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Monday, May 30, 2005

For and against Blogs for businesses

Micro Persuasion: Writer Says Businesses Should Avoid Blogs Steve Rubel blogs about Why smart companies don't use corporate weblogs : "according to AlwaysOn writer Jesse Tayler, 'because they simply do not return extra value or information from the investment.'

He asks her for proofs to back up her assertions and offers the counter example Microsoft's success with corporate blogs.

Google

Friday, May 27, 2005

Yahoo! Tests PhotoMail,

Yahoo! Tests the Power of 300: "has released a beta version of an email photo-sharing product called PhotoMail, allowing people to insert up to 300 pictures into the body of an electronic message.

The PhotoMail feature allows the sender to drag-and-drop images from anywhere stored on their computer or Yahoo! Photos or the Web and insert them as thumbnail previews into a Yahoo! Mail message. All of this means that even if you haven't snapped 300 photos in your entire life, you can still collect plenty of pictures to send at once. Users can add captions and borders to the pictures, and the size and quality can be adjusted.

The Sunnyvale, Calif., online services provider said the new photo-mailing feature will minimize the amount of worry about exceeding message or attachment size limits.

In addition, Yahoo! Mail is adding six additional languages and new localized sites. It is also adding a new customizable "In the News" feature to the welcome page for its U.S. users.

Shares of Yahoo! were up 72 cents, or 2%, to $36.99."

Google

Women Lead Surge in Online Shopping

Women Lead Surge in Online Shopping: "a new study released by shop.org and Forrester Research Inc.... stated that online shopping by women is expected to show a surge in growth this year, with more women heading online to both research and make purchases. The increase will mark a steady trend of women leading the way in online shopping. Data released by BizRate earlier this year stated that 62% of online purchases were made by women in the fourth quarter of 2004. That number is up from 60% of purchases in 2002 and 55% in 2003.

According to Shop.org, online retailers will see a 33% increase in cosmetics, fragrances, jewelry and luxury goods. Online sales of flowers, cards and gifts are also expected to rise by 30%. "

Google

Thursday, May 26, 2005

Be A More Productive Blogger

www.to-done.com As well as "tips on being a productive blogger " this site has useful links to tools for thinkers and writers of every ilk.

Google

11 Ways to Improve Landing Pages

Digital Web Magazine
Article provides a concise overview of how to improve landing pages to increase conversion of traffic to sales.

Quote: "You’re about to launch a big online marketing campaign complete with media buys, search engine placement, banner ads and blog buzz. You’ve tested your creative and your clickthrough rate is strong. You know once you go live, tons of targeted traffic will be hitting your site.

Time to sit back and relax, right? Not quite yet...Conversion’s the Word"

...typical conversion rates are extremely low. Here are some rates from Fireclick Index Vertical Conversion Rate (%)
Catalog 6.1
Specialty stores 3.9
Fashion/apparel 2.2
Travel 2.1
Home and furnishing 2.0
Sport/outdoors 1.4
Electronics 1.1
All verticals 2.3

Conclusion: The Case of the Cookie Maker
Tweaking your landing page is the most cost-effective way to improve your conversion rate. Increasing your total conversions by just 1% translates to 50% improvement in your conversion rate (based on 2% original rate). To get the same results you would have to increase your advertising budget by 50%."


Google

Monday, May 23, 2005

BBC investigate: How Microsoft plans to beat its rivals

BBC NEWS: "How Microsoft plans to beat its rivals: Analysis
By Tim Weber Business editor, BBC News website.

First battle: Sort out security
Second battle: Get into the living room
Third battle: Get them young
Fourth battle: Go mobile
Fifth battle: Serious software..Linux...If they get serious, the balance of power could shift quickly.
Sixth battle: Open source
The final push: Convergence

The majority of the worlds population are poor, Linux is free, Microsoft is history!

Philip Werner, Australia
Without Microsoft it still would be a world of IBM and Oracle and that would be a lot more expensive world

Alex, Greece


Your views on Microsoft's future
It is competition - from Apple to Linux - that has forced Microsoft to raise its game and sharpen its vision of the future.

As Bill Gates tells it, we are set for a wonderful life where software is user-centric and your digital world accompanies you wherever you go - in the office, at home and on the road.

Mr Gates calls it "convergence", and says: "We need someone who creates an architecture, need someone who puts that into a framework."

Soon, he implies, soon Microsoft could be everywhere."

Part time: assault on software giant Microsoft

Google

Friday, May 20, 2005

Bloglines CEO promises top blog search by summer

businessweek Stephen Baker reports and links to his interview notes about: "The CEO of Bloglines (now a division of AskJeeves) says that his company will release a blog search engine this summer which will surpass the likes of Technorati, Feedster, and PubSub. 'The challenge,' he says, 'is to create world-class blog search, which we don't think exists now.'"

Google

EMarketer Predicts Greying Of The Internet

MediaPost by Gavin O'Malley

"TWO-THIRDS OF ADULTS AGES 50 to 64 use the Internet, and as they age, will significantly alter the digital landscape, according to an eMarketer report released Thursday.

'As boomers age, they will force change upon the companies that do business online, just as they have changed other industries at earlier stages of their lives,' wrote eMarketer Senior Analyst and report author Debra Aho Williamson. 'While today's seniors are a cautious bunch online, the next generation of seniors is not ... They use the Internet at home and at work, and they will carry those usage patterns over into the next phase of their lives.'...

The older the Internet user, the more willing they are on average to click on sponsored links, eMarketer reported. For those age 19 and younger, there is a 50/50 chance that they'll click through on links that seem relevant; 69 percent of 30- to-39-year-olds said they would click through; 80 percent of those ages 50 to 59; and just over 90 percent of those age 60 and older said they'd click on a sponsored link if they thought it was relevant."

Google

Monday, May 16, 2005

In Search of E-Commerce | Introduction

In Search of E-Commerce | Introduction: Report investigates the experience of "shopping on the sites of seven e-commerce leaders:

Apple, at http://store.apple.com
Dell, at http://www.dell.com
Amazon.com, at http://www.amazon.com
Barnes & Noble, at http://www.barnesandnoble.com
America Online, at keyword Shopping on AOL
Microsoft Expedia, at http://www.expedia.com
CDnow, at http://www.cdnow.com

They found that: "Each of the seven sites, as we expected, had strengths in its design. But what surprised us was that each one had glaring weaknesses that undoubtedly cost the company a great deal of money and customers, every hour of every day. Despite the millions and millions of dollars spent in creating them, all of these e-commerce sites had major flaws. Each site placed obstacles directly in the customer's path, in some cases making it impossible for us to complete a sale without a Herculean effort on our part.

To identify the strengths and weaknesses of each site, we simply took the position of a customer. We went through the buying process on each site and asked the simple question: What on this site makes us want to do something other than buy?"

The Expedia test was to buy a round-trip plane ticket from New York to Seattle.

They initially failed Expedia’s home page on four points:

"1) Nearly the entire page is implemented in graphics, guaranteeing that the first experience customers have with Expedia will be a slow one.
2) A frame at the bottom of the page advertises a separate Microsoft site. The frame substantially slows the loading of the home page, and the advertisement distracts from the focus of Expedia.
3) The page is wider than our display (a standard 640 x 480 monitor), which forced us to scroll to the right to see some parts of the page. There’s no excuse for this.
4) The most prominent element on the page is a graphic about trains. Is this really the most important thing Expedia can say about its brand to first-time visitors?

Conclude: It’s impossible to overstate the importance of a fast and focused home page....

Post registration comments include:

"Travel Agent mainly lets customers do three things:
buy a plane ticket
make a hotel reservation
rent a car
Then why doesn’t Travel Agent just come out and say it? Instead of offering customers a link such as “Buy a plane ticket,” Expedia displays a link labeled “Flight Wizard.” Flight Wizard. What customer in her right mind knows what a “flight wizard” is? Or a “hotel wizard”? Or a “car wizard”: Is that a magician who fixes broken-down rental cars?

Yes, Expedia has instructions that explain the meaning of the terms. But if you need instructions to explain your jargon, there’s something seriously wrong....

What to Learn From Microsoft Expedia
The home page is your only chance to make the critical first impression on the customer, so make sure it’s fast and focused.
Advertising, especially in separate frames, does not speed the buying process.
Don’t use jargon. To serve the customer, don’t use words the customer doesn’t know.
Don’t name a button “Cancel” unless you mean it.
Always copy-edit your content, especially if there’s only one sentence on the page.
Make it easy for the customer to buy.
Expedia, Eight Months Later
Of all seven sites, Expedia underwent the greatest change since the report was first released. The home page is now radically faster and easier to use: booking paths are presented front and center, and text is used heavily instead of large print-style graphics

Google

Saturday, May 14, 2005

Let the Blog Bashing Begin

Following yesterdays post about Businesses being hesitant to blog at Micro Persuasion: Steve Rubel blogs about the predicted anti-blog sentiments now starting to be voiced by the (threatened) mainstream media.

Rubel concludes that: "What eMarketer totally neglected to talk about, however, is what the opportunity is for the companies that do decide to be brave and take the plunge. For example...

Significant competitive advantage -you could become the loudest voice in a channel where your competitors are absent
Press and consumers read blogs - either willingly (RSS/bookmarks) or unwillingly (Google); like it or not they influence purchases
Blogging aint going away. The conversation is going to go on without you. Be there or be square
Blogs are a cost-effective marketing tool that helps smaller and mid-sized companies generate more attention. Just look at Stonyfield Farms."

He advises: "Take this report with a grain of salt. With every major revolution, there are believers and there are doubters. Read everything you can get your hands on and form your own conclusion based on what your company is comfortable with. Just be sure to consider the pros and the cons."

I maintain that blogs are one of the most important weapons for challengers.

It is irrelevent to the influence of blogs that most U.S. Internet users don't know what a blog is, most Corporations do and the smell of fear is overwhelming, go exploit it.

Google

Friday, May 13, 2005

Businesses hesitant to blog

MediaPost Publications Wendy Davis writes : "BUSINESSES STILL HESITATE TO SET up blogs, according to a report released Thursday by research firm eMarketer. Just 4 percent of large U.S. corporations have blogs available to the public, according to an informal eMarketer survey, and an even smaller proportion of smaller businesses are believed to have blogs.

The report, 'The Business of Blogging,' advises small businesses that a blog 'can be a remarkably efficient advertising tool,' but cautions that failing to keep posts current can signal a downturn in business. 'A moribund blog could suggest a moribund business,' warns the report."

Google

Intelliseek's BlogPulse

Intelliseek's BlogPulse: "BlogPulse is an automated trend discovery system for blogs. Blogs, a term that is short for weblogs, represent the fastest-growing medium of personal publishing and the newest method of individual expression and opinion on the Internet. BlogPulse applies machine-learning and natural-language processing techniques to discover trends in the highly dynamic world of blogs. BlogPulse is brought to you by Intelliseek...

BlogPulse.com features the following:

A Search Engine for blogs
A set of Analysis tools that are applied to blog content daily
A fun look at real-world Trends as reflected through blogs
A Showcase, which we think of as a virtual sandbox where our researchers bring you some of the coolest new ideas, tools and gadgets for blogging

If you are a blogger …

You can ensure that your blog is represented in our index
Try our search engine to see who is talking about topics of interest to you
Find out who links to your blog actively through other bloggers' own blog entries, and in what context
Analysis and Trends tools to see what’s current or "bursty" (meaning it bursts onto the discussion scene) in the blogging world on any given day"

Google

Blogger Knowledge: Holiday Traffic:

promoting your blog with AdWords.
: "Biz Stone works at Google on Blogger and writes books about blogging"

His profile reads: "Who Let the Blogs Out? and Blogging. He helped start Xanga, and is currently in the employ of Google Inc. Biz lives inside the internet and they don't let him out much."

With links from blogger HP I wonder how much traffic of his traffic is from there and how much from adwords?

Google

Silicon Valley Abuzz Over Epinions Lawsuit

Silicon Valley Abuzz Over Epinions Lawsuit: "An unusual lawsuit filed against several prominent venture capitalists is ruffling feathers in clubby Silicon Valley, where most financial disputes between investors and entrepreneurs are worked out in private.

The suit was brought by three co-founders and 45 former employees and contractors of Epinions Inc., who claim they were cheated out of their share of a more than $200 million payoff when their once failing dot-com startup merged with another company called DealTime Ltd. and went public.

The renamed company, Shopping.com Ltd., continues to trade with a $395 million market capitalization. It also is named in the suit.

The venture capitalists in the dispute - Benchmark Capital, August Capital and BV Capital Management LLC - reject allegations they misled the former employees to convince them to give up their Epinions shares. They also say they didn't distribute false information or withhold news of a crucial deal with Google Inc., as the suit claims. "

Google

Wednesday, May 11, 2005

Blog from the Gut of Your Company

Micro Persuasion Steve Rubel makes the point that the best blogs avoid corporate speak and have unique voice and POV:

"Often the most interesting corporate blogs are the ones that are written by the rank and file. They come from the passionate 'gut' of the company, not necessarily from the top...

The maverick CEOs - Mark Cuban, Bob Liodice, Alan Meckler and Bob Lutz - they all blog from the gut. They're naturals. Not every exec is a natural, but there's always someone in the rank in file who is. The moral of the story is, find someone who will blog from the gut whether they are at the top of the corporate food chain or the bottom."

Google

Tuesday, May 10, 2005

ThirdWay Advertising Blog

ThirdWay Advertising Blog Aging of ex-brand managers blog critques of big ad campaigns...structure posts as:

What works
What doesnt
Branding bottom line

Example: re Brand: GoDaddy.com TV ad....
"Branding Bottom Line -
Sex sells but just like the real thing it doesn't last very long ..."

Will this blog?

Google

fantomaster links to search news news blogs -

Resources 1: cloaking, ip delivery,search engine optimization,link popularity,keywords,search terms - 2005-05-10: "Recommended Resources" update to new blog address requested today....

Google

Monday, May 09, 2005

Firms line up to rocket into the blogosphere

Sunday Times - Times Online: "IMAGINE the internet as a large, cacophonous pub 10 minutes from closing time. There are a thousand different conversations in progress. Many consist of little more than childish nonsense. Many are conducted in shrill and angry voices.

But some of those present are expressing strong and heartfelt opinions. Some of them will act on them tomorrow. And some of them are your customers. This, very roughly, is the Blogosphere - Wikipedia, the fast-growing part of the internet made up of web logs the online diaries known as blogs...

...Nick Denton, former Financial Times journalist turned internet entrepreneur, regards blogs as a way of cheaply producing magazines for niche audiences. His firm, Gawker Media, produces some of the best-read blogs on the internet, including Gawker on Manhattan gossip and Gizmodo on gadgets. Others, including Market Sentinel and Infonic, are creating a business by advising large companies on how to make sense of the blogosphere.

Roy Lipski of Infonic, which advises Unilever, said: “Our business is to help corporates understand the shifting landscape of opinions. What do people think about their business, their brands, their reputation? Companies in sectors where public opinion can have a dramatic effect will be taking this very seriously.”"

Google

Thursday, May 05, 2005

There is an easy way to make money on the Internet

Internet Daily: Al : "Sell T-shirts. Bloggers, artists, and entrepreneurs are unexpectedly finding that T-shirt sales are more reliable money makers than the original ideas that brought them to the Web, The Wall Street Journal reported."

Google

Wednesday, May 04, 2005

The Future of Databases

Slashdot: "gManZboy writes 'Ever wonder where database technology is going? This is something that Turing award winner Jim Gray from Microsoft has given a lot of thought to. He recently published an article in which he looks at the many forces pushing database technologies forward, and what those new technologies will look like. Gray writes, 'the greatest of these [research challenges] will have to do with the unification of approximate and exact reasoning. Most of us come from the exact-reasoning world -- but most of our clients are now asking questions that require approximate or probabilistic answers.'"

The Man....Jim Gray, Microsoft Research Home Page: "Jim is part of Microsoft's research group. His primary research interests are in databases and transaction processing systems. His current work focuses on building supercomputers with commodity components, thereby reducing the cost of storage, processing, and networking by factors of 10x to 1000x over low-volume solutions. This includes work on building fast networks, on building huge web servers with CyberBricks, and building very inexpensive and very high-performance storage servers."

Google

Forrester report 64% of advertisers willing to spend for ads on blogs

Barnako.com: Holy Smokes! Frank Barnako blogs : "Almost two out of three advertisers want to spend money on blogs!

A report from Forrester Research says new channels will draw 'interest and spending from marketers,' with 64 percent of the surveyed advertisers saying they are interested in spending money on blogs, and 57 percent thru RSS."

Google

Tuesday, May 03, 2005

Traditional media eying blogs to boost revenues

Yahoo! News: "Traditional media such as newspapers and radios are casting an increasingly covetous eye over the growing number of Internet blogs, hoping to cash in on a slice of the action. With daily newspaper circulation in decline, the highly critical and at-times irreverent world of the personal online journal with its potential to attract millions of readers is looking more and more attractive."

Google

Tagging: the next, next big thing

'Tags' Ease Sifting of Digital Data - Yahoo! News: "Tagging has the potential to change how we keep track of and discover things digital � even whom we meet online. Several startups are banking their futures on it...

Though many Web sites have long embedded search keywords, or metadata, tagging has a social component that gives it its power..."

"Tagging is something selfishly useful. It helps you understand and categorize something for yourself," Technorati founder David Sifry said. "But I can take advantage of the fact that you and hundreds and thousands of people have also tagged the things" for themselves.

Tagging is fundamentally about tapping the collective human wisdom, rather than relying on a computer algorithm, for search, said Ben Shneiderman, who teaches human-computer interaction at the University of Maryland.....

Examples: ...Entire communities have formed around tagging.Nearly 2,000 Flickr users are part of a "squared circle" group, all sharing a desire to crop into squares photographs of circular objects. Other users tag satellite images of their childhood neighborhood "memorymaps" and annotate them with stories about growing up.

At 43 Things, where visitors list their goals, those inspired by the book "Getting Things Done" have tagged their goals "GTD." The tag helps users find what like-minded people want to accomplish and perhaps adopt those goals, too.

Conference-goers are frequent taggers. Organizers of a blogging conference in Paris last week encouraged participants to tag their entries "lesblogs." Italian blogger Luca Lizzeri did just that and got hundreds of additional visitors.

Sites like Technorati not only let you search its own indexes, but also pull items from other sites. So a search for "tsunami" brings together Flickr photos and del.icio.us links besides blog entries — creating a mini-magazine of sorts on the fly.

Cons: ...drawback lacks an easy solution, though. Once tagging takes off, marketers are bound to add irrelevant tags to hijack you to the latest Viagra ad.

Warns Danny Sullivan, editor of the online newsletter Search Engine Watch: "The noise and deliberate manipulation will probably just bring the system into a crashing halt."

Google

Sunday, May 01, 2005

Gates Gives 'Longhorn' Peek;

Forbes.com: "Gates showed off some of Longhorn's aesthetic aspects, such as a new catalog of icons to help organize documents, and gave brief explication of the newer software for file-sharing. And perhaps most urgently sought after, Longhorn will feature new security features to fend off viruses and other assorted cyber-pestilence. "

Google

Can Blogging Ever Become Big Business?

Business 2.0 : "
By Greg Lindsay, April 28, 2005

Snips: "At the moment, blogging is a small business enterprise, not a speculative venture. While the VCs seemed poised to swoop down a year ago, so far only the toolmakers like Six Apart (maker of Movable Type) and blog searcher Technorati have attracted any funding. "

John Battelle's "plan is to offer himself as a publisher-as-service to blogging entities. He'd aggregate traffic, sell category-specific advertising against the sites in the FM network, and handle the back-end business and tech issues. He's done much of this for BoingBoing, where he's been acting as "band manager," as he puts it, for more than a year to generate cash from the site.

Calacanis, who is definitely a rising-tide-lifts-all-boats type, offered, via e-mail, this rosy summary of Battelle's accomplishments there: "John did an amazing job over the past six months taking BoingBoing from ad/revenue-free to ad/revenue-filled without upsetting the user base or the four bloggers. I understand it makes $40k a month and is growing ... so $500,000 a year across five folks is a nice living ... if John can do that 10 more times he has a very powerful business." (Battelle says, "We don't talk about numbers, but they are in the right range, if a bit high.") BoingBoing has already signed up as FM Publishing's first client, provided Battelle can get his company off the ground."

Lindsay sums up: "Battelle's philosophy and his business plan signal that 1) blogs are valuable enough to be worth owning, and 2) he's inviting the mainstream media to decide what "enough" means in the case of ventures as small as his own...Personally, I can't wait to see what that dollar figure might be, but that could just be my wishful thinking again."

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Creative Commons Licence
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.