Blog Posts About: Weblogs and Business

I slacked on the last couple of presenters so I'm going to try again now.

Halley is talking about all the things that help you get popular:

Story
Truth
Passion
Things of this world- keep it real
Brevity- think about 12 posts instead of 12 paragraphs
Freshness
Voice

Halley talks about Mena Trott and how she is a corporate blogger and highlights entries from Mena's blog from 2001-2005. They start very innocent and then move into the business side of Six Apart.

The first time she heard about Movable Type, she heard it was "beautiful- it is designed by a woman who really knows what she's doing.

Mena's Corner was established as a place to write about her life and the company. This established a "softer" side to the company- which is a contrast to their more professional blog at Six Apart.

Six Apart bought a huge weblog company called Live Journal and the title of her post was "Current Mood: Optimistic"- which is something that is from the Live Journal community.

Halley is making the point that Mena is a model business blogger. She is a person with a personality and voice that shows through.

Stowe asks: Can it be learned? Can good blog writing can be learned?

Halley: It is possible, but hard. It takes practice. Blog writing can be better and studying the masters is a start.

Stowe: My trial by fire was when I needed to write a 16 page newsletter. The first one took a month, then later it became later a day.

Halley: Don't assume that the corporate communications people are going to be good bloggers. What it really takes is someone with passion.

Stowe Boyd on True Voice

He believes its impossible to get across a good story unless you are strongly biased and care deeply about what you tell.

Blogging is a social medium. In his writing- its very much about getting into discussions with really smart people. Corante is a confederation of thought leaders. David Weinberger once said "There are no smart companies, only smart conversations."

Read first, then write. How can we make sense of this blog thing? Often we got brought in, they tried it and it didn't work. They didn't go out and look for the thought leaders or the popular writers on the subjects they wanted to blog- so they failed.

A critical thing that you need to do is know where the lines are and when you need to cross them. He got in an argument with Clay Shirky and Danah Boyd recently that went back and forth and created great content.

To get good, write more and more. Ask for feedback, get out there.

Halley- I'm not worried if its bad- I just put it out there and it works.

Stowe- Ranting about things that really make him angry is what gets the most hits.

Q: Can you go back and rewrite blog posts.

A: If you go back and change your posts to reflect a change in opinion is bad. It's like food- if it hits the floor you have a few seconds before it really gets unclean.

Stowe and Halley both sit down and write a post in one sitting.

Anil encourages people to post the same posts more than once. Put it out there and it will show your readers that you are practicing.

I'm getting encouraged by this talk and the whole conference. I tend to put a magnifying glass on each post (except today). I think I need to be more whimsical and write all the site.

Stowe: It's important to have a sense of humor.

Halley writes her most sexy and dirty posts on Monday mornings because that is what her readers want.

Technorati Tags: StoweBoyd, HalleySuitt, BBS05, leelefever, commoncraft, seattle, blogs

I slacked on the last couple of presenters so I'm going to try again now.

Halley is talking about all the things that help you get popular:

Story
Truth
Passion
Things of this world- keep it real
Brevity- think about 12 posts instead of 12 paragraphs
Freshness
Voice

Halley talks about Mena Trott and how she is a corporate blogger and highlights entries from Mena's blog from 2001-2005. They start very innocent and then move into the business side of Six Apart.

The first time she heard about Movable Type, she heard it was "beautiful- it is designed by a woman who really knows what she's doing.

Mena's Corner was established as a place to write about her life and the company. This established a "softer" side to the company- which is a contrast to their more professional blog at Six Apart.

Six Apart bought a huge weblog company called Live Journal and the title of her post was "Current Mood: Optimistic"- which is something that is from the Live Journal community.

Halley is making the point that Mena is a model business blogger. She is a person with a personality and voice that shows through.

Stowe asks: Can it be learned? Can good blog writing can be learned?

Halley: It is possible, but hard. It takes practice. Blog writing can be better and studying the masters is a start.

Stowe: My trial by fire was when I needed to write a 16 page newsletter. The first one took a month, then later it became later a day.

Halley: Don't assume that the corporate communications people are going to be good bloggers. What it really takes is someone with passion.

Stowe Boyd on True Voice

He believes its impossible to get across a good story unless you are strongly biased and care deeply about what you tell.

Blogging is a social medium. In his writing- its very much about getting into discussions with really smart people. Corante is a confederation of thought leaders. David Weinberger once said "There are no smart companies, only smart conversations."

Read first, then write. How can we make sense of this blog thing? Often we got brought in, they tried it and it didn't work. They didn't go out and look for the thought leaders or the popular writers on the subjects they wanted to blog- so they failed.

A critical thing that you need to do is know where the lines are and when you need to cross them. He got in an argument with Clay Shirky and Danah Boyd recently that went back and forth and created great content.

To get good, write more and more. Ask for feedback, get out there.

Halley- I'm not worried if its bad- I just put it out there and it works.

Stowe- Ranting about things that really make him angry is what gets the most hits.

Q: Can you go back and rewrite blog posts.

A: If you go back and change your posts to reflect a change in opinion is bad. It's like food- if it hits the floor you have a few seconds before it really gets unclean.

Stowe and Halley both sit down and write a post in one sitting.

Anil encourages people to post the same posts more than once. Put it out there and it will show your readers that you are practicing.

I'm getting encouraged by this talk and the whole conference. I tend to put a magnifying glass on each post (except today). I think I need to be more whimsical and write all the site.

Stowe: It's important to have a sense of humor.

Halley writes her most sexy and dirty posts on Monday mornings because that is what her readers want.

Technorati Tags: StoweBoyd, HalleySuitt, BBS05, leelefever, commoncraft, seattle, blogs

Molly.com

Practical aspects of building traffic to your blog.

Is content what really matters? You can have great content, but never be seen or used if you don't put some things in place that help. Blog technology can help.

Have a business plan for your blog- know very specifically what you to do with your blog- who you want to reach, etc.

Choose the best engine for your needs
Brand your site thoroughly
Hire a professional designer
Make sure you can post regularly or your blog will die

the holy trinity:

Comment systems can help build community; blogging technology makes comments easy; beware comment spam; don't enable comments unless you can manage them.

Comments enable sites to have the ability to have an interactive element. "The accidental blogger"- relates to the directions in which comments can take a site.

Trackback

Pings sites and creates a circle of linking love. Trackback links together sites who are talking about one another.

Trackback is something that is done by the technology. It doesn't take a lot of knowledge or manual work to make Trackback- the technology does the work.

Point from Darren Barefoot: I don't use it because it is confusing for most people. It is not simple enough yet. Everyone agrees.

Spammers will figure out how to exploit trackbacks eventually.

See also: Trackback Described in Plain English.

Content Aggregation (Feeds):

A feed is a bit like the "push" model, but are here to stay. Almost all blog software has a built in RSS or Atom feed. All professional and business based blogs should have an RSS feed.

Question from Boris Mann: You talk about "blog software" Isn't blogging just a feature as opposed to something specific? She says: No, most are specific to blogs. I think Boris is alluding to Drupal, which has blogging as a single feature among many.

Quick poll in the room: With RSS feeds, do you use excerpts or full feeds? The crowd responded with more folks voting for full feeds. Either way, it's important to have them.

Use web standards- they can increase the speed of your site and your search results.

Use user friendly URLs. Title your links appropriately. Care for your blog, feed it with yummy content, love your blog and it will love you back.

Technorati Tags: MollyHolschlag, BBS05, BlogBusinessSummit, Seattle

These are just notes....

Marc starts with a little opera for the crowd.

Cluetrain Manifesto- read it it will help you
Honesty and Transparency

Trends:

Blogosphere
Guerilla Marketing
Get rid of internal team

Distributed knowledge:

Open Source
Strategic Consulting
Blogging
Outsourcing

With enough people out there putting out unique messages, real change can happen. With blogs, you can go off and do your own thing. Companies need an agent of change for the corporate message.

Digital Lifestyle Aggregation- the future portals

Humans have jobs. For some reason the people who work in enterprise and business see it as two different things. People have a way of snaeking technology into new situations. LAN in the home is an example.

Chris Pirillo

Goes into his history .. Iowa... Bay Area... Tech TV.... LA...

Figured out that email isn't working.

Chris is the #1 Chris on Google (the announcement garnered applause).

Muvee is about 50bucks takes all the video and trims it down to a time you want it to be. It took 5 minutes. It splices it in a way and with music and styles.

Google Adsense enables monitenization.

Gnomdex will be in Seattle. He will be doing a seminar on making $500 a week on free content.

Amazon affiliate program doesn't work. It's too hard to make money.

He "can make everyone's house payment" from the Lockergnome site via ads, when asked how much he makes.

Ads don't work on sites that have static content- like most company sites.

Marketers and salespeople suck. He gets tired of not being communicated to like he is a human. He will never hire another salesperson again.

Copernic desktop search is the best out there (it may be windows only). Sounds like LookOut to me. Chris linked to it and the CEO emailed him within hours and hooked him up with the developers. Chris sent and email to FireFox people and hooked Copernic to FireFox all in very little time.

It's getting a little rowdy. Canter, Pirillo and Scoble are having a discussion about the effect of blogs on business and the market. The basic point is that the world is changing quickly and it represents a risk for businesses and the ones that will survive will be the ones who prepare now.

Interesting talk. You can tell that Chris is successfu and is proud of his success. Being a fellow Seattleite, I'm going to try to hook up with him sometime.

Technorati Tags: ChrisPirillo, MarcCanter, BBS05, BlogBusinessSummit

OK, so I started a wiki for the Blog Business Summit. I didn't know of another one and it was so easy, I said what the hell?

Blog Business Summit Wiki

It'll be interesting to see what happens with it, if anything...

I'm using Seedwiki.

Robert Scoble is the keynote. His first point is that a blog is just a tool, like a drill.

Dave Winer used Weblogs.com to keep up with blog traffic in the early days and looking for what is hot. 9/11 brought Dave and Scoble and about 30 other people together on IM to see how the blog world was reacting. Weblogs.com was the centerpiece for watching the news happen.

Basically, a blog is a website that has posts in reverse chronological order. These are some of the things that differentiate blogs...

1. Ease of Publishing
2. Discovery- Technorati, Pubsub, etc, allowing a site to be discovered in the mix.
3. Referrer pages - Knowing who is linking to you
4. Permalinks - point to a specific page
5. Syndication

The web browser fell apart once you started trying to read 30-40 sites. With publishing being so easy, the amount of information grew past what the browser could handle.

Watched Howard Dean and these really smart and passionate converged around these blogs. Because of Google, the blogs are building concetrations of passionate people. Blogs are building these concentrations of people around subject matters. The journalists are noticing this now and watching the blogs and comments. When something interesting happens in the blogs, the reporters can go out and push it into the mainstream.

The passionate people concentrated around specific subjects are the engine that creates the buzz and the press. See Engadget.

He gets more traffic and people reading him than some of the major media outlets and for millions less in investment.

Uses Technorati as a way to quantify his success. He can see how many new links he gets over time.

Read 50 blogs for two weeks if you want to get started. If you're interested in quilting, go to Technorati and search for "quilting" and you'll see hundreds of sites. Nascar, Wines, etc. You have to listen to the market via blogs.

If you're a plumber and put your knowledge out there, people will find you and contact you just because you shared your knowledge online.

2 things that make a good blog: passion and authority. You have to get out there and learn and go to the events, make the connections. You can't be an authority from home.

Linking to your competitors is interesting. He learned from working in a camera store in the 80's. He found that if he would be honest about the local camera store market- he would keep the customers. They appreciated the honesty and built trust.

He has to be careful and who he links to (see the "no follow" links). Now he can link to someone who is doing something bad and not give them Google Juice.

The blogosphere has a way of cleaning itself out. There is a constant fact-checking mechanism built into the system so if he links to a hoax site, he learns about it within hours and takes away the links.

To be successful, you need to start a movement. You need to enable multiple people to talk about you and build from there. Let the message travel through connectors.

Apparently you can find naked pictures of Scoble with a "good google image search". As Greg Narain said, that sounds like a bad business search.

Attention overload is the big risk right now. What if I want to watch 3000 feeds?

Break time... Sorry for the half formed sentences- I'm getting used to the real time thing...