Oct
31
Juicy Fruit Blog Died – R.I.P.
We blogged about it here and here and now it is gone.
Oct
31
Content or design, what is important?
Guys like Fred at WeBreakStuff are starting to realize that most of us are not using web content in its original or intended form. Instead we are using news readers like NetNewsWire to pull content from web sites and deliver it in text form to our readers. Do you offer RSS/Atom feeds? How do you feel about the loss of control feeds represent?
Oct
28
Attack of the 50 Foot Blog
The professionals are nervous this week — worrying aloud about the ease with which any reader can turn into a writer. Forbes is the latest, with an hysterical cover story about how blogs are coming to get you. (Hysterical, as in, it’s pretty funny *and* batshit crazy all in one.) It’s almost like a piece of performance art — a paranoid story about uneven, one-sided rants from powerful publishing entities contained in an uneven, one-sided rant from a paranoid but powerful publishing entity. So meta it hurts.
Frankly, it’s so bad, I’m not going to offer a line by line critique. I will say this: they encourage firms to monitor the blogosphere and start their own blogs. I would, too, though not to ‘fight back.’ We are counseling someone now about how to deal with negative blog posts, and our overriding message to them is that your own blog should not be about doing tit for tat on every distracting blog post out there. Instead, add value. Tie your name & brand to the right sorts of things. We also don’t subscribe to the ‘blogs as weapons’ approach listed here. We’d never be anyone’s huckleberry for that sort of foolishness.
"Bloggers are more of a threat than people realize, and they are only going to get more toxic. This is the new reality," says Peter Blackshaw, chief marketing officer at Intelliseek, a Cincinnati firm that sifts through millions of blogs to provide watch-your-back service to 75 clients, including Procter & Gamble and Ford.
I’m going to assume that they did a really long interview with Pete, and that this quote only looks like FUD because of the context it’s in. Yes, monitor. Sure, check out Intelliseek, but not because of some article-induced panic attack.
Follow the discussion at tech.memeorandum. Here are some of the early reviews of this piece:
Chris Pirillo (nice one, Chris)
Oct
26
Weblogs work according to Marketplace
Check out this podcast (not really since it is a RAM file) from American Public Media’s Markplace radio show. Patrick Hirsch interviews the people behind the English Cut Blog and Stonyfield Farm Blog.
Technorati Tags: podcast, npr, David Parmet, English Cut, Stonyfield Farm, Patrick Hirsch, Marketplace
Oct
25
If your brand is getting blogged & remixed, you might be on to something
Sweet piece in yesterday’s NYTimes on unofficial brand blogs – fan blogs for products like Barq’s (It Tastes Good) & services like Netflix. (Hey, didn’t we ask a bit ago where the Blockbuster evangelist blog was?) Lots of chatter in this piece about blogs as really great learning channels — open focus groups that broadcast the good, bad & ugly about products & companies. These are also great brand rally points — e.g. the Vespa projects kicked off by the Micropersuasion team. This, however, was a stunner:
Most of them are written without the consent of the companies that own the brands; a spokesman for Coca-Cola, which owns Barq’s, had not heard of Mr. Marx’s blog.
Say what? The dude has been running a Barq’s blog since ‘04 (with an url like thebarqsman.com) and you, tasked with talking up Coke products, tell the paper of record you have never heard of such? Sounds like the Coca-Coca company could use some blog monitoring services. I have just the team for you.
Technorati Tags: customer+evangelists
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