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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. 

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.

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

The Terms weren't discussed, but it's estimated to be around 25 - 30 Million US. AOL is beefing up their interest in the Blogging industry with this acquisition of Weblogs Inc., which touts some of the top listed blog sites today such as Engadget and acquires more than 30 million visitors a month across the full portfolio. 

Here is an interesting quote:

“Though the audience for blogs is small, their audience is attractive to advertisers since users tend to be educated and have high incomes.”

How can you tap into this potential? Well shoot me an email and I may be able to help.

MSNBC is speculating that Apple may unveil a new ipod for video during their special announcement scheduled for Oct 12th. The BBC also backs this notion while Thinksecret seems to disagree so there are some conflicting reports.

What I can say is if they do unveil any portable device that can subscribe to RSS feeds and play multiple video formats, then they could really revolutionize videocasting as much as they have podcasting.

I know there was allot of hype around pspcasting a few months ago when I posted this article, but after a customer asked me yesterday “Did anything ever happen with that?”… in all honesty and as far as I can tell, nothing really. This may have been due to the way psp's require a proprietary video format to work with their handheld which requires a combination of bittorrent and a special conversion software to work properly so the complexity level wasn't all that user friendly.

If the iPod video is announced, the true explosion will happen if the device supports all video formats, and not just the apple .avi format. We'll see what happens, but with this announcement coinciding with the second annual Quicktime Live! event, I personally don't see allot of hope for cross-platform support.

This is a very interesting press release since it involves some ideas I have been bouncing around as of late.

Bob touched on this topic on his blog a few weeks back…

“All of these ideas and proposals have the same basic “Web 2.0” theme: Make it easier for computers to process the data on the web by publishing that data in formats which are easily parsed and manipulated.”

Instead of figuring out a way to accurately categorize the immense amount of data coming through from the unstructured chaotic blogosphere, why not try and get the publishers and the platforms they use to “pre-structure” it as a standard for all indexing services before it's referenced. Absolutely a brilliant strategy on the part of Pubsub, but one of many that will emerge since there is allot of room to play in this space.

Lately I have been thinking about ways to mine blog content for more relevance and context around queries. Being able to micro-divide content along verticals with a high level of accuracy would lead to a unique positioning in the market and IMHO ultimately create more demand and consumption of blog content by readers which benefits the entire food chain. 

Today, searching blog content allows you the ability to find data based on key words without context. Imagine being able to search not only for keywords, but keywords within reviews of hotels by people who stayed there (not just books or movies) , or further clustering of that search to differentiate between hotels in New York or hotels that have New York in their name. That is a tool I would use, and I know many, many others would too…

For more info on the Open source Structured Blogging initiative take a look here. 

The Ops and Product Management crew were up very late last night and although the maintenance had to be extended a little we did add a first step to prevent comment spam from affecting our customers so overall things were a success.

What's that first step? Well something that will at least limit programmatic attacks which are the most damaging to the system and people's blogs from a cleanup perspective. Word Verification images are that first step, and to see a great example click the comment link on this article and check it out.

With this new defense I now feel much more comfortable turning off authenticated accounts as a requirement for commenting.

 I decided to put up a video of my cat who has learned to use the toilet all by himself in order to highlight the Video capabilities of the 6670 and how to use this with a blog.

Considering the native file format for videos is .3gp which is pretty standard for cell phone video formats, this eliminates the ability to directly post videos to your blog for videocasting on the fly since it's not supported for web applications without a special player.

I found a converter with a quick google search called Zwei-stein that allows you to convert .3gp to both Quicktime and Windows media formats pretty easily. It doesn't have the best UI I have ever seen, but it works. The only problem I experienced so far is that the conversion seems to speed up the video just enough to make the audio sound like a chipmunk which you'll notice in the example above. They have a newer version called ZS4 which I havn't tried yet so I'm hoping this will correct this issue, but either way I'll follow up as I learn more.

I used the instructions on this web page to create the code to embed the video in the HTML above, and attached the video to the post to get it into the RSS feed so this would be considered my first official videocast.  More to come…

AOL has released a very interesting survey where they asked questions of approximately 600 bloggers to find out why they blog.

Number one reason? ”It's Therapeutic” it seems…

I'm not so sure about that. When you look at this previous article you could assume that self help would have been the directive or a huge benefit to the first or second generation of bloggers, but not so sure how therapeutic it would be to share photos of my family, or talk about hobbies and things I do professionally.

Although writing this blog does help me think through things in a little more detail before hitting that POST button, it doesn't help with my personal stress level nor help me figure out the meaning of life.

Either way some great food for thought.

I haven't had a chance to really play with it to any great extent, but it looks typically googlish; simple, understated, yet pretty targeted and results oriented.

Check out the article by the BBC here to learn more.

Some further evidence (Scroll to the third paragraph) that photo sharing is one of the largest in-demand features on the Internet.

Sites which host users' photos have grown more than 400% to 14.7 million users since January, according to a NetRatings report. “The large rise in blogging activity has lifted other sites,” said Jon Gibs, senior research manager. “The primary beneficiary has been image-hosting sites.”

IMHO I would say this is attributed to the fact that most blog providers, especially the free ones, don't have half of the Photo Management features of Blogware or require third party services to host the photos. As you can see by the photo albums I have in my navigation to the left, megapixel photo albums with slideshow capabilities are a real snap to setup with Blogware.  Not to “toot our own horn”, but definitely easier than any other service I have tried and in my job that's most of them

I decided to make a move and upgrade the Motorolla v400 I acquired about a year ago to the new Nokia 6670 smartphone so I may highlight some of the great moblogging features of blogware for customers (True 1.2 megapixel Photos) as well as some of the best native Videocasting support of any hosted service (support for up to 10 minutes of recorded video).

It'll be interesting to see how the speed factor plays out in posting these higher quality images and video files on the go. I'm also very excited about some of the applications usually reserved for the pocket pc market such as video and photo editing, the office suite, and synchronization tools for integration with your desktop calendars and address books .

Either way I'll report on my experiences and start to play around with videoblogging now that I have a mobile tool that inherently supports these features *almost* as well as Blogware does.

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.

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.