Click To Hit

We launched the referral program over at SharedReviews yesterday. It’s pretty basic to start, everyone who signs up and references an existing member earns a free review credit which is worth about $2 each. The person who was listed during the signup receives a great bonus themselves, earning up to 4 review credits ($8) when their referrals achieve certain milestones of approved reviews themselves. Specifically:

* 3 Approved Reviews = 1 review credit
* 10 Approved Reviews = 1 review credit
* 25 Approved Reviews = 1 review credit
* 40 Approved Reviews = 1 review credit

We’ve also launched some buttons that people can use on their site. When someone clicks on any one of them, the sign up page locks the user name of the account that generated the button so make sure you login and get your own button code. Since I don’t want to earn any referral credits for my own account, I figured I would reward our top 3 reviewers by placing their nicknames behind the sample buttons below.

Here’s the Button:

Here’s the Banner:

Here’s the Medium Rectangle:

So I made the arduous decision to switch blogging platforms as you can tell by the shiny new digs. It was a tough decision but one that was coming for a long time. I still love Blogware, it’s a great platform and something I would recommend to anyone starting out or new to the blogosphere, but my requirements have matured over the years and I felt it was time to graduate to something a little more versatile. With a fantastic supporting community, and really cool widgets / plug-ins I can play with, Wordpress is the new platform I tapped for the next iteration of Sales Mindset.

Needless to say I’m still working my way up the WordPress learning curve, and I’ve lost allot of the links built over the years due to some quirkiness in the way Blogware created permalinks, but thanks to Frank (Thanks Frank!) and his wonderful DNS skills, I at least have my feed redirected and all of my permalinks go to the monthly archive for the original posts so you shouldn’t get lost trying to find the right article.

My next step is to look for a good stats package since the one my Hosting Provider gives by default melds all of the domains I have associated in the account. If anyone can share any recommendations on something free I can try, or something that doesn’t cost too much but does a fantastic job, let me know.

Goodbye Blogware, after over 3 years I’m truly going to miss you (sniff)

There’s been a ton of press lately pertaining to big business jumping in on the Social Networking bandwagon. From NBC, to the BBC, and even Proctor & Gamble, everyone seems to want to create their own social network in order to leverage all of that user generated goodness to promote their brand. Although there are huge opportunities to be discovered in how Social Networks can build new revenue streams and strengthen brand loyalty, to me the strategy of trying to create your own mountain is the wrong way to go, let me explain…

Social Networks provide the ability for people to create friend’s lists, nurture a controlled image of oneself, and interact with a community in ways that can become an extremely rewarding and addictive experience. This is obviously a simplistic description of what’s taking place, but when it comes to the net effect social networks have, these features are what I see as the most common denominators driving the success of the top players in the market today. A problem starts to become apparent when you think about the effort versus reward of maintaining your presence in any one of these specific networks. No matter how rewarding emotionally or otherwise, the number that you could reasonably dedicate enough time to garner any viable reward has to be limited unless you don’t need an income and can resign yourself to button mashing as your only contact with the outside world.

If we assume that  you actually have a normal life such that you’re a disposable income generating consumer, only one, two, or maybe a max of three networks will be able to garner enough of your time to make the relationship rewarding. If this is the case, no matter how much you love a brand, product, service, or vertical niche, would you be able to spend enough time to help the community grow if you’re already maintaining profiles and relationships on MySpace, Bebo, or any other of the plentitude of social networking sites that exists today?  Not unless you decided to jump ship, in which case their network better offer something amazing that I've yet to see.

So, if I were a brand manager, would the first thing I do once I realized just how much potential Social Networks have in store be to hire a bunch of developers / marketers and try to build another a-typical Social Network? Or, should I find Social Networks that compliment my brand strategically by leveraging those that have users who match my customer target profile in order to achieve my goals? I'm thinking the latter, and I may be able to show you proof sooner than you think.

Frank provided quite the giggle this afternoon when he forwarded this article from Names At Work. AT&T is spending a half billion dollars on advertising their new blogging service, yet if you do a keyword search for blogging on their website, they return no results and suggest “logging” as the best alternative solution.

If you're going to sell them, you should at least have one or two for your customers to find. It's tough to design and maintain a service without having anyone in your organzition actually use it.

It's great to see initiatives announced to standardize some of the concepts in structured blogging. Although the plugins for wordpress and moveabletype are pretty far from being accessible, easy, or intuitive enough for the masses, it's definitely a great first step and hopefully will get the ball rolling nicely.

“A new era in blogging is upon us. We're expanding the ways we create, share and syndicate content — and we want to make sure that all the emerging standards are inter-operable,” said Salim Ismail, Co-Founder of PubSub Concepts, a leader of the initiative.

I've mentioned may times on this blog that I feel the successes of podcasting and even blogging in general can be directly attributed to the standardization of RSS, and structured blogging IMHO is definitely the next evolution of RSS as a communication medium.

Google, Yahoo,and Marchex have all been making waves by adding Pay Per Call types of advertising to their range of Lead Generation services in the last month. This clearly highlights the value of this new advertising medium that a few smaller players and even AOL have been experimenting with for a while now.

Think about it for a second… a key element in any marketing strategy is to ensure a quick turnaround time on lead generation to get the interested party in front of the purchase while still warm and “excited” about the advertising message. With current Internet Pay - Per advertising available today, this is all left in the hands of the potential buyer.

With Pay Per Click, or even the new Pay Per Unique models dominating the advertising networks, you have a potential buyer who sees a marketing message and is interested enough to click for more information… this is the point any supplier would love to deploy their human marketing / sales  resources to get in front of the potential customer in order to qualify and capitalize on the interest. With the current models of advertising control is lost to the whim of the potential purchaser allowing the opportunity for doubt to creep into their buy decision due to a potential objection that may not even exist thereby risking the sale. That type of scenario always negatively affects conversion numbers.

Imagine if you could immediately initiate a conversation with the potential customer the moment they clicked that link and you now start to see the potential of this advertising model and why the big boys are all clamoring to get into the mix. Add to this the benefits provided to local SME's who can geotarget the ads and you see a whole new market emerging for Internet Advertising since brick and mortar's have traditionally shied away from anything online. They prefer to use the yellow pages where the majority of leads are, yes you guessed it, funneled through the telephone.

The interesting new twist on this application is Google's entry with a service that's rumored to connect the seller and the buyer without exchanging any numbers or personal information. This is clearly a differentiator for users who are scared they'll be added to telemarketing lists or have their privacy compromised that may generate even more results compared to the competition in this privacy conscious environment the Internet has become.

In Google's case, a phone icon has begun to appear with some ads; after clicking on it, users can enter their phone number. Google then generates a call between the user and the advertiser, according to a frequently asked questions (FAQ) page detailing aspects of the pilot program on Google's Web site.

The call is free to the Google users.

It'll be interesting to see what happens in the near future as the market reacts to this model. My predictions are Pay Per Click will be relegated to the back burner as Pay Per Impression has and there'll be many new positions for inside sales reps and customer service agents to fill their time and pocket books.

One thing about Tucows is that we don't generate press like a lot of the players in our space so we sometimes end up appearing out of the shadows when an article's written about us. Being primarily wholesale focused is one of the reasons and favoring cows over beautiful scantily clad women in our advertising is probably the other. Either way there've been a couple of stories the last few days I thought I'd share, and although unrelated both contain very important messages I feel everyone should be aware of.

The first is an article written by our very own Ross Rader who's Tucows Director of Research & Innovation as well as a very active participant in the ICANN policy space. I won't even comment on the article since I want everyone to go and read it directly, but other than Kudos on an absolutely brilliant piece that eloquently articulates concerns regarding the ICANN - Verisign .COM Registry relationship that everyone should be paying great attention to, I'll have to ask Ross where they found that picture since it definitely doesn't do him any justice

The second article is one on Tucows in the National Post today that covers everything from the high profile addition of Mark Cuban as an investor, analyst reviews, the fact we started trading on the TSX, and even comments on our offerings including one service in particular that for some pretty obvious reasons I hold a little more dear than some of the rest.. 

… is bullish about the company's prospects because of its blogging service called Blogware.

“Blogging has taken the world by storm but the big challenge from a business perspective is how you make money off it,” Mr. Shore said.

“We think Tucows might have come up with a way to make money from the growth of blogs by providing blog capabilities to service provider partners who bundle it or sell it to customers. To participate in one of the top three hot trends in the Internet and make money off it is a good thing.”

I've been hearing a lot of feedback lately that people don't know how to make money out of blogging yet. I may be way too entrenched in the industry but I don't necessarily understand where the disconnect is… that's like someone saying they don't know how to make money out of Web Hosting. Like the hosting industry of days gone by, there'll be a surge of free to fee Blog users as market demand matures so the opportunity to capitalize on this vertical as a fee based recurring revenue service is tremendous and should be the first model to consider when wanting to get into this space.

Although this trend has already manifested itself in the public growth of some of the fee based players out there, I feel that our retail partners are in an amazing position to take advantage of this surge through the relationships they've developed with their customers from their core offerings. The relationships we've built with them (Our wholesale customers) is a testament to the success and viability of what I feel is one of the most powerful distribution models online, and one that definitely benefits all of our services let alone Blogware alone.

Elliot Noss, CEO, says his company doesn't get enough credit for being the world's fourth-largest Web site domain name registrar.

Although I feel the same could be said around every service we offer today, the proof's in the pudding and like any sleeper hit I'm sure that recognition will eventually manifest all on its own.

Although an athlete rarely receives any notoriety for coming in third or fourth place in the 100 meter, they will if they also appear in the top four of the 400 meter, 1000 meter, Long Jump, High Jump, Pole Vault, Decathlon, Marathon, Discuss, Heptathlon, Javelin…

Now this is some really cool stuff.. kudos guys.

Forget shuffleboard, needlepoint and bingo. Web logs, more often the domain of alienated adolescents and home to screeds by middle-aged pundits, are gaining a foothold as a new leisure-time option for senior citizens.
 
    There’s Dad’s Tomato Garden Journal, Dogwalk Musings, and, of course, the Oldest Living Blogger.
 
    “It’s too easy to sit in your own cave and let the world go by, eh?” said Ray Sutton, the 73-year-old Oldest Living Blogger and a retired electrician who lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. “It keeps the old head working a little bit so you’re not just sitting there gawking at TV.”

This touches on something I discussed in a previous post I made about how blogs are valuable to every demographic and how it's more of a communication medium, and not just a website or journal. There are as many uses for a blog as there are people who understand their value as a communication tool.

If a teenager is using email less than any other demographic due to it being too cumbersome and ineffective, then why wouldn't those same benefits apply to older demographics that have an even harder time dealing with the more complex and cumbersome aspects of technology and the Internet?

   Bloggers say their hobby keeps them up on current events, lets them befriend strangers around the globe and gives them a voice in a society often deaf to the wisdom of the elderly.
 
    “It brings out the best in me,” said Boston-area blogger Millie Garfield, 80, who writes My Mom’s Blog with occasional help from her son, Steve Garfield, a digital video producer. “My life would be dull without it.”

Blogging can bring family much closer together, and it may be the first “new technology” your Gram will be able to even somewhat effectively use.

Mari Meehan, 64, of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, has been blogging since July. It’s given her a voice in her small resort town where, as a relative newcomer, she felt rebuffed in her efforts to get involved.
 
    Inspired by other local bloggers she’d found on The Spokesman-Review (Spokane, Wash.) newspaper’s Web site, Meehan discovered it was easy to get started.
 
    “If you can read, you can do it,” she said. She titled her blog Dogwalk Musings and based it on the premise that she would write about her thoughts during morning walks with her St. Bernard, Bacchus. Her posts range from nature sightings of a kildeer’s nest with four eggs to rants about local and national politics.

It's super easy, and rewarding. If anyone has the time and something to say it's the senior citizens of the world. If your kids are doing it as well as your parents… why wouldn't you? The growth in this demographic is a clear sign of the potential penetration of these tools across all of them.

Three percent of online U.S. seniors have created a blog and 17 percent have read someone else’s blog, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Compare that to online 18- to 29-year-olds: Thirteen percent have created blogs and 32 percent have read someone else’s blog, according to Pew.

PubSub, a search tool for tracking what people are saying about the topics they care about, has announced an agreement with Cymfony, a provider of automated media analysis and marketing intelligence solutions…

…Cymfony will license PubSub's prospective search subscription services for use in Cymfony Orchestra, a market intelligence dashboard application that monitors and analyzes mainstream media (MSM) and consumer-generated media (CGM) under one converged Web-based service platform.

Would anyone like a little Blogpulse with their Pubub? Interesting move, and definitely a winner for Cymfony.

I wonder if this will be a trend for Pubsub where their application will be available for private labeling to anyone. It would be interesting to see what other applications their prospective search could be plugged into.

According to the fifth annual 2005 PRWeek/Burson-Marsteller CEO Survey  about 7% of CEO's surveyed are actually blogging, and only 18% are planning to host a company blog in the next two years.

“Even though there is greater awareness of the power of blogs today, CEOs may feel that employees expect them to be spending their time running the business, meeting customers driving growth.”

Efficiency is the key word here. As an employee, I “feel” that CEO's should be spending their time running the business, meeting customers, and using an effective communications strategy to engage in conversations both internally and externally around the values and benefits of the corporation. A blog can potentially help streamline, account, provide relevance, and add transparency into these efforts significantly compounding results. 

…they are spending more time communicating “face-to-face” with employees with most saying they spend more than 41 percent of their time in this regard.

A CEO is only one person, and no matter how much of a Superstar they are (And I definitely consider Eliott to be one of them), they have “time and effect” constraints especially when employees can number in the hundreds or thousands. Giving them a blog provides the ability to have this same one to one conversation through a one to many medium, which should increase how many employees feel the net effect of having met with the CEO face to face no matter how much time that CEO has to do it.

“The CEO is the company's public face for many audiences, including Wall Street, the media, shareholders, and their own employees. Effective and consistent CEO communication builds credibility and strategic alignment with internal and external audiences,” said Julia Hood, PRWeek's editor-in-chief. “The real challenge for CEOs today is balancing the demand from stakeholders for responsive and timely communications.”

This is a very complicated environment to work in and each CEO will have to make their own call if the risks outweigh the rewards.  What I do know is that a Blog is a communication tool, and if used wisely will significantly increase results with your strategies both internally and externally.

It would take some pretty hard arguments to convince me to say no to that.

For the first time in my role as Biz-Dev for Blogware, these numbers truly surprised me even with the phenomenal growth in the market that we've all been watching for some time now. The Key findings from their executive summary say it all…

…89% of respondents are either blogging now or are planning to blog.

This was the sticker shocker for me, I assumed maybe 40% which would've been a significant success in my books compared to personal blogging that has fewer risks associated and therefore should have a much higher growth rate. When looking at the methodology for the survey it was open to the public and required opt-in with only 140 respondents, but it was pretty respectable in it's coverage of individual roles within organizations, business types, and the way it was marketed.

…More than 50% of respondents have launched one or more blogs in the last year. Less than 10% have been using blogs for more than 3 years.

This one wasn't so surprising. You would more than likely find similar ratios if surveying individual blog publishers. When I first took on this role about a year and a half ago, there were a little over 2 million blogs being tracked by technorati where today they're tracking over 20 million.

Adoption is being driven by specific business benefits from both internal (improved internal communications - 77.4%) and external (improved brand recognition - 78%) facing deployments.

Although as I discussed in my last article, the easiest way around an objection regarding risk is to get a company started with intranet blogging, external blogging has it's own risks and rewards that are definitely worth the effort to small businesses and even the largest ones. You can go ahead and ask Microsoft who is one of the biggest. Sun is also widely known to have thousands of public employee blogs.

They then lead into a lot of valuable information about utilization by number of employees and revenue showing that smaller business are willing to dive in sooner and take risks which makes sense. The real value for me came when looking at the data demonstrating how blogs are being used in both internal as well as external capacities and how.

The big winner for internal applications is communication. The uses listed by the respondents with percentages are:

-    Knowledge-sharing (63%)

-    Internal Communications (44%)

-    Project Management (30%)

-    Personal Knowledge Management (23%)

-    Event Logging (23%)

-    Team Management (20%)

The key benefits they enjoyed were cited as:

Improved Internal Communications (77%)

Replacement of Other Work Processes (41%)

Replacement of Email (39%)

External Blogging is a little clearer, where the primary benefits involve marketing and PR. The primary uses listed are:

-    PR/Marketing (61%)

-    Demonstration of Thought Leadership (61%)

The major benefits listed for these uses were:

Brand Recognition (78%)

External Communication (78%)

Vehicle for Customer Feedback (66%)

Improved Search Engine Ranking / Traffic (58%)

Generating Income (20%)

Well there you have it, this level of detail is difficult to refute and definitely invaluable when designing your marketing campaigns in this space.

Here's an interesting one to consider…

In other words, 9 per cent of a worker’s contracted time in a small business or company will be devoted to reading the online musings of unknown, established and personally known Web writers.

Hey, didn't someone say the same thing about a crazy medium called the Internet a few years back? How it will distract your work force into “surfing their productivity away” that caused managers and business owners to scramble?

IMHO, it “distracted” the work force so tremendously that it's changed all of our professional lives completely and increased productivity a million times across almost all spectrums of work related actvity.

So yes, be very afraid, blogging has that same potential to be just as revolutionary.

Happy Halloween!

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 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.

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.