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The Editors Weblog reports that readers loyal to New York Times columnists are increasingly searching for their works on blogs ever since the columns went up behind the TimesSelect paid service. A quick look at the top blog searches Technorati's home page certainly backs this up. How long until someone starts a wiki up with all of their columns inputted?
Technorati Tags: Journalism, Media, newyorktimes, nyt, nytimes
When I spoke at the OMMA conference this week someone from a top 10 magazine asked me how news organizations such as the Austin American Statesman, Advance Internet, MSNBC, etc are dealing with verifying the legitimacy of the citizen journalism content they use. They are concerned about potential liability issues. For example, it's fairly easy for a consumer to use Photoshop to create and submit faked photographs. This particular media company I am talking to believes this is a huge issue for pro-am partnerships like these. If anyone out there can help, please leave a comment or link to this post from your own blog. Thanks.
Technorati Tags: Journalism, Media
I am hearing lots of good things about a new service called Jeteye. Jeteye lets you create, save, search, tag and share collections of web links, notes, images in what's called jetpaks. So far it looks great. I like how it's built on Google, but also enables me to search other engines as well. Give it a go.
I am testing a new free tool from CustomScoop that searches both news and blog sites and delivers results in aggregate. So far it looks promising. The beta is by invitation only. However, they are inviting my readers to take a test drive. To try it out send them an email at this address. Be sure to tell them you read about them on my blog.
CustomScoop Personal is geared for the PR community, but honestly I think anyone interested in tracking topics will find it valuable. Their database breaks down as follows (approximations):
U.S. Online News (5,000 sources)
International Online News (2,000 sources)
US & EU Government Web Sites (7,000 sources)
Policy Web Sites (1,200 sources)
Blogs (25,000 sources)
For blogs, Chip Griffin from CustomScoop writes in that they have sought to add the most influential ones. “We have plans to ramp up that number significantly, but we’ve been in the news business for five years and only added blogs in a serious way earlier this year,” he said.
Understandably, the free version currently only allows one set of search terms per email address. The paid product allows unlimited keywords and all sorts of other bells and whistles.
CustomScoop Personal is really lightweight and easy to use. Much of it is written in AJAX (definition), which means that pages load faster and changes can be made quickly within an individual page. What I really like is how you can set up a very powerful search without any knowledge of how to construct a good Boolean query as the image below shows. You can also limit your search to either blog, government, news or policy sites and then even drill down further (e.g. only send me results from daily newspapers).
Once you set up your searches you can elect to receive results in different ways. For one, they give you a secure RSS feed. Sweet. Second, you can get twice daily emails. Lastly you can simply log in and view your results on a Web page. (see images below)
The search results so far don't seem to keep up with Technorati or the other search services, but in time it is my hope they will improve the blog search or partner with someone else. Still, so far, it's worth giving it a go and adding it to your arsenal.
A fascinating article by Richard MacManus is saying what I have been for quite awhile - the Web-based office suite is around the corner. He's pointing to a slew of sites that replicate many of Microsoft Office's core features. Go give it a read. Also check out ThinkFree's new online office suite for a taste of what's to come.
Major League Baseball's Web site now has RSS feeds by team and more.
Search Engine Watch points to a new rundown of search engine ranking factors that can influence a web site's rank at for a particular term or phrase. This nugget was particularly interesting...
In certain documents, particularly those with lengthy content and an obvious hierarchy or structure, the ordering of words, phrases, sentences and concepts can be taken into account by search engines. The optimal document structure will vary based on the type of document being sought, but it is generally wise to optimize news or blog entries with a classic lead-in, followed by a broad subject and moving, eventually to narrower discussions.
So there you have it - a search engine friendly approach to writing blog posts.
Technorati Tags: SEO
MediaPost: 'Blogs and other consumer-generated media channels can be extremely cost-effective in driving Web traffic to campaign sites and creating interest, said panelists at the OMMA East Conference on Wednesday.“
Technorati Tags: Advertising
Eric Schwartzman from the Spinfluencer podcast and I recently sat down to talk about blogs and PR and much more. You can read the full podcast show notes here. (Link to the 50-minute MP3 file)
New York Post: “A marketing and public relations guru says she was shown the door at her high-powered real estate job after an ambitious assistant tattled to executives about her online diary.” (via Curbed)
Over the past several weeks I have been testing a new stealth search engine called Rollyo. It's now in a public beta. Rollyo is a very smart idea. Any individual can set up a custom searchroll that searches within anywhere from one to 25 different sites. The product is powered by Yahoo Search. Here's where you can find my profile and a search engine I put together that searches interactive marketing Web sites. Kudos to Dave Pell for a great product. He went out to a slew of influencers while the site was in alpha who each put together a searchroll and also gave him feedback.
No Stowe Boyd, it's not just you. Technorati is definitely monkeying with its index and the way it counts links and ranks blogs. My blog shot up from #220 last week to #100 this week.
Technorati Tags: Technorati
The Fly With Me podcast has captured some of the pilot-tower audio from last week's Jet Blue emergency landing at LAX. As far as I know this audio has not been “broadcasted” anywhere else.
Judging by this MediaPost article media buyers are moving away from trying to reaching as many consumers as possible, towards micro-targeting. This bodes well for bloggers and podcasters interesting in getting ad dollars.
Technorati Tags: Advertising
Interested in wikis? Then give JotSpot Live a try. It's very easy to use and bare bones, but it's a terrific tool for collaborating. Heck, I may even use it to set up a Micro Persuasion wiki. If I did, what could we use it for? (via TechCrunch)
Good for Apple. They listened to the cacophony in the blogosphere - and later the mediasphere - over the fragility of their new iPod nanos and their VP has responded to the concerns. Now if only Dell would take a page from Apple's playbook.
Technorati Tags: Apple, CustomerService, Dell
This is a good one. Political candidates are now fact-checking each other's blogs. WCBS-TV in New York reports that NYC Mayor Bloomberg's campaign office cried foul over one of his opponent's blog posts.
The Bloomberg camp caught an embarrassing error on democratic candidate Fernando Ferrer's campaign blog. In a September 5th entry on his blog, Ferrer wrote “I was born in the South Bronx and educated in public schools for most of my education.” The Bloomberg campaign reminded Ferrer that he attended Catholic Schools through 12th grade and then went to NYU. The Ferrer campaign removed the line and apologized.
Here's the line of the day, “a spokesman blamed an unnamed staffer for crafting it, based on Ferrer's dictation.” For one, I guess if Ferrer were podcasting this wouldn't have happened. Two, maybe Ferrer should ask his new buddy Howard Dean for some blogging lessons! Boy am I glad New York has a blog-savvy mayor. Whew.
Technorati Tags: Politics
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