an instablog ready for the next earthquake?
MANGAN: Remember, all my blogging is volunteer; I have nothing to do with the Merc's online operations, which are mostly handled via Knight Ridder Digital. So I can't speak to their ideas about blogging. My guess is that Knight Ridder Digital is reluctant to dive headlong into blogging until the novelty wears off and the profit potential becomes more obvious. But I will say that blogs are so easy to set up that it would not be a large task to set one up the next time a quake hits.
MP: Robert Scoble recently urged journalists and bloggers to help each other. He wrote: "For instance, what will happen during the next major earthquake in San Jose? Will the few hundred journalists who work for the San Jose Mercury News be able to keep up with such a huge story? No. Webloggers, because of our numbers, will be able to cover such an event in a way that traditional journalists would never be able to." How do you see bloggers and journalists working together?
MANGAN: Well, we have a generator so our lights will stay on. It'll be hard for all those bloggers to post when the power grid's down and the batteries on their laptops go dead. Access to professional resources will always divide the pros from the volunteers. But there will be volunteer bloggers for the same reasons there are volunteer firemen. In the firefighting trade the volunteers are a given, but in the news trade they are newcomers on the scene. Over time they'll figure out the best ways to work together and stay out of each other's way.
When big news breaks, blogs will spring up spontaneously. The best thing bloggers can do for reporters and photojournalists is to recognize they are people with jobs, deadlines, press runs and editors -- if want to be helpful, fine, but avoid situations where you'll be tripping over each other (a good guideline might be: if you see a reporter, go somewhere else to get the unreported story).
The best thing journalists can do is validate bloggers' efforts by reading, linking and recommending blogs to their readers. Bloggers don't need this validation, but those who get it will be more apt to stick with it than those who are ignored.
MP: What is the best copyediting advice you can offer to bloggers?
MANGAN: Check your spelling, check your names, check your grammar, check your facts. And write well.
Good writing will draw an audience, but mistake-ridden copy will run them off.
Tom Mangan, who penned the popular journo blog Prints the Chaff, has called it quits. Tom writes:
Some of you probably saw this coming: Increasingly infrequent posts, taking three weeks off for three days' work, etc.Well, as Freddie Mercury once said, it's time to leave you all behind and face the truth. Which is, I don't want to do this anymore. It's taking too much time away from people and other stuff I care more about. And besides, the place I'm moving to has only dialup access, and daily blogging at 33k is madness.
I'd rather do this right or not at all -- that is, post every day and give the topic the time it deserves, rather than let it whither or fade into irrelevance. Burnout vs. rust, as Neil Young would put it.
(Source: David Akin)
Steve Gilliard dissects how a newspaper story is written.
I'm still looking for some good general news and business news blogs for my experiment. I'm doing well with sports, entertainment and politics. If you have ideas, please send them my way.
Dan Forbush, president of ProfNet and editor of Media Insider, has just signed on to participate in the Global PR Blog Week, Constantin Bastureau reports. Dan will interview Ross Mayfield, president of Socialtext.
With his interviews on Media Insider, Dan has been a leader in driving industry awareness about the new world of opportunities that Weblogs, RSS and wikis offer PR professionals.
As part of this event -scheduled for July 12-16 - I will run separate Bloggerside Chat interviews with Jay Rosen (PressThink) and Dan Gillmor (San Jose Mercury News) on this blog.
The American Journalism Review this month looks at the expanding world of political blogging.
"Political blogs--online journals featuring commentary, often highly opinionated--have rapidly become a presence in the campaign landscape. Now some established news organizations are hiring established bloggers or creating their own. How much impact does this instant punditry have on mainstream political reporting?"
Dave Winer has launched a blog to educate non-techies about the benefits of using RSS tools.
Dave writes:
Every publisher that supports RSS has to explain what it's about, and every one tells a different and incomplete story. So I wanted to start a site where people from the RSS users community can answer questions to help newbies figure out what to do with an RSS feed.
(Source: Blog on Blog)
Dan Li today offers some good ideas for how bloggers should reference each other's work. Wayne Hurlbert adds his thoughts as well.
Now that we have a good petition going, the blogosphere needs a body to set some basic standards for sourcing. Dan's ideas are a start, but I urge Creative Commons, a credible body, to take a leadership role here.
Creative Commons has already successfully established a working "honor" system that is designed to protect content rights and keep us all in check from stealing each other's work. They have set a series of licensing codes with input from the community. Publishers choose a level of code to adopt and bloggers elect whether to abide by them or not.
The organization should now create a wiki to enable the community to promote proper attribution. Using such a wiki the blogosphere will establish a "blogger code of ethics" that determines the best practices for content sourcing. Even better, the wiki could also serve as a public registry listing the most egregious offenders who steal works from Creative Common licensees. To my knowledge, no one yet has grabbed hold of this opportunity. Hopefully Creative Commons will do so.
BusinessWeek this week features a story all about wikis. Rob Hof writes "they could transform Corporate America." The story also has an online extra on four wikis to watch.
The Guardian asks how have business and the media adapted to the arrival of the Internet? The writer, Giles Turnbull, spoke to Doc Searls, Rick Levine, Chris Locke and David Weinberger, authors of the seminal Cluetrain Manifesto - five years after it first appeared online.
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