This is a very interesting article I came across from the Daily Yomiuri in Japan. Alhough it initially appeared that not many Japanese businesses are adopting blogging strategies from some recent survey data I came across, it does appear that they are being used for sales and marketing efforts.

They site a bunch of real life examples of how blogs are being used to sell and market products and services from cars to books to Public Relations, so this is definitely worth a read. Two things piqued my interest that I thought I would share.

According to the Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry, blog-related business generated 3.4 billion yen in fiscal 2004 and is expected to expand to 137.7 billion yen in fiscal 2006.

That is over 1.26 Billion US in Japan alone, which is a significant figure.

Also, I read an amazing example of how one company is giving the public free blogs in exchange for the promotion of their products and services.

Anyone who registers with Rakuten can set up a blog on the company's network and receive benefit from the program. Bloggers must advertise products available on the main Web site and post a link to purchasing pages. If somebody purchases the product after jumping to the page from a blog, Rakuten will give the blogger reward points, which can be used to purchase products via the main Web site.

Absolutely brilliant. I have consulted with many customers on setting up viral marketing strategies for community blogging applications, but this takes it one step further by incenting bloggers with “rewards points” which the customer can redeem for discounts on additional purchases through the provider. This is a great strategy that alot of companies should seriously consider with any large blog service roll out. 

MSN is trying something a little unique by holding a contest to try and attract more British bloggers to their free blogging platform.

Basically they want users to acquire a UFO picture (If you don't have one, they are happy to provide one) and post this to their MSN Spaces blog with a small article that will then enter them to win all kinds of neat stuff such as MP3 players and digital cameras.

Great idea to flaunt the brand, create some awareness, and get users in to try the tool, although a strategy premised on a ficticious topic may not be the best bet to create repeat or long term bloggers. All this seems to do for MSN in the long term is create a bunch of populated blogs.

Considering how much they have been number tossing regarding the millions of users they have in North America as of late, I can see how this would be a great way to beef up the numbers in that locale….

Sunday afternoon is deadline to get into The Feed pilot!

Here is a snippet from a previous article on The Feed:

Would you like a free ad for your podcast on CBC Radio, to be potentially heard by close to a million people? I’m accepting short promos for your podcast on The Feed pilot. I will be putting a couple of promos into the pilot episode and hope it stays in the final format. To qualify, your promo must be:

• Canadian: Promoting a podcast either made in Canada (please say in your promo what city you’re from) or is about Canadian culture
• Non-commercial: If your podcast promotes a company or product, or you charge for your podcast, it won’t be accepted.
• Broadcast-quality: No less than 22khz compression, speak close to the mic, don’t let the music overwhelm your voice, etc.

So in conjunction with Yahoo's moves into the VOIP realm with the acquisition of Dialpad, which is is a little bit of a different direction than the supposed rumor about them going after Skype, is the fact they have now acquired the blo.gs tracking service.

Blo.gs is similar to some of the other weblog tracking services, and in their own words are…

this is a directory of recently updated weblogs and tools for tracking interesting weblogs, in the spirit of services like weblogs.com and blogrolling.com.

This is a very similar move to what AskJeeves.com did with the acquisition of Bloglines, and Bloglines recent announcement of their move to launch a Blogging / RSS search engine similar to Pubsub.com or Technorati.com

I predicted in my article covering the Ask Jeeves acquisition that their move was a sign that the lines between RSS/Blog search, and traditional web based search will blur.. It's great to see that when it comes to predictions, you can't always be wrong

I wonder what the next moves for Microsoft and Google will be to incorporate Blog/RSS dedicated search functionality?

Joi Ito posted an article today referencing some statistics he acquired from the 10th Annual Internet Survey by Internet Association Japan.

I recommend clicking through to Joi's site so you can see the full list of Internet related statistics, but what I found particularly interesting were those associated with Blogging…

72.5% of people have heard of blogs, up from 39% last year.

25% of women in their teens and 20's have blogs.

9.5% of Internet users use RSS Readers.

2.8% of companies have corporate blogs and over 50% express no intention of ever having corporate blogs

What perplexes me is why there seems to be such a high awareness and utilization rate in the residential arena, yet half of businesses in Japan are quite vocal of never willing to consider this as a valid communication tool.

Considering how popular the hype seems to be in North America for business blogging, it seems a bit contradictory to me. This could just be a reference to the differences between business practices in Japan compared to North America, but I'm not sure, someone more versed in Japanese corporate culture would be able to clarify much better than I.

What I do know is that corporate Blogging can be scary, but when you weigh the benefits versus the drawbacks, and as long as you have a solid implementation plan and clearly communicated rule set, a tactical blogging strategy will put your business far ahead in the trust, relationship, communication, and brand awareness curve than any traditional corporate communication strategy ever could alone.

Today, AskJeeves.com announced that Bloglines currently has over 500,000,000 blog and news feed articles being tracked in their database. That is pretty impressive, especially since they have doubled their data count since January.

Add to this the fact that they are indexing roughly 2 - 2.7 million new entries per day and you start to get a great picture of not just how many blogs there are out there, but also how high the usage rate is.

Bloglines is an RSS aggregation and tracking tool, and one of the most popular since they are web based and free so they seem to be a pretty valid source for data such as this.

The caveat to keep in mind is that I'm not sure if or how they track blogs NOT being subscribed to by a user in their system nor how effective they are at indexing multilingual blogs in Asia or other countries. Although they are one of the most popular aggregation tools out there, this number of daily adds could be even higher dependant on what percentage of the market they are covering.

I'm not posting about this just because we are the the world's largest domain name wholesaler… well maybe… actually yeah, that's why.. Blogging is about honesty right?

Great article for any Blog starting up. A tip from my own experience is that I chose the name of this blog before I decided on using a domain name. My old URL used to be http://sm.blogware.com which stands for Sales Mindset. Of course this was before I found my choice hence the survey question on the right.

 Here are the relevant points from the article for you to think about:

- what happens if this blog is very successful? Will the domain/subdomain/directory that I start this blog on look professional down the track?
- does the domain name include my main keywords? (helps heaps with SEO)
- is the domain memorable?

So, foood for thought, I started this blog with my first post as a rant to vent a little. Little did know I would take this on as a full time gig…. so choose your name carefully! Even personal efforts deserve a protectable brand in this day and age, so buy a domain name!

For all you reseller's out there still pondering? Bundle, Bundle, Bundle… I bet a few of these bloggers need an email address on that new domain name too

I saw this on Gizmodo and HAD to blog it. It's rare that I have the opportunity to blog about two of the main professional passions of my life at the same time, Sales and Blogging.

In this Gizmodo has a funny quip quoting an old favorite movie of mine… Glengarry Glenross… Perfect example for the application. I wonder if Tucows would be willing to give all of us in the sales force free Ipods… Tucows?… hello?…. anyone? … Bueller?….

“…..First things first. These are the new leads. These are the Glengarry leads. To you, these are gold; you do not get these. Because to give them to you would be throwing them away. Put that coffee DOWN! Coffee is for closers!”

Maybe not, but when I saw this article, I remembered Ross had a bit of a rant a few months ago on the topic and I agree, I would LOVE to see Microsoft enable features to be able to post to blogs.

Now supporting XML won't necessarily mean Blogware or Flickr or any other blog specific support… yet… but it does bring it close enough that providers such as Blogware could potentially have alot of incentive to create some features that work with these formats if possible.

Well, easier than today that's for sure.

Interesting data presented by the Blog Herald, especially relating to the statistics by country. First thing of note to me is that MSN Spaces is claiming 10 million blogs while Blogger is listed at only 8.5 million while being the incumbent and having a significant lead to saturate the market. IMHO the MSN claim to fame is more than likely attributed to the MSN Messenger 7.0 release, but either way it smells like a little bit of a marketing stretch to me. Most providers stretch the numbers, 'spin' is nothing unique so it's not necessarily a negative thing, especially since people like me are talking about it now…

7.2 Million for LiveJournal, and here is a big one, 1.5 million for the pay for MT and Typepad where previous data indicated the vast majority of Six Apart customers are based on Typepad, the hosted service. That's a million plus pay for blogers through them alone… Now look at the “other” column that comprises a number of pay for providers which I would assume include our retail partners. Our resellers  in aggregate have experienced exponetial growth the last few months, not nearly as as many blogs in as Blogger or MSN Spaces which are free, but this really goes to show the maturing of the market and the growth in numbers of users who demand a much more sophisticated service with support. Anyone remember the decline in the number of free hosting providers?

I think of the Blogger and MSN Spaces of the world as the proving grounds, the ability for someone to try this highly rewarding practise, to understand the true value proposition of this revolution of online communication…. then as they mature realize that what they have is not enough, and what they want can only be provided by a premium vendor for only a few dollars a month.

Thankfully Blogware has a Blogger import tool so all of their users who see the light can simply pick up where they left off by contacting their friendly neighborhood Blogware reseller. Little do they know that switching is as easy as replacing a lightbulb.