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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Siliconbeat reports that Yahoo 360 will now support notifications to their platform by third party blogging services such as Xanga and Livejournal.

“You'll be able to go to LiveJournal, update a post and have your friends and family members notified of the update,''

Based on Paul Brody's statement (Senior Director of Community Products) this is a big move by Yahoo, and quite contradictory to their pretty consistent business approach of being all things to all people. Is this a defensive move because they entered the blogging game a little late? Maybe, but I don't think so…

Over the years I have watched Yahoo grow by adding as much of the internet as possible directly within their portal so they may maintain a firm grip on visitor eyeballs for as long as possible, all the while their competitor Google seems to be leading the search arena by offering as little as possible… how can this be? Two words: Vertical Focus. 

You will provide more value in being the connector or facilitator of specialty providers who focus on a vertical as opposed to trying to re-create everything yourself . Why lock in customers by only supporting proprietary services which will always be sub-standard without a big budget and focus when you can acquire as much if not more profitability by linking specialty providers to your product portfolio directly or by proxy?

You end up with a higher quality product, most times with only half the investment on your part while mainting your own brand by the mere introduction let alone the added benefit of private labeling which the better suppliers will provide. How long does anyone remain on Google's website? Seconds, where they are merely “introducing” you to other websites. Why then is their brand so recognizable without a huge marketing budget behind it? You remember the value they provide by thier focus and innovation in their particular vertical.

This is especially the case when it comes to tertiary non bread-and-butter features, and is one of the main reasons why our customers choose us to outsource services to. We focus, they profit, we maintain, they interact and benefit by establishing and strengthening the relationship with their customers which is key to any long term stability and success. A server that can be turned off and on can be replaced, but the person who helps you do it can't.

The market will favor those who adopt open standards and understand that their position in this marketplace is as a part of a growing ecosystem of applications your customers will use, and the realization of how you can't compete successfully in all of them at the same time unless your model is dedicated to being a wholesale provider yourself.

It seems Yahoo is finally “getting it”.

Bloomberg and Marketwatch report that News Corp. has agreed to acquire Intermix Media for a juicy $580 million in cash. This traditional media company has instantly doubled their on line ad views from 20 million  to over 47 million unique visitors per month with this move, and is in a much better position to capitalize on the expected 15% growth in on line advertising versus the 2% expected in the traditional television market.

If you can't beat 'em, join em!

The biggest jewel in this acquisition is the addition of the myspace.com free blogging service to the portfolio. News Corp. instantly became one of the largest providers of free blog technology on the internet, where if the previous claims of over 18.5 million accounts plus 2 million users monthly are correct, they are taking Google's Blogger, Microsoft's MSN Spaces, and Yahoo's Yahoo360 head on for marketshare.

It'll be interesting to see if there are any more moves by traditional media giants to enter this burgeoning space, as well as what this move will mean for the industry dependent on how aggressive they decide to play in this sandbox we call the blogosphere.

The first whitepaper I have personally come across on podcasting, and a pretty good one from Rodney Rumford of Podblaze on the Business value proposition and how to get started easily.

It covers all of the bases, and although it does mention the podblaze service quite a bit, it's unobtrusive and a well thought out document on communicating why businesses should podcast.

He centers most of his explanations around how Podcasting is a medium that is valuable through the use of RSS, so I find that most of the benefits he outlines can be attributed to normal blogging as well, but overall some really valuable points of interest that include some market data such as:

The large majority of podcasts (over 70%) are currently consumed (listened to) directly on the listeners desktop and don't ever make it to a portable media player such as an Ipod.

That shows that consumers of podcasts are not only Ipod owners, and this medium crosses the boundary of portable devices which indicates a broader spectrum of potential growth and interest.

Currently there are 6000 podcasts being produced. The listener market that consumes these podcasts is currently estimated at over 6 million and growing rapidly.

Although he does indicate that the exact listener demographics are not available at this time, this does go to re-inforce the discussion in the last article where there seems to be no real demographics available. He does cite the PEW report which has already been debunked, the Forrester report that is quite vague, as well as hinted at an IDG Research study that purports even higher numbers, but I have been unable to confirm any of their validity.

One really interesting statement of note is:

You can also create a podcast with some Blogging platforms by doing some custom tweaking (this is fine if you are a hacker). Not all Blogging platforms can or will support podcasting. The other major drawback to this is that you need to be concerned with the reliability of a free Blog (such as Blogger) and its ability to deliver podcasts reliably.

I couldn't agree more, and just so all of you are aware, Blogware fully supports Podcasting, is NOT a free service, and it's as easy as attaching an MP3 file to a regular post in order to have your podcast inserted into your RSS feed. In fact, we are pretty much the only provider that supports up to 5 files (RSS enclosures) per article.

Wired has a piece on the emerging trend of video blogging that is the obvious next step to Podcasting.

Some call it Videocasting, some Vlogging, but no matter your flavor it is the wonderful art of embedding custom video clips into your weblog entries and RSS feeds. The one misnomer I found in the article is the statement:

Olsen also said that vlogging doesn't have any wildly popular device like the iPod to help fuel the vlogging trend — yet.

Chuck Olsen is a Video Blogger that is quoted repeatedly through the article, but IMHO Chuck, I beg to disagree. I know that the Sony PSP is not as wildly popular as the Apple Ipod… yet, but exposure and promotion of Video blogging as an easy medium may change that fact whether it is coined PSPcasting, videopodcasting (Apple Ipod Video?) or something else…

With the current growth rate of Blogging and Podcasting it is only a matter of time before this grows like wildfire too.

Boeing has decided to market their new Connexion in-flight Internet service by taking up a few prominent bloggers on a voyage to demonstrate how blogging is a great way to use the service… Great way of acquiring some viral marketing to promote the new service is more like it, but it does go to show that the big corporations are recognizing the power of viral marketing and how blogs and prominent bloggers are one of the best ways to do so.

It's an important new way to communicate with the public, said Terrance Scott, a spokesman for Connexion by Boeing, the company's aerial Internet service. “We're working with that community to understand how it fits into the news cycle, how it fits into marketing,” he said. Bloggers already are using Connexion during flights to keep in touch with people on the ground, Scott said. “We're seeing a ton of it at 30,000 feet.”

Yes, there's definitely nothing to be afraid of. Well that's what Bob Lutz told Information Week and I totally agree. His comments about the GM Fastlane Blog extol allot of the virtues John and I discussed in the last article I posted about transparency, airing negative comments as well as positive ones, and using it as an honest dialogue with customers.

It's important that we run the bad with the good. We'd take a credibility hit if we posted only rosy compliments, and credibility is the most important attribute a corporate blog can have. Once it's gone, your blog is meaningless.

If you filter the negatives out, you don't have a true dialogue, so how can you hope to change anybody's mind about your products or your business?

Backbone Media just released a White Paper with a Summary on their survey of Corporate Bloggers and the results these blogging companies have experienced for their efforts so far. They even ended up creating a blog that takes these best strategies and helps businesses get up and blogging the right way.

The summary… it works! Blogs are cheap, easy to use, generate tons of traffic and acquires almost instantaneous feedback from customers and prospects. Basically, Blogging for business works….

“Every company is at a different stage in their blogging efforts, some are dipping their toe into blogging and getting good results, in terms of higher search engine rankings and thought leadership, while others have changed their whole product development process to make their company as open and transparent to customers as possible. The benefits of blogging are many, but it seems that to build and achieve the best results using blogs, a company must cross a cultural chasm that turns customers into brand evangelists.”

Transparency, now that is a word that IMHO goes synonymously with Business Blogging, and what John Cass of Backbone Media says in his quote above is correct, you have to be willing to cross a historical line in the sand in order to truly achieve the potential of what a blog can do for your company.

Allowing your customers, critics, and competitors access to view a public forum of communication can be risky if there is the potential for a negative customer experience or a critique to be aired for all to see…. that is if you have that old PR mindset of “CONTROL THE INFORMATION FLOW”!!

What some businesses are catching onto is that having dirty laundry aired in public allows them the ability to also publicly show how they addressed the concern, fixed the issue, and also have the opportunity to express how they will never allow this to happen again. We all make mistakes and your customers know you do too even if you never let them know about it. Doing this publicly allows you to develop a sense of trust with a broad audience that would have taken years to develop individually through a “controlled” information environment.

That is a truly powerful thing and a marketers dream come true… Imagine being able to take every single negative customer experience and turn that into a positive outcome further strengthening your relationship with them and ten others. Before blogging that never would have been possible.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday afternoon is deadline to get into The Feed pilot!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9.5% of Internet users use RSS Readers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, easier than today that's for sure.

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

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

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

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

About a year after the launch of Orkut, according to News.com, Dodgeball the Social Networking service announced with a notice on their Homepage that as of Wednesday this week they were acquired by Google.

From what I see, Dodgeball is like a mobile version of Friendster. Tell them where you are via a mobile device and they’ll tell you who’s nearby, which is a really cool concept. The service takes social networking and integrates an almost GPS sort of functionality which is a pretty obvious next step for these “people connector” sorts of services.

I really havn't played with Orkut or Dodgeball personally, but I can see a pattern emerging after the Yahoo360 launch and now these Googles moves. How long until MSN comes out with more social networking features for Spaces and Messenger? Not long I would assume….