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One of the most unassuming but influential players in Silicon Valley is Matt Mullenweg, the key developer of Wordpress blogging software and owner his associated anti-spam company Automattic. Mullenweg spoke today at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco about new developments at WordPress, most significantly their new relationship with Sphere to create a WordPress feature called "possibly related" which will help readers identify similar content all across the WordPress network of blogs. This will help low traffic blogs hit the radar screen when they right about topics of interest to the broader community, and will also help solve the current problems that are created when major blog players fail to link to other blogs, preferring to keep the precious Google pagerank within their limited networks of sites or those owned by associates or friends. Mullenweg also said Wordpress now has some 168 million users, up from only 2 million just two years ago. WordPress is not generally mentioned in comparisons with Facebook, Myspace, or other major social network players as it should be. Matt Mullenweg and his team are definitely to be watched as they help usher in the new era of blogs and blogger. Josh Lowensohn was there and has more details at WebWare. Labels: Blogs, matt mullenweg, tech blogs, wordpress
Enterprise 2.0 will become a $4.6 billion industry by 2013, according to a report by Forrester Research. The top priority for enterprises will be social media applications and tools and most of the money is expected to flow to social networking tools and mashups.
  Forrester defines Enterprise 2.0 as the corporate version of Web 2.0. Here’s the research firm’s definition: In Forrester’s view, the key hallmark of Web 2.0 is efficiency for end users, and the ultimate goal is to use technology like Ajax, rich Internet applications, blogs, wikis, and social networks to foster productive, advantageous behavior among employees, customers, partners, and other networks such as Social Computing, the Information Workplace, and collective intelligence.
Across the board, Web 2.0 tools enter a crowded space full of legacy software and processes that are difficult to displace and with which Web 2.0 software must integrate to be fully effective. Integration with lightweight applications like email and Excel, as well as heavier applications like Web content management suites, campaign management software, portal software, and customer relationship management (CRM) systems, must all be addressed over time. Labels: Blogs, enterprise 2.0, online services, social media, videos, web 2.0, wikis
A report issued by Society for New Communications Research reveals that many companies are adopting social media as a marketing tool however they are struggling to find effective metrics. The report is based on findings from a survey of 297 advertising, marketing, PR and corporate communications professionals, 57% felt social media tools are becoming more valuable, 27% of whom say that social media is a core element of their communications strategy. The most popular social media tools used were; 1) Blogs - 78% 2) Online Video - 63% 3) Social Networks - 56% 4) Podcasts - 49% Awareness and engagement were cited as the most important criteria for evaluating the effectiveness of the social media in addition to the following: * Enhancement of relationships with key audiences * Enhancement of reputation * Search engine ranking of website * Customer awareness of program * Click-thrus to website * Comments/posts relevant to company or products * Social media coverage * Unique visitors from influencers’ sites Researchers expected social media to be more effective when targeted at younger age groups, with 18-25 being the most likely to be influenced. However, the over-65 age group closely trailed the under-18 and 26-35 age brackets. Labels: Blogs, podcast, social media, social networks, video, wikis
Cisco is facing a lawsuit after an employee - who happend to be in charge of Cisco's Intellectual Property Division - criticized other companies on his personal blog. The companies that came under fire are now suing the company, claiming the employee should have disclosed his Cisco affiliation. Anne at CNET wonders today if a new spate of blog lawsuits may be coming as employees are increasingly given, and taking, the freedom to discuss company issues. My guess is that companies have little to worry about. Several prominent bloggers have been talking about their companies for years with few detrimental effects and many positive ones. Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo has both complimented and criticized Yahoo many times in his long blogging career. Rather than hurting the company this level of transparency arguably helps with credibility and gives readers the kind of "reality check" that official corporate blogs cannot provide. Other prominent personal bloggers who became something of the de-facto company bloggers are Matt Cutts at Google and Jeff Barr of Amazon, though more recently the companies have established their own blogs, Google on a very large number of Google related topics. Corporate blogging advocate Robert Scoble in his book with Shel Israel called "Naked Conversations", argues that companies should encourage personal blogging as well as establish corporate blogs as part of their media strategy to engage with customers on a more personal and more detailed level than simple advertising will provide. I think this is the best advice for the long term, and that lawsuits will be few and far between. Labels: Blogs, cisco, companies, lawsuits, liability
England's popular website for the Guardian newspaper has listed the world's most "powerful" blogs. The article is here.The Guardian's criteria appear to be somewhat suspect given some of the blogs on this odd listing which include in the top 10 blogs Beppe Grillo and icanhascheezburger. Hugely popular LOLcats of icanhascheezburger aside, it's seems very hard to make the case that this blog has a lot of "power". Drudge Report or Daily Kos are a lot more likely to influence or even change the world leadership situation, yet they are far down on this list, and arguably many of the very popular tech blogs, like Scobleizer, influence business and culture quite a bit, albeit somewhat indirectly. The Guardian places the Huffington Post as the most powerful blog in the world with BoingBoing.net as number two and TechCrunch as number three. Labels: Blogs, guardian
Premier Tech news website CNET has a new editor in chief. Dan Farber takes over today, and as a tech journalist *and prominent tech blogger* the choice of Farber is smart for CNET and a sign that blogging sensibilities are playing an important role even in “legacy” media outlets. Of course it is more than a bit inappropriate to consider CNET - a groundbreaking online news network - a legacy media enterprise but in the rocket-paced online world CNET is ... aging fast. Most of us now turn to TechMeme or TechCrunch or other fast paced blog sources before CNET for breaking and insider news. Partly for this reason and partly because CNET can’t leverage internet efficiencies as easily as leaner and meaner sites like TechCrunch, CNETs traffic and profitability has been suffering for some time. Farber’s experience may help to bring more innovative approaches to blogging tech news at CNET, and Dan will recognize how important it is to work to establish a social network that revolves around CNET’s tech coverage. Mike Arrington has done this brilliantly at TechCrunch and it drives their very successful efforts, as has Om Malik at GigaOM. Sites like DailyKos and Huffington report are other examples of new media leveraging social forces very effectively both in terms of content and profitability . In addition to these large sites, many others have built smaller communities around their blogs with more modest levels of success. CNET already has a brand and a large body of quality journalistic experience and tech related content. Let’s see what Dan does with all that, and if he can help turn around a great internet information institution. Labels: Blogs, CNET, world news
 Bill Gates gets to the office as usual.  He gets to work right away.  He takes a break and takes up singing.  Bono, do you need a vocalist?  Would you like a Zune with that?  Jam on! I think Bono will like that chord!  Wow! The fans are going to love this!  He should stick to his day job.  Hey Al, I am great at speeches and blogging.  My campaign can do without long speeches.  How about campaign refinance?  So George - did you like the movie?  The Men in Black.  He gets some acting lessons.  Are you seriously doing this?  He heads to Hollywood. Break a leg! Labels: Bill Gates, Blogs, CES, Microsoft
 Tonight at CES Bill Gates delivered his final CES Keynote (and perhaps final in the industry). The crowd pleasers were a very self-deprecating video where Bill was turned down for jobs by celebrities and notables from Hilary Clinton to Bono to John Stewart, and a Guitar Hero contest where Gates brought in "Slash" -playing live- as his Guitar Hero proxy to win a bet. The key business announcements included a partnership with NBC to deliver video online for *every single sport* at the Olympics - some 3600 hours in total and I think he indicated close to real time. Also impressive was Microsoft’s work with partner “Tellme” and MS mapping to bring powerful voice and map navigation capabilities to the mobile space. They noted that mobile advertising will be some (11 billion?) by 2011, and that although MS feels PCs will remain very important it’s clearly the mobile phone space where a lot of key innovation will be seen. Back at Microsoft's MIX06 I noted that Microsoft had not yet embraced the social media revolution that clearly was going to come to dominate the online experience. I think they have now done so, but they may be too late. The demos of something called “Zune Social” were neat, but I noted the key feature was the ability to integrated with a Facebook profile. I’d argue that Open Social (or some variation on that theme), that is very largely company agnostic, will ultimately prevail. I didn’t get the idea Zune Social would be a big winner over time. (posted from the CES Bloghaus! Thanks Seagate and Podtech!)Labels: Bill Gates, Blogs, CES
Twitter is a popular platform for micro-blogging. Messages exchanged here are more of status updates or related to users' activities rather then anything else. So, Twitter is acting as a platform for friends to stay in touch with each other while presenting the posts in a single place. This can be termed as content creation - that is, content that is created by users to share. Similar content can be said to be generated by users in social networking sites like Facebook since information like feeds and profile information is looked at with interest by friends, etc. This would be different from, for instance, publishing on blogs where people generate and keep content and many earn recognition or money from it. Published content is often intended to be read by third parties while content created in social networks like user profiles, feeds, and status messages are meant to be for the interest of friends or any other person interacting on a personal level. What Twitter has done is diffused the boundary between social interaction and published material leading to the term micro-blogging. One essential feature that is present in blogs and not in content in social networking/interaction sites is user's advertisments. While advertising on blogs is a widespread and prominent feature and, with social networks becoming more engaging with feeds and applications as on Facebook, advertisments have emerged there too. MicroSocialAds is a service which enables users to embed advertisments in their Facebook profile or into IM conversations they are having with friends.  I see some basic problems with this kind of advertising model. Firstly, a friend won't want or like to see advertisements while chatting with another friend. People are already used to chatting on good IMs and for one of the chatters, advertisements are a disruption and nothing more. Secondly, while social networking or micro-blogging, a user has no intention of being interested in any particular kind of content since they come to a social network with different intentions. So, its hard for advertising to be useful for a user in such a scenario which is not in the case of published blogs (read more if interested on Advertising in Social Networks). That is why I think advertisers should expect very low clicks per impressions in these cases. This point coupled with the fact that advertising would be disruptive in such scenarios, make it hard to believe that Micro Social ads would be too successful. Thus, even though lines between published blogs and social interaction have diffused, I think they will still differ in terms of advertising - mainly because while the former is about content, the latter is about interaction. Labels: Advertising, Blogs, social media marketing, social networks
Here is an instance of a news item that couldn't have been made public if not for new media:  This picture is not about Fox or Digg but shows the difference between news sources that are centralized like Fox or old media and others that are decentralized - meaning that they are distributed over the web allowing any person to be a source. Let me first point out the difference between these two. Old media is newspapers or news channels which act as a central source of news to a large number of people. New media is simply media which uses the web as a distribution platform. The web enables anyone to be a source of news. It enables news to automatically reach a large number of people using viral platforms - which function as word to mouth - like Digg, Youtube, Stumbleupon, etc. If a person like me or you gets a hold of an interesting news item, we have a way to reach a large number of people easily. So, what is it that people are essentially doing if they want to read the latest interesting news items? They go to sites like Newsvine, Digg, or Youtube. And content on these sites are contributed by a large number of unrelated people. The other difference is that while old media is essentially an information pipe where there is only one direction for the flow of information from media to us; in new media, news is more of communication. Most of the bloggers go through and respond to comments to their articles, and any reader can be a blogger too where they can post a response. Since anyone can be a source of content, the lines between reader and contributor have blurred too. It is true as the old media supporters point out, that amongst many bloggers there is tendency to "post first, check later" but then as we all know, news channels or papers are not totally neutral or even true. Also, a blogger posting a false blog is never a single source of information. There are many other alternatives that readers can look at. It is no longer a matter of which kind of media is better because with the advent of new media, the need for old media no longer remains. Content on the web is both vast and more engaging than its old media counterparts and this is the main reason that old media has to change its character to survive. Labels: Blogs, digg, Youtube
The Blog Council has come to order. It has been formed, site launched, and first meeting set to convene in January. Per their official description, the Blog Council is a community for official corporate blogs and bloggers that represent major global corporations acting as a strong advocate in support of responsible, ethics-based corporate blogging. Their mission is to create best practices (global corporate blog directory, standardized blog terminology glossary, moderating and responding to comments), community, ROI, and advocacy. Other initiatives include proactive blogger relations, blog policy, blogs as customer service tools, ROI of blogs, creating "brand love" in the blogosphere, managing blogs in multiple languages, dealing with employee personal blogs, and how to engage bloggers to write about a company. Council member companies include AccuQuote, Cisco, Coca-Cola, Dell, Gemstar-TV Guide, General Motors, Kaiser Permanente, Microsoft, Nokia, SAP, Starwood Hotels, and Wells Fargo. I don't see Google on the list, at least not yet, but the Official Google Blog is more popular than all the others' blogs. Neither is Sun on the list whose CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, has a blog. The council is clear to differentiate itself from and as not representing personal, SMB, and professional bloggers. Corporate blogging is the corporate adaption of blogging. And, given that corporations have a corporate and legal reponsibility to protect themselves and shareholders, it seems logical that they would have some rules of engagement around this. But this smells of a corporate stranglehold on an inherently open, unregulated, free speech realm. The Council's own site is a blog but already I don't see how you comment other than email the "Blog Council". I don't know about anyone else, but I don't read any of the member council company blogs; okay, maybe I've looked at a Microsoft Blog before. I guess I might check out some of the others in time to see the fruits of this endeavour. Will all this policy-making help or hinder corporate blogging?! I guess that is yet to be seen but people are mostly skeptical. Robert Scoble writes:"If your company needs help "getting it" then you shouldn’t be hanging out with other companies.... Demonstrates that the industry has a LONG way to go before it understands the real value that seemingly unimportant conversations have." What do you think? Labels: Blogs, cisco, GOOG, Google, Microsoft
 LiveJournal, the online blogging platform owned by Six Apart which also owns Typepad, Moveable Type and Vox, has sold LiveJournal to Russian online media company, SUP, founded in 2006. The financial terms of the sale have not been made public. LiveJournal, which has been in existence since 1999, was started by Brad Fitzpatrick who went on to join Google as its social networking guru. It claims to have 14 million users and 18 million unique visitors a month, the majority of users are 15 to 22 years old and mostly female, and it is open source. The WebGuild featured Ben and Mena Trott, co-founders of SixApart, which acquired LiveJournal in January 2005, as speakers back in April 2004 to talk about blogging and their experiences in starting SixApart. I know that some Harvard classes use LiveJournal mostly because its free (but there is a paid component to it as well) and I wouldn't be surprised if other academia do as well. LiveJournal.com also "supports the OpenID distributed identity system, letting you bring your LiveJournal.com identity to other sites, and letting non-LiveJournal.com users bring their identity here". This is something another free blogging software, Blogger, is also moving towards this with its latest announcement that it is adding OpenID commenting where users can sign in using their LiveJournal identity. Labels: Blogs, GOOG, Google, web 2.0
 The latest feature coming out from Blogger is OpenID commenting. Blogger in draft, the experimental version of the popular blogging platform, Blogger, has just announced that they are now enabling OpenID-based commenting for blogs. OpenID provides users with a single digital identity across mutliple sites eliminating the need for multiple usernames across different websites, simplifying the user experience. Users of OpenID-enabled services such as LiveJournal and WordPress can comment on a blog using their accounts from those sites rather than with a Blogger/Google account. Once released to the larger public, this can be enabled through the "Settings > Comments" in Blogger. Labels: Blogs, GOOG, Google, user experience
For bloggers, Gabe Rivera's TechMeme has become a top technology watering hole, ranking and finding great blog posts and tracking the discussions that form around them. Fred Wilson, a New York Venture Capitalist and great blogger, is lamenting the good old days when he thinks TechMeme had more of the stuff he wants to read - more of the old guard tech bloggers and fewer popular newspaper articles. Unlike Fred, I'm happy with what I see as a diversification of the TechMeme post universe. I've never been comfortable with the idea that the "old guard" does all the best blogging, and TechMeme does a great job of unearthing new voices for me. In general I find I prefer the new fresh voices. I think Fred likes them too, but he's tired of legacy media coverage of tech issues. I agree legacy media often misses the very nuanced tech issues, but they are driving much of the national debate on these issues so I want their take as well as the insiders angle that we get from well-connected or insightful technology bloggers. Thanks to TechMeme I find a lot quickly, and I also have the site doing some of the human filtering for me because I know they won't run lousy blogs. Are people writing specifically to TechMeme to get links there? Sure, but that's just a challenge we get all over media - a sort of echo chamber where all the insiders are talking about the same stuff. That's not TechMeme's problem to fix - the solution for that is more good bloggers which will diversify the conversations even more and get more conversations going. After all, isn't almost all the goodness of blogging about good information and good conversations? Labels: Blogs, tech blogs, TechMeme
 Back in July Whole Foods CEO John Mackey was caught making inflammatory comments about a potential acquisition target and arguing optimistically for his own company under a pseudonym on a financial message board. He later apologized for his actions and slipped quietly back into corporate obscurity, albeit with a lot of egg on his face. This wasn’t the first time we’ve seen social networking like forums or blogging get someone in trouble, and you can bet it won’t be the last. The interesting thing to watch here is how these mistakes are handled afterwards. The Whole Foods example is such a good one because we’re able to see exactly what he did, exactly what the public consequences were, and now, exactly how his company is dealing with it. Whereas most of the attention will continue to be paid to corporate blogging and it’s risks and rewards, not as much attention is given to the fact that the advent of social networking means that all of a company’s employees now have a public identity, and like it or not these people and their opinions will absolutely reflect on the company they work for. In John Mackey’s case, Whole Foods is following what looks like a pretty vanilla “ CYA” plan of protecting themselves from something like this happening again. According to Terrence Russell of Wired, a source close to the matter says, “company executives can no longer post on blogs, message boards, or chat rooms about company matters -- anonymous or otherwise.” Unfortunately for Whole Foods and other companies following the head in the sand strategy, they’re not only fighting a losing battle but it’s a battle they shouldn’t be fighting anyway. In previous posts I’ve mentioned the wisdom of enabling and educating your employees rather than muzzling them but apparently one lesson in risk was enough to set the table at Whole Foods. As I see it there are two big problems with what they’re doing: - As customers continue to provide feedback and suggestions online in forums of their own choosing, employees should be empowered to respond and trained to represent the company responsibly.
- As their employees continue to embrace social networking, Whole Foods has just forfeited the voice of their most passionate advocates in the most efficient and effective communications medium in history
These are not easily quantifiable risks, but potential opportunity costs. These problems wouldn’t result in Whole Foods being susceptible to embarrassment and an SEC investigation like Mackey’s faux pas did, but could very well result in them losing touch with their customers, losing market share to competitors and going out of business in a market where razor thin margins are par for the course. It seems like there ought to be some way to mitigate both sets of risks with a well thought out strategy that empowers employees while mitigating risk. Good thing for us companies like Sun are showing us how. Labels: Blogs, whole foods
Two articles this week suggest how tough it’s becoming to turn a buck in the print media world. Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine and founder of eWeek, notes in “ Whither Mags”, that major print efforts require a huge capital outlay before they can even hope to be profitable, and that the current high risk associated with print publications means we probably won’t see nearly as many new big magazine efforts. Even more ominous for the future of the newspaper industry was the New York Times report showing circulation declines almost across the board for US Newspapers. The NYT Article “ More Readers Trading Newspapers for Websites” has a great graphic showing how circulation has fallen at most newspapers since last year with an average drop of 2.4%. Given the relatively thin profit margins at many papers and the fact many costs are fixed this does not bode well at all for the future of newspapers. The future of news is a far more complex question and I think the answer is not knowable at this time. Blogs are picking up some of the journalistic slack, but I’m not convinced they can pick up all of it. With subscription based news models in decline it is simply not clear that heavily capitalized news efforts can survive - let alone thrive - in the changing news landscape. Labels: Blogs, Newspapers, Online Advertising
 When it comes to Social Media Marketing there are few failure examples to learn from. Mainly because it's so new but also because many failures get quietly swept under the rug. Unfortunately for Wal-Mart, their mistakes are in the limelight but that gives us the opportunity to learn from them. Here are some pitfalls they could have avoided: False Transparency - They got caught red-handed for staging thier blog (Wal-Marting Across America) leaving their readers feeling cheated and lied to. The couple who was RVing across the US turned out to be a PR stunt. Build it and They Will Come Mentality - Last summer Wal-Mart built their own social networking site for teens. Did they really think they could compete head-to-head with MySpace? With more than 3% of their traffic coming from MySpace at that time, why not optimize that relationship and go where the community already exists? Doh! After just 10-weeks the site was taken down... Obsessed with Control - Their recent Facebook campaign is anything but open and genuine. If you're going to leverage a social media platform like Facebook you have to be willing to open the kimono. Instead they decided to keep a lock down on comments and disabled the forum feature leaving visitors irritated and upset.
- They are now threatening their customers from posting Black Friday ad posts. Why would they go to such extremes - they should be rewarding people who want to talk about them - especially since it's not threatening to their business. Reward your customers for having a voice - don't reprimand them.
This realm of Marketing 2.0 is new for all of us and there will certainly be a trial-and-error period but I think these mistakes could have been avoided with a little research and education. I gotta give Wal-Mart credit for not giving up and at least one attempt has worked - reviews and ratings - let's just hope they can handle the negative reviews. It’s clear though that at this point, they’re not getting it. Marketing 2.0 is about enabling conversations and they don’t seem to be interested in that. Quite the opposite in fact. They’re still acting like it’s a different kind of radio. Labels: Blogs, social media marketing, social media marketing examples, Social Networking
 Google has launched a new non-Google branded site called SearchMash which is designed to serve as an experimental testing ground for user interface ideas without the Google brand skewing the objectivity of the results. Here are 14 observations on SearchMash:1. The character count on the SearchMash homepage is even less than the Google.com classic homepage. 2. With SearchMash, there is no search button but there are instructions to 'hit enter to get results' but those directions disappear on the search results page. I always hit 'enter' myself versus clicking the "Google Search" button and I never click "I'm Feeling Lucky". I wonder how many people actually do.  3.The SERP page on SearchMash has a frame for the header which houses the search text field so it doesn't scroll with the page. 4. On SearchMash, you can only search web pages by default whereas Google shows you the options to search for images, videos, news, maps, blogs, etc. but SearchMash automatically gives you results for web, images, blogs, videos, and wikipedia oddly enough. 5. My search for 'flowers' on SearchMash yielded about half the number of results (14,200,000) than on Google (22,600,000). There is no time of how long it took to generate the results, the number of results showing on the page, or definitions. 6. The search results are on the left, and the images, blogs, videos, and wikipedia results are in the right rail along with a feedback survey which doesn't take you off the page. It doesn't seem to save your feedback results on the page if you navigate away to another site and then come back or do another type of search like image/blog/video/wikipedia and and go back to web search. 7. There is no pagination. There are ten results by default, designated by a "..." divider (not sure that's necessary) and when you click a link for 'more web results' or hit the space bar, the page expands downward until, in this case, I hit 100 results (so not sure what happened to my 14,300,000 results) versus paging to more pages as on Google. 8. The results are numbered which is also different from its Google counterpart. 9. The color palette is the same kind of blue and white just a softer blue and no yellow designated 'Sponsored Links' section and no heavy demarcation of section areas. So, if there are any paid links, they are not called out in anyway. 10. The font size is smaller by default (12px), all the text is the same size, the blue is a little brighter and there is no underlining by default for links (not even on mouseover but opting instead for background highlighting). 11. You can click to see images or blogs or video results which then loads in the left channel and web results moves to the top right column and whichever type of result you've clicked on doesn't show up on the right. 12. You can click on 'hide details' in the title bar to collapse the display of web or images results, allowing more results to fit in view. 13. Searches seem ranked the same as on Google. 14. From your SERP, you can also search within a site. So, my search yielded 1800flowers.com as a result, which I could click on to navigate to or search their site for 'flowers'. Cool! It will be interesting to see how this evolves. Labels: Blogs, GOOG, Google, internet, measurement, Search Engine Strategies, Search Tools, SearchMash, websites, wikipedia
HP has just announced that it will be making it easy for you to print your customized content from the web. This is part of HP's Print 2.0 Strategy to offer internet users new and enhanced printing options to control what they print and how they print it. HP has partnered with high traffic sites like Facebook, Flickr, Windows Live Spaces, and Disney.com to offer this improved print capability. HP plans to deliver this via Web 2.0 technologies such as those developed through an acquisition of web-based app, Tabblo, and others. "People are frustrated with printing from the web – it’s often wasteful and rarely do the pages print with the information laid out on the page the way you want," said Vyomesh Joshi, executive vice president, Imaging and Printing Group, HP. On Facebook, users can use a Graffiti widget to draw on or decorate their own and friend's profiles and print their real-world artwork. With Flickr, it's a similar feature. The HP technology will power a blog printing feature on Microsoft Live Spaces. Labels: Blogs, Facebook, online services, Print 2.0, Print 2.0 Flickr, user experience, web 2.0, widgets, Windows Live Spaces
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