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I have to say that Iupload has been sharing some great learning about blogging in the enterprise space as of late. I'll do a follow up article on the Corporate Blogging survey they released through Guidewire last week that has some pretty valuable data later, but I also found this article from PC Advisors which highlights a couple of direct examples of verticals that blogging can be applied to right away.

I'm mentioning this since the Enterprise market is a great area for our retail partners to mine and although we have some progress on our plate to make Blogware a little more friendly to the more Firewall conscious enterprise customers, our tool has a lot of great differentiation and features for public community building and marketing oriented strategies that I'd love to get into if anyone's interested.

“Hopper's company recently trumpeted a super-sized deal with McDonald's that will find the junk-food giant initially using iUpload's blogging technology for internal corporate communications. However, Hopper says the day may soon arrive when your McDonald's server asks, “Would you like a blog with that burger?” While the corporate communications piece is still only in pilot mode, the grander vision would have blogs playing a role in marketing at the franchise level. McDonald's serves 50 million customers a day.”

This snippet shows a very interesting strategy on how to get corporate or business customers more comfortable with the potential risks associated with blogging by introducing babysteps into the effort with intranet applications. This marketing blog that we created is an example of the application of blogging for the Intranet and how our tool can easily be used as a corporate collaboration piece, an area to share competitive information, a project tracker, as well as a great distribution channelthrough both RSS and the Email Subscription features that we support.

“Sure, they're concerned about employees blogging off the cliff, but the risk/reward analyses are falling squarely in favour of all this being more than a fad.”

They definitely hit the nail on the head with this one.

I've mentioned on this blog before that I've been known to be a bit of a gamer. I'm not a die hard, but when thing's like Half Life 2, Doom 3, and Sierra's latest release F.E.A.R hit the market I've turned on the gaming machine and given them a whirl for their adrenalin inducing escapist fun.

So yesterday I was able to get my hands on the latest release I've added to my collection, Call of Duty 2.

The original, which was rated game of the year in 2003 was something I've never had a chance to try so I thought I would give this one a shot with the screenshots looking as juicy as they do (You can click on these to go to the full screens). The first thing I did was download the demo that's available on Gamedaily and after checking it out I was pretty shocked with the realism, graphics that i find are as good or better than HL2, and sheer adrenal inducing series of action events that made me decide to go for the full copy as soon as it came out yesterday.

After installing the 6 cd collection and doing a quick defrag I started the game and jumped into the first level that starts you off in basic training as a young russian with a rifle and rotten potatoes as grenades since real grenades are <thick russian accent>” worth more than you are”</thick russian accent>

By the time I ended the level watching the collapse of a 10 story building full of enemy troops where I'd just finished planting explosive charges on the foundation, I felt the smallest bit of moisture well up in the corner of my eye and had to literaly stand up and start to applaud an imagined team of developers and game designers I knew I will never meet let alone hear me. My wife was so shocked she came running downstairs to my office to find out what all the comotion was about.

All I have to say is… two thumbs up, 5 cows, 10 out of 10, or the best of whatever other rating system suits your fancy.

I couldn't agree more with Blogherald's take on the article.

I had a very interesting exchange with Ross who's interested in finding out whether we should sunset trackbacks due to all of the spam going on with no inherent dials built in to the standard to defend against it.

I personally felt that trackbacks provide a lot of value to the conversation and either blog providers themselves or new entrants to the market will develop the defenses to help us all fight this menace. 

Just like with email, we didn't can the platform. New providers emerged with defenses to help us do what the standards couldn't. These providers were either fee based services since the problem was so systemic a market developed where we were willing to fork up a few dollars to help ease the pain, or there were open source initiatives like the RBL's such as Spamcop who although weren't perfect, came a long way in helping turn the tide to a somewhat stable stalemate of tit for tat the way the email spam issue has ended up today.

Then I read this article on Wired where I was introduced to Splog Reporter. Very cool stuff, and very similar to that pioneering feel of the early days of RBL's and open source initiatives.

Not sure how or if they are planning to build a business model around this peticular service, but a clear indication that new markets will emerge in this sector and we'll be able to either have volunteers or mercenaries for hire to help with the fight against these predators of thought.

I have a lot of respect for the folks over at Six Apart, who in my opinion have come a long way now that their model has been progressively solidifying and they've been maturing as a business. When I was listening to this podcast from Blogon Between Mena Trott of Six Apart, Steve Rubel, and Ben Mcconnel / Jackie Huba of the Church of the Customer blog, that respect grew even more based on where they are going with their platform and the justification for the pretty big changes.

Now let me be clear, although they are focused on the retail market where Tucows and Blogware is focused on the wholesale, they are a competitor to our retail partners so let me explain…

Six Apart has recently announced Comet which they have touted as their next generation platform that's been designed to be so easy to use that even her Mother could use it. This was the motif of the presentation they did at DEMO this year where Mena brought up her own Mom to show how a 48 year old would be motivated and interested in using the Comet platform to enter blogging.

The “Mother” factor is a demographic you can't ignore when trying to penetrate a typical ISP customer segment with a blogging tool.

When you look at demographic data coming in today, such as this report that indicates over a third of those between the ages of 14 and 21 have created and are using a blog you'll notice a pretty big disparity between this and older data that indicates only about 7 % or so of all ages have done so.

The biggest reason for the disparity is what you would call the communication factor, and how blogging in conjunction with IM have pretty much replaced email as a primary communication medium in this younger demographic. One thing about youth is they find amazing ways at streamlining processes, and you may attribute this to laziness or attentiion deficit, but it's true and if you have a teenager at home you know exactly what I'm taking about. This then starts to make even more sense when you notice that blogging allows tracking of views, multiple conversations just like a party, it has a structure that supports a one-to-many approach that still feels as intimate as one-to-one, subscription capabilities so you know what's being said no matter where you are… so why hasn't your mom figured this out yet?

During the podcast Mena talks about a few of the barriers that people in older demographics (35+) use to justify why they aren't blogging, and I can substantiate most of it with customer surveys we have done in co-marketing campaigns with retail partners attempting different techniques to roll out our tool. The two largest reasons why users do not try the tool in our findings have been:

-  Not enough time

-  Nothing to write about

How do you address that? Well when it comes to time or what to write, your mom does send email and make phone calls, heck even some grandma's send email, so she has the time to post a note about things most of our moms chat about such as family gossip, the weather, her job or career, her soaps or any hobbies that interests her. I mean if your mom is anything like my mother used to be you know there are no limits to the topics she was able to cover and the means by which she would take to be able to reach you. 

Now, when you realize she does have time and she has plenty to talk about, you have the ability to really dig down to where the barriers lie, and that's that most of those conversations are pretty intimate. She doesn't want everyone to know everything, she wants to be able to have multiple conversations on multiple levels dependant on the audience.

Since the release of 1.0 back in early 2004, Blogware has had some pretty cool content access and publishing controls that allow you to filter by audience multiple views into your content seemlessly and easily. This should be a focus for any campaign you do to your customers about our tool such as how your mom could easily shoot out a user/pass to a friend and enable that friend to be a part of her “friends group” that can only see certain views of content or can only post to certain sections.

Add to this some really robust subscription capabilities where all of these friends and family can subscribe via RSS, which even for some teens is still a little too hard to grasp, or our emailing feature so that everytime your mom posts something new everyone she wants to see that post will get an email with what she wrote and the photo or video she attached.

Oh, did I mention that Blogware also has some of the best photo management features inherently built in to any blogging tool? I know my mom had more photo albums than cook books, and trust me that was a lot.

As you can see Blogware has always been designed for your mom, and all you have to do is make her realize that this service is the best way to reach you and there's a good chance she'll never put down her keyboard again.

An interesting article by businessweek drawing some conjecture on how a few Europeans have caught some screenshots of a new service called “Google Base”.

It would be interesting to see how any of the big search co's try to compete with Ebay in the auction space, especially since it would be pretty difficult to improve on the current model without getting into a price war or giving it away for free.

This move would also provide the background for Ebay's 45 slide explanation of the acquisition of Skype where they basically justified the move with how their “competitors” are already in this space and they were just “Keeping up with the Jones's”.

Google, MSN, and Yahoo all have VOIP features through their IM solutions.

According to the Verisign Call yesterday, and a number of articles discussing the settlement of the Verisign vs. ICANN vs. Verisign lawsuit, not only has Verisign managed to get ICANN to agree to extend their registry deal to manage the .COM domain space from 2007 until 2012 in exchange for dropping the lawsuit, but also to increase registry fees per domain year 7% per annum compounded. This means that in 2012 all registrars will be paying $9.75 per domain year which is an increase from $6.25 today.

I wonder how all of the constituents will react at the Vancouver ICANN meeting where this has to be ratified. Add to this that it seems pretty clear that no real roadblocks have been put in place to provide an official green light to the Sitefinder service that started the lawsuit in the first place and you have to fight pretty hard not to shake your head in bewilderment.

According to this Econtent article, Yahoo is on the verge of releasing their new Blog search tool. Will it bring with it the same thunderous anticlimactic silence of Google's Blog Search launch?

I mean don't get me wrong, I do like Google's blog search. I've mentioned in the past it's very googlish in being simple and highly targeted, but the one thing you will notice when you read this article is that you get a sense of comfort and complacency from the smaller players when talking about the incumbents.

None of them seem very concerned that these mega-billion dollar conglomerate market leaders are entering their space, and in all honesty I don't blame them since I wouldn't really be either. There's nothing really different with their approach and due to their size they don't think they have to…

They are trying to do something the same way the innovators have already been doing in a market stew pot that is constantly churning and changing without having the same flexibility of being small and adaptable to change with it. This means that strategically they have to tread a thin line and not deviate too far since there is no way they could hope to match the hop, skip, and jump of all of these RSS search focused players who eat and breath blogging. 

Unless Yahoo does something extremely different, expect a little hype, a ton of spin, and an exodus back to Pubsub, Icerocket and Technorati.

I was reading this article on Microsoft Scoble's blog about how he's playing with different blog tools and what's happening with the personal review he's doing with the different vendors.

Considering the list of suspects, the one thing that struck me was why he isn't checking out blogware and then it dawned on me. If you look at any of the top bloggers using our tool like our own Ross and Joey, or Lockergnome's Chris Pirillo, you would be hard pressed to find anything other than the tell tale reader account sign up to differentiate our tool from competitor's applications. When looking at most tools from the outside looking in we all sort of look alike, and it's not until you get under the hood of Blogware that you can really differentiate our service. I'm sure Blogware is still in the realm of undiscovered gold for most blog publishers out there but the question you may be asking is why?

When you look at our feature comparison chart, or any of the few third party reviews posted on line that include us directly you would find we are ranked in the top for almost every category and are pretty clear winners from a wholesale or enterprise perspective, so why hasn't the word spread?

When I look at third party vendors who have blogging applications that support Blogware, they tend to mention our retail partners more than us when compiling the list of supported platforms… why?

Only one answer to this one, trust…

Trust that we are a dedicate wholesale supplier that does not heavily compete with our customers in the retail space. 

Trust that we are a supplier that treats all of our customers fairly and we value all relationships no matter how big or small.

Trust that we try not to expend more resources on our branding than our retail partners do on theirs.

Trust that we recognize our partner's customers are their own and we stand behind our retail partners every time when facing them.

This trust is why we are the World's largest dedicated wholesale domain registrar with in excess of 5000 retail partners in over a 190 countries worldwide. This is also why we have one of the most loyal customer bases in our industry who recognize that due to our positioning we have to charge a little more and over deliver since our partners trust us with their hard earned brand every time they provision one of our services to their own customer base.

So, based on all of this I'm sure you can see why Blogware may not be too well known in the blogosphere, but if Mr. Scoble would like to give our tool a fair shot, I'm sure he won't be disappointed and may even be looking for a Blogware retail partner he can call his own someday.

With Flock, blogging is a fully integrated part of the Web. Flock includes a blog editor that works with WordPress (and the new Wordpress.com hosted service), Movable Type and Typepad (and shortly also Live Journal) and Blogger. Other blogging platforms have not been tested.

I'm testing out the new Flock social browser to see how it compares to the traditional IE or Firefox. As it states above, this tool allows you to blog directly from within your browser and provides a list of supported providers.

Blogware was not on the list so I was a little skeptical as to how easy it would be to integrate my blog but we do fully support the Metaweblog API and based on the setup which is about 3 simple steps coupled with the fact this post is posted, it seems pretty easy and straight forward. I'll be playing with the other features and write up a bit of a review in a few days if time permits, but other than the need for a spellchecker, so far so good…

Ooops! There was an error posting to your blog. Please doublecheck your account settings or try again later.

DISCLAIMER! Article provided through the magical feature of “Copy and Paste” and not posted through any third party application.

I have to say that it was one of the busiest, IMO most successful, and generally fun trips I have had in a very long time.

This year Tucow's focus was around spreading the word about Blogware, and how this service not only represents an amazing new revenue stream that has opened up web publishing to massive new markets, but also provides incredible value such as lowering attrition and the ability to turn customers into marketers for cross-pollinating other services and products you offer to a highly targeted and attractive demographic. It's great to see how some ideas I came up with almost a year ago are starting to take real shape in the market and our customer base.

A couple of personal notes I want to add. I got to spend some more time with John Keegan of Blogharbor which is always a pleasure. Rarely in my many years in this industry have I met anyone who in the first 5 minutes of a conversation can so clearly communicate how well they “get it” without even saying anything “about it”. We were proud to have him do a speech at our reseller party to help communicate his success's to other customers which he did very well, and as far as having in depth discussions about the market and where things are leading I have to thank John for sharing his expertise and insights in retailing this unique service model. 

I spent some time with many other existing and new customers as well… I won't name names but you all know who you are, it was an absolute blast, thanks for the good times. I was also able to meet for the first time face to face a couple of guys who lurk in the darker reaches of the special forces of our development efforts but have probably built more respect in my books than most others I have come across over the years. Tom and Joe… you were a major part of making the whole trip for me personally, and yes the Advil definitely came in handy at least a couple of the days.

I'll be a very busy person the next few weeks as I start to solidify opportunities and educate customers on how they may take advantage of this new medium with an existing customer base. If I missed anyone or if you are curious about anything Blogware, don't forget to pop me a note and let me know.

AOL and Intelliseek's Blogpulse announce a cooperative to provide AOL with mined data on the Blogoshphere and also allow them to syndicate BlogPulse's two blogs; BlogPulse Newswire, an account of daily blog activity, and BlogPulse Spotlight, which focuses on entertainment and celebrity based blogs. This further beefs up their recent moves with the acquisition of Weblogs Inc. to fill their media properties with more relevant Blog and RSS content.

Blogpulse differs in their approach from the more traditional RSS Search out there such as Pubsub and Technorati by specializing in providing detailed reports on brand and buzz trends to those willing and can afford to pay. They do provide traditional search for the masses including overviews of what everyone's talking about, but also provides a specialized service that allows a brand to monitor and mine any dialogs regarding their products and services for a beefy price.

This approach is very unique and gives a clear indication as to exactly how much potential there is in the amount and quality of data being generated through bloggers sharing their thoughts, opinions, and experiences with products and services of all kinds. Their business model is a mere drop in the bucket as new players start to understand and mine Blog content for all kinds of vertical applications in the future.

After a pretty grueling trip I must add. Recommendation, when traveling here always go direct to San Fran and drive the extra 20 mins, the San Jose airport leaves allot to be desired and you can avoid the stopover we had in Denver for an hour. I have never waited 20 minutes for a rental car shuttle at any other airport I have been to.

I'm extremely excited about opening day tomorrow for ISPCon so I'll moblog some photos and even some video if possible. 

There is a very interesting debate looming on the horizon for all of us in the industry.

I will reserve my direct commentary for now due to my position, but it would be a dire shame to see politics interfere with the growth and openness of what I would consider one of man's greatest achievements in history.

Some quotes of interest for all of you to consider are…

Viviane Reding, European IT commissioner, says that if a multilateral approach cannot be agreed, countries such as China, Russia, Brazil and some Arab states could start operating their own versions of the internet and the ubiquity that has made it such a success will disappear.

“We have to have a platform where leaders of the world can express their thoughts about the internet,” she said. “If they have the impression that the internet is dominated by one nation and it does not belong to all the nations then the result could be that the internet falls apart.”

The US argues that many of the states demanding a more open internet are no fans of freedom of expression.

And then…

David Gross, who headed the US delegation at the Geneva talks, said untested models of internet governance could disrupt the 250,000-plus networks, all using the same technical standards (TCP/IP), which allows over a billion people to get online for 27bn daily user sessions.

“The internet has been a remarkably reliable and stable network of networks and it has grown at a rate unprecedented in human history,” he said. “What we are looking for is a continued evolution of the internet that is technically driven. We do not think the creation of new or use of existing multilateral institutions in the governance of essentially technical institutions is a way to promote technological change.”

and you can then round it out with this…

Calls from Argentina for a continuing debate while Icann is restructured are believed to have garnered support from countries such as Canada which do not like the perceived power that the US has over the internet but are wary of opening up the web to overall state control.

Just before the meeting in Tunis, there will be a three-day gathering of bureaucrats to try to thrash out a deal on internet governance. Getting the parties - especially the US - to agree to anything looks like a near impossible task but Mrs Reding believes it is crucial to find common ground or see the global communication network disintegrate.

If any of this concerns you, and it should, make sure your ICANN constituents, Registrar, or anyone willing to listen in anyway is aware of what you think. Now is not the time to remain quiet.

USA Today reports that Steve Jobs and Apple have unveiled the next upgrade in the line of the iPod, and that's the iPod video.

I still haven't had a chance to review most of the features, or even confirm what video formats the device will support definitively, but based on this it doesn't look like it will support anything other than Quicktime. That's a real shame if true or if there's no other workaround provided, but based on the success of the mp3 iPod I still think this move will take videos and rss to a whole new level.

The one thing I found very interesting about this article was a quote from an analyst with the Yankee Group who doesn't think video on a mobile device will sell…

But Nitin Gupta, an analyst at Yankee Group, questioned how much the video iPod would boost sales of the devices, saying it will be hard to sell shoppers on the idea of watching “on-the-go” video on a little screen.

“The market is likely small for people who want to watch a portable video on a little screen,” he said. “That will not be the main reason people buy the iPod. It is just an enhancement.”

I beg to disagree Nitin . I'm sure most ladies will agree that it's not all about the size, but more how you can use it. With this device you may now timeshift your video consumption to when it's convenient to you, and not when you are connected to the Internet or in front of a TV. That was the secret behind the success of the original iPod in the first place. There were a thousand MP3 players in the market already but only one that could subscribe to RSS feeds.

Let the videocasting revolution begin!

I attended our first meeting today to go over the scheduling and itinerary of our efforts at ISPCon this year. We already have a great turnout of resellers who are booked for our Reseller event that was a pretty smashing success from what I hear last year.

Personally I'm really looking forward to this, it's the first time I have attended this particular event, and we are doing some pretty  innovative stuff on the Blogware side to let everyone know who we are and what we are doing.

If you are going to ISPCon, make sure you take advantage of  our discounts and attend the reseller event.

1. We are exhibiting in booth 700 with demos of Blogware, the Platypus Billing System and our other wholesale services.  Expert members of our team will be available to talk with you about any of our services.
2. Tucows Reseller Only Event will be on Tuesday October 18 starting at 6:30 PM. After the positive feedback from last year's event, we will again host our channel partners for hors oeuvre and drinks.  There will be a series of brief presentations on current and future projects and much more time to give your perspectives to the Tucows team.
3. Elliot Noss is speaking on Wednesday October 19th at 4:15PM.  His topic is 'Love technology - Use it to win customers'.  Kim Phelan Product Manager for Website Tools is speaking on Thursday October 20th at 10:15 AM.  Her topic is 'Blog Hosting Services, Sound Models Amid the Hype'.

We have arranged for free exhibit passes and a discount of $100 off the full conference price.  Please use this link http://resellers.tucows.com/ispcon and let us know you are coming to the Reseller Only Event and access the discounts for the conference.

We'll be painting the town yellow so make sure you come by and say hi, I'll be the guy doing the Blogware demos with the big smile on.

In June 2006 MSN Messenger and YAHOO! IM users will be able to trade messages seemlessly, and make their combined number of users roughly as big as that of AOL the incumbent.

Obviously a defensive move, but one that benefits all of us. The article mentioned Trillian which I've used in the past, but it's not perfect and really doesn't address the ease of use and integration that either of these services have now that they will be interoperable.

Very cool stuff, what's AOL's response?

otherwise you may end up like Dell…

In an open letter to Dell, Jarvis wrote: “Your product was a lemon, and your customer service was appalling … Today, when you lose a customer, you don't lose just that customer, you risk losing that customer's friends. And thanks to the Internet and blogs and consumer rate-and-review services, your customers have lots and lots of friends all around the world.”

The following day the letter was the third most linked-to post in the blogosphere, according to Web search and navigation consultancy Intelliseek, Cincinnati.

The Editor's Weblog reports that Yahoo announced yesterday they will incorporate content from the blogosphere alongside traditional media.

This is a very interesting story, and provides a lot of credence to Blog content online. Although they will clearly differentiate Blog content from mainstream media content, including the ability to read posts from over 10 million weblogs alongside traditional media will provide Yahoo! a clearer insight into how blog content is valued by a surfer, or as they put it:

“who do you trust more; any random blogger sitting in his basement commenting on Iran's nuclear situation, the journalist designated by a large brand-name media company to report on it, or an expert in Middle Eastern nuclear proliferation who happens to have his own blog?”

This is a very interesting turn of events. Due to my unique position as being a part of the world's largest wholesale dedicated domain registrar and heading up the business development arm of the Blogware.com service, it's intriguing how these two industries meet with this move. Dave Winer provides his take here, and Verisign's take is here.

A few years ago Verisign was asked to sell off their retail arm of Network Solutions in order to keep their contract to run the .COM and .NET registries. Basically, they were asked to stay out of the retail side while they remained as the operators of the back end of the Internet. They then tried to monetize domains that expired to a chorus of objections and stopped, then went into ring tones which doesn't conflict with the Internet in general but hasn't really panned out either.

Then there were blogs, and what an attractive lucrative industry to get into, but how would you do that? Sell them? Well that is too retail… so why not leverage your expertise in the operations of running the back end of the Internet to justify the foot into running the back end of the blogosphere? Interesting strategy, and pretty justifiable on the surface although I'm not too sure whether the current players will agree like Google, Technorati, Pubsub, and Yahoo. What I can say is that they do run a great ship over there with the .com and .net registries, so we'll see what they can bring to the table from an operational perspective.

From what I can tell in their post, it looks like they will maintain the white hat that David has worn with weblogs.com to this day so that service will remain free, but based on the hints in their post they may monetize this move by providing services for the ”filtering of spam blogs” out of the ping stream.

They have a great opportunity to prove something here and hopefully how to monetize the back end of the blogosphere will not be the only thing