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I found this article very intriguing since this was a question allot of people in our company spent an immense amount of time trying to answer. What are the applications of a blog, and who is a blogger?

Back when this had a big push, it was about a year ago and we were at what the Blog Herald calls 2G, or the Extrovert stage. At that time my conclusion was that there is no specific vertical application for blogs, but more so that blogs were a flexible communication tool that were used by… well, extroverts. Specifically I didn't use that term but I described it as “people who want to be heard or have something to say”.

Since then the blogosphere has matured, and what they call 3G… mainstream has arrived.

“Most new bloggers blog because they can, because others are, and because to many people (perhaps more so amongst younger people, and in particular amongst teens) having a blog is now regarded as a normal behaviour, just like having an email address and mobile phone are normal as well.”

I couldn't agree more.

The world has become a little dimmer for me with the loss of an ex co-worker who passed away of natural causes at the young age of 27 yesterday morning.

His genuine attitude, exhuberance, excitement for life and all around positivity are things I continue to strive for every day. May God bless his soul.

Kris, enjoy the next steps on your journey and let this transition for you remind us all that life is too short and to value the time we have in this world.

And I have to say, it's about time… It's great to see some of the more successful and noteable business leaders such as Mr. Trump and Mr. Cuban stepping up to the blogging plate to share their thoughts, experiences and ideals. These snippets of wisdom being brought forth through this new medium will foster more innovation, creativity, and motivation for new young entrepreneurs everywhere.

In taking a look at his first articles, what truly stood out to me is his latest on Business Ethics citing the example of recently ex-CEO of TYCO Dennis Kozlowski. He had quite the scandal emerge where he was recently convicted of being caught with his proverbial “pants down” for receiving bonuses that were not approved by the board of directors.

Ethics, Morals, and Character are things that are not always synonymous with business, and it's examples such as this that makes building trust a sometimes difficult thing to create in any industry. I've had my own experiences and dilemmas in my professional history and chose to take the bite and walk the right path which is not always the most profitable, at least it wasn't for me in the short term. Mr. Trump proves you can do both, and someday I will as well.

Now here is the first detailed analysis (PDF Doc) I have seen that targets and measures the difference between traditional surfers and Blog readers.

By tracking traffic to top blogs, and co-ordinating this data with Top Blog providers, Comscore seems to have been able to somehow slice the blog reading cream from common Internet traffic.

Some interesting finds of note:

-  50 Million U.S. Internet users visited blog sites in the first quarter of 2005. That is roughly 30% of all U.S. Internet users and 1 in 6 of the total U.S. Population.

-  Compared to the average Internet User, blog readers are significantly more likely to live in wealthier households, be younger and connect to the Web on Broadband High Speed Connections

-  Blog readers also visit nearly twice as many web pages as the Internet average, and they are much more likely to Shop Online.

The data is based on Comscore's “Panel” of 2 Million Internet Users comprised of Home, Work, and University users in ratios that reflect  the demographic composition of the general U.S. Internet user population. They all have provided explicit permission to monitor their activities so based on all these factors and the sheer size of the panel the data should be pretty accurate.

The most telling information comes in the form of the profile of blog readers.

ComScore found that blog visitors represent a demographically attractive advertising audience. Blog visitors are disproportionately likely to be affluent, young, and broadband enabled.

This alone provides incredible incentive for Broadband providers to offer a high end blogging tool to their base, where they may take advantage if embedding advertising in the blogs to viral market to this surfer crowd. 

Blog visitors are 11 percent more likely than the average Internet user to have incomes of $75,000 or more.

Combine this with a younger demographic as reported above that has a lower likelihood of having any parental expenditures and you have a technically savvy target audience with allot of disposable income.

Blog visitors are 11 percent more likely to access the Internet (from either home or work) using a broadband connect.

The average Blog visitor spent nearly 18,000 minutes or about 23 hours per week online, while the average Internet user spent just over 10,000 minutes or 13 hours per week online.

Blog readers are a heavy Internet surfing demographic. They are more dependent on their broadband connections, and require the additional speed, and better value added features of a good broadband provider than any other Internet user demographic. How do you reach them? Through blogs of course, and as many of them as you can.

The report also found that blog visitors are 30 percent more likely to buy products or services online. While less than 40 percent of the total Internet population made an online purchase in Q1 2005, 51 percent of blog visitors did. The average blog visitor who bought online spent approximately six percent more than he average online buyer.

They shopped online more often and spent more on average than a typical surfer. This is an excellent online demographic to target for selling pretty much anything on the Internet. Offering a blog tool to any large community base will allow you an open door to market to this extremely attractive demographic. 

An excellent real life example is a company called Rakuten in Japan who sells a myriad of products and services and who recently started to offer free blogs to incent users to viraly market their wares through the blogs and receive discounts. It's only a matter of time before this same approach starts to take shape with product and service providers across North America.

Thanks to Ray Slakinski the author of iPodderX for hosting the event, Dave Winer for his exceptional demoing capabilities, Ross and Joey for providing the Tucows boardroom and making sure no one was lost, out of pop, or not greeted with a smile. It turned out to be a very entertaining and interesting learning experience for this technical sales guy.

I have to say that the OPML editor is a very cool little tool, and Dave was able to successfully showcase some of the more powerful aspects of OPML when it comes to directory creation, organization, and delegation. I never realized just what you can do with categories and how OPML can link multiple authors and multiple applications into one seem less ecosystem of fluid publishing architecture. On the surface RSS is more about empowering the user in consuming content, where OPML is more about how to manage the development, creation, delegation and organization of that content in a complex environment. There was even a whole line of discussion on work flows using outlining tools, which out of all the features highlighted truly piqued my interest, but I'll save that for another discussion on a different day.

Now onto the actual editor itself. He went through allot of features, primarily organization and delegation of directory and category hierarchies as well as highlighting how the tool could be used for managing a Blog or web presences. During the walk through there were a couple of distractions and bobbles, and being someone who demo's tools and features for a living they were totally unavoidable and added to the actual charm of the event. I'll digress with the sales hat, but I did want to touch on a few points that caught my eye. It's very interesting to me that Dave mentioned a couple of things that sort of contradicted each other, yet I totally agree with his current approach… let me explain.

He said that he feels this tool would be used by “advanced bloggers”, especially those that manage multiple weblogs, yet he also stated his goal is to have have 35 million, wait let me correct that decimal as he did in a quite straight to the point yet witty fashion, to 3.5 million. That's on the verge of and even past the cusp of mass adoption IMHO, and any tool that in it's “current” iteration can be described as an advanced blogging tool best used to manage postings to multiple weblogs as Dave did, will be tough to be broadly used by the masses. There were allot of tough questions for Dave on actual applications of the tool, where Dave humbly denied a response on most, and this is where and why I agree with his approach… he felt that articulating any applications may stifle innovation of the tool. He specifically released the tool in a a very raw, rough around the edges open source format, trying to achieve stimulation and developer community involvement in taking the tool to the next level.

We face this challenge with Blogware quite a bit as well, how do we empower our retail partners with the advanced functionality we do while still focusing on simplicity of use for mass adoption across large customer bases. We have customers launching our tool to hundreds of thousands and even in some cases millions of users. The lowest common denominator is the key with that type of approach, and I'm not saying we have solved the puzzle, but we continue to work on improving Blogware for as many users as we can. That will also have to be a key with the OPML editor before he hits that holy grail of 35, wait, 3.5 million users.

Trying the tool for yourself is the only way to truly appreciate the ideas being placed on the table here, and I would be interested in hearing any ideas on application and concept. OPML has some very powerful underlying capabilities that I don't beleive have really been taken advantage of yet, and there may even be something in there for Blogware as well… definitely some food for thought for the bovine crew to chew on for future versions .

The car has been fully broken in for the last couple of months now and boy have I made sure of it.

Once that odometer hit 2,000 KM's it was only the fear of a speeding ticket and the threat of bending it around a tree to keep my foot off of that gas pedal. When they said this car lives at High RPM's they weren't lying, I've heard that oh-so familiar and subtle beep of the tachometer hitting 9,500 RPM more times than the sound of a pager at a Physician's conference. Absolute heaven…

I haven't yet hit the 8,000 kilometer point for the first servicing. It's only supposed to be a simple oil change, but for all of the complaints about oil consumption it hasn't been any worse than my last car which was a traditional 6 piston. So far it's been about 1 quart of oil for every 5 tank fulls, that's way less than the one every 2 fill ups that I was told by the sales rep, not sure why but she's driving amazingly so it might just be good luck. Now on the fuel economy side I haven't been so lucky, so far an average of about 350 KM per 50 litre tank full which isn't so hot.

Now, let's look at some of the specifics….

Performance: Nothing to complain about here, in fact I have driven many different cars in my life and I have to honestly say this car came through with a significant lead on the fun factor side. For a 4 door car it can go like stink, it's practical and extremely responsive. The feedback and stability alone put this car in the lead of anything I have driven, and when I tried the 350z which is about as close as you can get on the bang for the buck side, it's much more practical and so much easier to drive. The 350z takes some effort, the RX-8 is probably the most forgiving car out there.

Maintenance: Considering it isn't scheduled to go in for the first oiling for another 1,000 km's, not too bad really. The only thing I've spent on this car is more car washes than the two previous cars I owned combined (Pride alone, silver is a very forgiving color for dirt) and I'll have to spend about $80 to get the paint touched up where a cab driver hit me about a month ago. That was a frustrating experience, totally not my fault, but it was minor so I let it go and skipped the insurance claim. They'll ding you for bad luck you know…

Uniqueness: I have seen a few here in Ontario, not too many, maybe about one every week or two so definitely high up on the uniqueness factor. I constantly get the thumbs up from passers by, especially anyone who ever owned an RX7. For the price, this sort of reaction is priceless and usually only reserved for those owners who have spent 6 figures on their choice of usually European modes of transportation. When I took a drive down into the US recently the results were even more shocking. I had a crowd gathered around the car in the parking lot when I left the major outlet mall, but considering almost 90% of all vehicles I saw down there were domestics it wasn't too much of a shocker. I mean in all reality a honda civic would have stuck out, but still a pretty cool experience nonetheless.

Conclusion: I've only driven the car in the summer but all inidcations are she's a keeper! I'll have to put it through a Toronto winter before I make any final decisions, but so far they'll have to pry that miniature steering wheel from my cold hands in order to get it away from me…  Next update after the first snow falls so stay tuned for a winter driving report.

The BBC is reporting that Technorati is now tracking one new blog being created every second. That is over 86,000 new blogs per day where the total number of blogs being tracked is more than doubling every 6 months. Back in March they were tracking more than 7 million, that number is now more than 14 million.

Thirteen percent of all blogs that Technorati tracks are updated weekly or more, said the report, and 55% of all new bloggers are still posting three months after they started.

This is interesting food for thought on the usage front. Although there are allot of preconceptions on how a true blogger should be posting consistently, I personally feel that a blog can be used for both a constant stream of information as well as an easy to use tool for sharing more static content less frequently. The market will tell how blogs will be used, and I feel that the application will fall across the full spectrum of possibilities. Some other interesting info that they published:

What is clear is that the blogosphere is highly varied, with blogs coming in many shapes and forms, whether they be professional or for personal use.

Blogs have been used as campaign sites, as personal diaries, as art projects, on line magazines and as places for community networking.

Much of their appeal has been boosted because readers can subscribe to them, for free, to stay updated of any new posts automatically.

It is becoming more and more clear that it's not the application of the tool that will drive widespread adoption although that has been the catalyst to date, but more so the demand by the content consumer. I feel there will be a day when a website that does not have RSS or subscription capabilities will actually be shunned by the consumer. Anyone looking for a piece of surfer timeshare will be forced to enable these features where a blog is the easiest and most cost effective for both the personal and business sides of the Internet publishing coin.