Internet Changes Everything

The blog in the corporate machine

Corporate reputations | The blog in the corporate machine | Economist.com

Feb 9th 2006 | CHICAGO
From The Economist print edition
Bloggers can be vicious, but they can also help companies avert disaster

THEY have always had their critics, but corporations are having an especially hard time making friends of late. Scandals at Enron and WorldCom destroyed thousands of employees' livelihoods, raised hackles about bosses' pay and cast doubt on the reliability of companies' accounts; labour groups and environmental activists are finding new ways to co-ordinate their attacks on business; and big companies such as McDonald's and Wal-Mart have found themselves the targets of scathing films. But those are just the enemies that companies can see. Even more troubling for many managers is dealing with their critics online—because, in the ether, they have little idea who the attackers are.

The spread of “social media” across the internet—such as online discussion groups, e-mailing lists and blogs—has brought forth a new breed of brand assassin, who can materialise from nowhere and savage a firm's reputation. Often the assault is warranted; sometimes it is not. But accuracy is not necessarily the issue. One of the main reasons that executives find bloggers so very challenging is because, unlike other “stakeholders”, they rarely belong to well-organised groups. That makes them harder to identify, appease and control.

When a company is dealing directly with a labour union or an environmental outfit, its top brass often take the easy route, by co-opting the leaders or paying some sort of Danegeld. Until a couple of decades ago, that meant doling out generous union contracts and sticking shareholders, taxpayers or consumers with the bill. More recently, the fashion has been for “corporate social responsibility”. This might involve spending money on a pressure group's pet project; or recruiting prominent activists to a joint committee, dedicated to doing good works.

In the blogosphere, however, a corporation's next big critic could be anyone. He might be an angry customer or a disgruntled employee—though that sort of tie to the company is not essential; nor does he need lots of industry experience or lengthy credentials to be a threat. All a blogger really needs to devastate a company is a bit of information and plausibility, a complaint that catches the imagination and a knack for making others care about his gripe.

Mike Kaltschnee's site, HackingNetflix.com, became a force to be reckoned with for Netflix, a video-rental outfit that delivers to people's homes. When Netflix said it was not interested in Mr Kaltschnee passing on questions from consumers, he posted the exchange online, hurting the firm's reputation among loyal customers. The company now treats him much more respectfully and his site has gained a large following.

Increasingly, companies are learning that the best defence against these attacks is to take blogs seriously and fix rapidly whatever problems they turn up.

One firm that could have saved itself a lot of trouble is Diebold, an Ohio-based firm that makes automated cash machines. After America's presidential election in 2000, which featured a vote-counting fiasco in Florida, the firm decided to expand a part of its business that made electronic voting machines by acquiring Global Election Systems (GES) in early 2002. The deal turned into a disaster when computer scientists and voting-rights groups educated the public about problems with machines such as those made by GES. The critics complained that GES's voting devices could not leave an audit trail because, among other flaws, they did not print paper ballots. By 2004 the mainstream print and broadcast media were also hammering away on this issue, leading several states, including Ohio, to reject GES's machines.

Evolve24, a consultancy which analyses corporate reputations and watches online trends closely, has used its blog-sniffing software to find out what was available on the internet before Diebold bought GES. It discovered that not only were a couple of voting-rights activists calling attention to the machines' drawbacks on their blogs well before the acquisition, but also that research papers highlighting the problems were available on technical websites. Diebold did traditional forms of due diligence before buying GES, such as verifying its financial health. But by ignoring the blogosphere, it failed to spot some crucial risks.

Although its response was much quicker than Diebold's, Kryptonite, a firm that makes high-priced bicycle locks, also learned the hard way how important blogs can be. In September 2004 word spread quickly through the blogosphere that U-shaped locks by Kryptonite and other firms could be picked, quickly and easily, using only the plastic casing of a Bic pen. Then somebody made a video showing how to do it, and posted it on the Engadget blog site, one of the most popular on the internet. After Kryptonite discovered the problem, it came up with a plan to take care of its customers and improve its locks. But Donna Tocci, Kryptonite's media chief, says that she now checks 30-40 blogs every day.

Not all company interactions with bloggers involve damaging criticism. Sometimes a careful look at what is happening online can help managers to avoid over-reacting. After the invasion of Iraq, when American consumers turned against all things French, a big French drinks company noticed that its brand names were popping up on boycott lists. But an analysis by BuzzMetrics, which specialises in scrutinising blogs and other online forums for corporate marketers, revealed that those who were pushing hard for a boycott tended to be “Budweiser drinkers”, who would not have been natural customers for the firm's wines and spirits anyway.
A hair of the blog

Many big companies have been looking eagerly for ways to tailor their advertising to specific groups of consumers. They have found that web logs and internet discussion groups, which bring together people of similar interests, can help them turn hot links into cold cash. But besides trying to get out their message, companies are also learning that blogs can provide early warning signs of potential problems.

They are increasingly turning to firms that can help them sort through the blogorrhea to find what they need. There is a lot to sift, considering that some 27m blogs are online. Last month, responding to growing interest in their services, BuzzMetrics agreed to merge with Intelliseek, another firm that specialises in analysing blogs for business. BuzzMetrics has ties to Nielsen, a media-research firm; Intelliseek has a clutch of former executives from Procter & Gamble, a consumer-goods giant.

Max Kalehoff, vice-president of marketing at BuzzMetrics, says that many of the firm's clients want it to analyse blogs so as to gauge the seriousness of bad news. Drugs firms, for example, want to know what questions are on patients' minds when they hear about problems with a medication. Car companies are looking for better ways to spot defects and work out what to do about them.

Steve Rubel, of CooperKatz, a public-relations firm, reckons that companies should also have a ready-made plan for influencing bloggers if a crisis does occur. Mr Rubel runs the firm's Micro Persuasion practice, which helps companies improve their marketing by using blogs and other conversational media. He recommends setting up a “lockbox blog” that is hidden behind an internet firewall, but can be made visible to the public at short notice. Any websites or video clips that companies might want to direct the public to in an emergency, for example, could be prepared in advance. Then, he likes to tell clients: “in case of emergency, break glass and blog.”

March 24, 2006 at 10:53 PM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink | TrackBack (395) | Top of page | Blog Home

Yahoo Will Add RSS to Mail Service

Yahoo Will Add RSS to Mail Service

By Shelley Solheim
November 30, 2005

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Aiming to drive RSS adoption to a broader market, Yahoo Inc. is adding an RSS reader to its forthcoming Yahoo Web mail service, currently in beta.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) allows users to subscribe to content feeds from blogs and other Web sites to automatically receive the latest content in their area of interest, but the technology is still a little clunky for many non-technical users.

By integrating RSS into a familiar application, like Web mail, Yahoo hopes to help users become more comfortable using RSS. In the upcoming version of its AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML)-based Web mail service, a list of RSS feeds will reside in the side pane underneath a user's e-mail folders, and users will be able to read, forward, print, file and save RSS-enabled content.

"One challenge with RSS adoption is that it's a new behavior, and you have to know to click on the RSS button, copy the URL and paste it into a feed reader. Yahoo mail is a known environment for consumers and one they're comfortable with so that will further both the ease of subscribing and broaden the number of subscribers," said Dick Costolo, co-founder and CEO of FeedBurner, a Chicago-based company that provides services to help 100,000 publishing companies manage their RSS feeds.

"I would expect you would see all the consumer Web mail clients add support for RSS soon," said Costolo.

Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. would not comment on plans for future versions of their consumer Web mail offerings. But Microsoft and IBM are both adding support for RSS feeds into future versions of their corporate messaging and collaboration offerings.

Although RSS has yet to gain widespread adoption, some businesses are already finding RSS feeds to be a valuable tool to interact with customers.

"Without a doubt, this instantaneous, personalized communication is helping Cannondale to create brand loyalists worldwide and increase our customer base," said Janet Maurice, Webmaster, for Cannondale Bicycle Corp., in Bethel, Conn.

The company is using RSS to allow customers to subscribe to areas of interest in Cannondale's blogs, such as road riding or mountain biking, and discussion topics, such as racing news, technology and training tips.

PointerIs RSS the next target big target for worm bots? Click here to read more.

"Because RSS remains outside the mainstream, it is still unfamiliar to many. It is, however, gaining ground very quickly and will continue to do so as the average Web surfer comes to understand what it is and how it will benefit them," said Maurice. "By adding an RSS reader to their very popular Web mail client, Yahoo is expediting that process. As a bonus to using Yahoo's technology, the end user will be provided with tech support—not something currently readily available to the masses using RSS."

Yahoo on Wednesday also rolled out a new RSS feed alerts service that allows users to receive RSS feed alerts via e-mail, Yahoo Messenger instant messages, or SMS on their mobile devices, according to officials in Sunnyvale, Calif.

December 1, 2005 at 01:53 AM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink | TrackBack (79) | Top of page | Blog Home

Pulse of the Saudi Blogosphere

Global Voices Online » Blog Archive » Pulse of the Saudi Blogosphere

This week was even quieter than last week in the Saudi blogosphere. However, we can still find some interesting posts from here and there. Unfortunately, most of our featured posts for this week are in Arabic. I know that most of you can’t read Arabic, so I tried my best to translate the most significant parts of every post.

Prometheus compares between the Arab World and other parts of the world when it comes to publish hatred material (Arabic). He tells us is about two Singaporean bloggers who were jailed and fined after being accused with using their blogs to spread hatred and threaten the social peace. “It is different here,” he writes. “Some internet forums have been publishing threads by unknown writers, where they attack other religions and sects.” However, nothing is done about it. He also comments on the news about Bush’s administration plans to bomb al-Jazeera TV station, and asks, “why should a big superpower with such a great political and diplomatic influence brush aside all other effective means of pressure and persuasion, and resort to force to silence a small TV station?”

Fouad al-Farhan has dedicated a post to the Swiss president (Arabic), who criticized the Tunisian government for their human rights record and their position from freedom of expression, and described him as a “free man.” After finishing his speech, the Swiss president went to sit on his chair next to the Tunisian president, who did not look disturbed at all. “He is a dictator. Do you expect that he would cry?” al-Farhan wrote.

Farooha comments on the case of Mohammed al-Harbi, a chemistry teacher, who was unfairly sentenced with three years in jail and 750 lashes. She calls everyone to help. “Save the chemist, and would be inventor by leaving these good people your two cents!” she wrote.

After the terrorism attack in Jordan, Abu Joori says the reaction of Jordanians to the attack was different from that one Saudis had (Arabic) when they had similar attacks in the past few years. He thinks the attack has helped Jordanians to form a national unity; something that Saudis did not do. He says, “I think we, as Saudis, have missed yet another excellent opportunity to develop the feeling of nationalism, and to emphasis the concept that we all share this part of the world, and it is our duty to protect it and serve it.”

“Even here at the Saudi blogosphere, we find some people who clearly announce their hatred to a certain sect, a certain region, or even to the American president George Bush, forgetting there are groups who attacked this nation, every citizen lives here, and they did not even said a word to condemn these attacks,” he added.

Metallic Kitty writes about racism against Arabs in Europe. “It sucks how most countries consider Arab people dogs,” she says. “Isn’t that embarrassing? Isn’t that shameful?” she asks. Meanwhile, ubergirl87 says she is “sick and tired of Hollywood portraying Arabs as ignorant, evil people.”

Finally, here is our weekly selection of random, quick snippets from around the Saudi blogosphere: Dotsson posts an imaginary and funny interview with Michael Jackson, who recently moved to what he called “our tiny neighbor Bahrain!” Jo describes the sense of independence she felt when she was able to cash a cheque. Trilancer is wondering what “exactly is happening to Arabian TV,” and thinks that Arabian channels are “competing in showing the most smut possible without triggering a riot.” And Tyt notices that the majority of Saudi bloggers in English are females. “We need to hear the opinions of the Saudi male bloggers,” he says.

November 28, 2005 at 01:38 PM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink | TrackBack (29) | Top of page | Blog Home

RSS users visit news sites more than non-users

RSS users visit news sites more than non-users - CyberJournalist.net - RSS users visit news sites more than non-users

A new report from Nielsen//NetRatings says RSS users are significantly more engaged in online news than non-users, visiting an average of 10.6 news sites compared with 3.4 news sites for non-users. RSS users also visit news sites three to four times more frequently than non-users.

PRESS RELEASE:

RSS Users Visit Three Times as Many News Web Sites as Non-Users, According to Nielsen//NetRatings

Men, Longtime Internet Users Most Likely to Use RSS

NEW YORK - September 20, 2005 - Nielsen//NetRatings, a global leader in Internet media and market research, today reported that RSS users are significantly more engaged in online news than non-users, visiting an average of 10.6 news sites compared with 3.4 news sites for non-users.

"Convenience is the primary reason respondents gave for using RSS feeds," said Jon Gibs, senior research manager, Nielsen//NetRatings. "Once the technology has been adopted, users can easily add new content. This allows news-hungry Web visitors to sample a wide variety of news sources," he continued.

Not only do RSS users visit more news Web sites than non-users, they also visit those sites more frequently. RSS users visited the top 20 news Web sites nearly three times as often as non-users and all other news Web sites four times as often. This means that sites outside of the top 20 properties may be among the greatest beneficiaries of RSS.

Notably, 83 percent of survey respondents who were identified by clickstream data as RSS users were unaware that they were using RSS technology. This can be explained by sites such as MyYahoo!, where users can customize content without knowing anything about the RSS feeds that make that customizing possible.

Among RSS users who understood the technology, 78 percent were male, and 48 percent were longtime Internet users who have been going online since at least 1994. Among unaware RSS users, 54 percent were male and 36 percent were longtime Internet users. These figures were lowest among respondents who did not use RSS feeds, with just 46 percent male and 34 percent longtime Internet users.

"Men tend to be early and aggressive technology adopters, but it may come as a surprise that the youngest Internet users were not the most RSS savvy," said Gibs. "RSS users are particularly focused on breaking news, and trend toward an older demographic," he continued.

November 26, 2005 at 09:44 AM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink | TrackBack (13) | Top of page | Blog Home

Public Image Monitoring Solution scours blogosphere

IT Business

IBM software tracks review, news and personal sites for relevant data
11/10/2005 5:00:00 PM
by Kathleen Sibley

In the old days, companies could hire a news clipping service to keep track of who was talking about them in the news.

These days, that prospect is considerably more complicated – and even more essential than ever.

That’s why IBM Corp. has teamed up with Montreal-based Nstein Technologies and Factiva to deliver a technology designed to help organizations keep track of what’s being said about them around the globe.

The product, called the Public Image Monitoring Solution, is based on IBM’s WebSphere Information Integrator OmniFind Edition, which is built on the unstructured information management architecture (UIMA) open framework.

“Everyone knows public opinion can truly impact sales of consumer products and services,” said Marc Andrews, strategy and business development, unstructured information at IBM. “With the acceleration of people using public forums like blogs and consumer review sites to share and spread opinions, these opinions get spread worldwide faster than ever before, and it makes it that more critical for companies to monitor their public image so they can quickly address any critical issues that come up.”

The public image monitoring solution ferrets out mention of a company, its products or services in user reviews, news articles, blogs and podcasts, for example, and sorts them into positive and negative, said Andrews. It can also mine the data from internal sources such as customer surveys and call centre logs.

“Most organizations are struggling to capture what’s being said in their call centres and in customer surveys and market research studies,” he explains. “That information can quickly become outdated so it’s important to understand what’s being said internally and externally. The public image solution categorizes that information so you can determine if people are talking about the business, about marketing events, about tech reviews or financial-related activities, and you can scroll down to the specific information you want to review. It even goes further by enabling you to automatically identify hot topics so organizations don’t have to manually sift through all these comments, and it provides a tonality detector that allows you to automatically identify the sentiment.”

Factiva has built a “data listener,” which enables users to incorporate news feeds and articles, while Nstein has provided the text analytics.

IBM chose Nstein because it had the best analytics relevant to the field, he said. “They’re providing the tonality detector and the categorizer and the hot topics detector, and we leverage that to extract knowledge from the text,” said Andrews.

Michel Lemay, vice-president of marketing at Nstein, said his company’s technology applies business intelligence to the search engine that crawls through a potentially huge numbers of documents. It’s more efficient and effective than, say, a popular search engine such as Google, he said, because it shows the users all the concepts related to the search term.

“We call it intelligent search,” he said. “When you (use) Google you get a million results. This technology will guide you through the search, it will find you what you’re looking for by showing you entities, concepts, names and organizations. It categorizes the documents, it makes a summary of the documents, and it proposes similar documents.”

It can then sort them into positive and negative and show a graph of hot topics.

Nstein’s technology is also used to power Health Canada’s Global Public Health Information Network (GPHIN), which scours the Internet for information that health authorities can use to detect a disease outbreak.

The Public Image Monitoring Solution is expected to be of interest to large companies that produce consumer products, particularly in the automotive and electronics sectors, although IBM’s Andrews said it is scalable enough to work for smaller companies that might want to monitor what’s being said about one product on just blogs and news feeds, for example.

But while it’s not targeted to the business-to-business space, all industries that sell products need to take consumer-generated media (CGM) into account, said Peter Blackshaw, chief marketing officer at Intelliseek, a Cincinnati-based marketing intelligence firm.

And that impact is growing. According to Intelliseek’s 2005 Consumer-Generated Media and Behaviour Study, consumers are 50 per more likely to be influenced by word of mouth recommendations from their peers than by traditional advertising. Bloggers create an enormous amount of CGM, elevating their influence, the study said.

“When you go to Google a high tech product, a huge amount of what shows up is consumer and user generated, so it’s difficult to create the same silos,” Blackshaw explains. “I just did a huge engagement with one of the top telecom companies and they wanted to look at B2B buzz separate from consumer buzz.

“I said, ‘your brand is your brand.’ Most B2B shoppers use Google to do their initial due diligence and ultimately what they bump heads against are all these bad consumer experiences, so it really reflects on the brand … so to some extent CGM is unavoidable, irrespective of the buyer.”

Blackshaw added that blogs have exploded in the B2B space. “Business professionals and tech professionals are just acting like consumers, but the conversation is largely B2B-oriented, and you are seeing a whole context for IT products and services to be discussed.”

Blackshaw said while there is likely to be a big demand for a product such as the Public Image Monitoring Solution, IBM’s challenge will be to bring a marketer- and consumer-centric perspective to the data.

“The people who typically buy this are the marketers, the brand people that are really sensitive about how the market perceives their product, so I’m not sure you’re going to get a lot of buy from the IT department,” he said.

November 10, 2005 at 11:46 PM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink | TrackBack (15) | Top of page | Blog Home

Corporate Blogging Takes Off

Corporate Blogging Takes Off

By Susan Kuchinskas

Business blogging is taking off. Companies are using blogs for both internal and external communications, to improve customer relations and improve business processes, according to a survey released on Monday.

Results of the BlogOn 2005 Social Media Adoption Survey were released at BlogOn 2005, taking place in New York this week. The conference is organized by Guidewire Group, a research firm focused on emerging technologies. The survey was co-sponsored by Guidewire and corporate blogging software provider iUpload.

The poll of corporate marketing and communications professionals found that 55 percent of corporations are blogging, with 91.4 percent of those using them for internal communications and 96.6 percent for external outreach. More than half had launched their blogs within the last year.

"It's a recent phenomenon," said Mike Sigal, CEO of Guidewire. "We thought we were still waiting for the turn in the hockey stick of adoption, but we're already on the steep part of the curve."

Of those not blogging, 70 percent felt positive about the idea, with 7 percent intending to start a blog immediately and 13 percent intending to start a blog within a year. Only 11 percent of the total respondents were are blogging today and had no plans to do so.

Four out of five of the companies with internal blogs used them to improve intra-company communications, with one in three replacing e-mail-based processes with blogs. One is six is using blogs to replace other software.

"There's a mad dash for attention in the e-mail box," Sigal said. "The move to a centralized, streamlined, searchable vehicle is what people like best about blogs inside the firewall."

Companies use external blogs for public relations and marketing (61 percent) and "demonstration of thought leadership (61 percent). More than 40 percent of respondents had a blogging CEO. The expected benefits of external blogs include improved brand recognition and external communications, as well as a vehicle for customer feedback. While 20 percent of respondents expected blogs to generate income, 58 percent expected them to improve rankings in search engine results.

Blogging companies said the biggest challenges were maintaining enthusiasm (42 percent), encouraging adoption (36 percent) and dealing with technological problems (30 percent). Few seemed to grapple with cultural issues such as setting editorial policy (14 percent) or dealing with inappropriate comments or content (14 percent).

Sigel noted that responding companies came from all sectors including advertising and marketing, computers and electronic manufacturing, banking and lending, oil and gas, and space access, transportation and.

"We often think these emerging technologies will be very skewed to startups and technology vendors, but seeing the distribution across all industries was very surprising to us," he said.

"The most important issue in taking blogs outside the firewall," Sigal said, "is understanding the culture shift and loss of control of the corporate message. It's important that a company be ready to engage in a dialog with their market, as opposed to having a one-way conversation. "

October 19, 2005 at 05:25 PM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink | TrackBack (8) | Top of page | Blog Home

Blogging and the Wisdom of Crowds

O'Reilly: What Is Web 2.0

One of the most highly touted features of the Web 2.0 era is the rise of blogging. Personal home pages have been around since the early days of the web, and the personal diary and daily opinion column around much longer than that, so just what is the fuss all about?

October 12, 2005 at 04:57 PM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink | TrackBack (8) | Top of page | Blog Home

The Blog Herald Blog Count October 2005: over 100 million blogs created

» The Blog Herald Blog Count October 2005: over 100 million blogs created The Blog Herald: more blog news more often

Related entries in In the News

Its been three months since the last Blog Herald Blog Count due to the richness of the figures I’ve been collecting and the time its takes, but the Blog Count returns for October, and will now be published quarterly.

Now for the good stuff: the number of blogs in existence: over 100 million blogs

There are two sets of figures: based on major blog using countries the figure would be around 75 million, which is a patchy figure because its difficult to count blogs based on the country of origin due to the worldwide phenomenon of people using US companies. Based on blogs created at major hosts (a more accurate measure) the figure is actually 134-144 million. So I’m taking a round 100 million + blogs figure.

As always I’ll qualify that the Blog Count is about counting blogs, not active blogs, legitimate blogs (vs spam blogs) or bloggers. Are there a lot of inactive blogs? yes. Are there a lot of spam blogs? yes as well, indeed I’d suggest maybe 40-50% of every blog on Googles Blogspot domain is a spam blog, but the vast majority of blogs out there aren’t.

The history of this count: it started because I was tired of reading press reports that there were 4 or 5 million blogs out there when some countries had more than this alone. The figures still aren’t good in the press. In this last week I’ve read that there were 14 million blogs out there. Technorati is now nearly upto 20 million, but its still no where near the true number of blogs out there based on reported numbers. If SixApart alone counts 11 million users, then surely there are a lot more than the nearly 20 million Technorati and others track!

So here we go: October 2005.

By country:

Australia: approx 450,000
Still not a lot of hard figures here, but based on report in the Australian Newspaper 19 May 05 and allowing for growth since. Like other members of the Anglosphere though its hard to quantify blog numbers due to the dominance of US blogging firms and .com domains

Austria: approx 20,000
Ref: Loic Le Meur

Belgium: approx 100,000
Skynet: 68,000. There are problems with a definite Belgium count because of the split between French and Dutch speakers. It’s likely that some Belgium bloggers use services in the Netherlands and France, + naturally the Anglosphere offerings.

Bosnia and Herzegovina: less than 3,000
LJ: 1300. Rest unknown

Brunei: less than 3,000
LJ, Blogshares and others.

Canada: approx 700,000
approximation, difficult to ascertain due to the Anglosphere problem, LJ shows 285,000

China: 6 million and growing
ref: http://www.asiamedia.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=26700“>South IHT, South China Morning Post. Note the IHT article incorrectly reports 14.2 million which is a Technorati overall figure, however the earlier SCMP piece reported 5 million so we’d think 6 million, possibly more at this stage.

Croatia: approx 50,000
blog.hr which now has just short of 40,000 blogs + a little more for other sites.

Czech Republic: approx 10,000
Ref: Loic

Denmark: approx 15,000
Overskrift.dk has nearly 6,000, Smartlog 2,200, Loic has some earlier figures here.

Finland: approx 100,000
Media=blogi
Same as last quater, unable to ascertain any new figures.

France: approx 3.5 million
Businessweek called it 3 million back in July, and yet Skyblog alone now has 3 million. Ublog 65,000, Canalblog 64,200, Loic for other older figures.

Germany: 300,000
Hugo Martin from June + a little growth on this figure. Unlike France which is dominated by Skyblogs, German bloggers appear to be all over the place.

Greece: less than 5,000
ref: Loic

India: approx 100,000
Financial Express, same figure as last quarter as I couldn’t find anything more up to date but I suspect the number may be a lot more. Certainly India has its own blog awards now as well, and are mentioned in the press.

Iran: 700,000
Yes, this is a remarkable number, but I have it on research from Koorosh Eslamzade, but would note like all the figures here these are total blog numbers and not active blog numbers (which are between 40,000 and 110,000).
Persian Blog: 520,000 , Blogfa : 55,000, Blogsky: 20,000, Mihanblog: 25,000, Parsiblog: 7,000 , Perianlog: 9,500

Ireland: approx 75,000
Loic says 9,000, I don’t believe the figure could be low considering the “Irish economic miracle” of the 1990’s and Irelands continued status of growth and IT friendliness, although the population of just over 4 million people is always going to produce a fairly low figure. Problem again that most Irish bloggers would use Anglosphere blogging sites.

Israel: approx 100,000
thanks Jariv

Italy: approx 250,000
Splinder: 144,000, Excite: 17,500, Bloggers.it: 13,500, Timblog: 12,000, ilcannocchiale.it: 12,000, Aruba: 6,000, LJ: 7,500 + others per Loic.

Japan: at least 5.5 million
Ask Jeeves Japan is currently tracking 5.2 million blogs, suspect the number is much higher again.

Malaysia: approx 20,000
The Star + LJ. Difficult to ascertain as many would blog on anglosphere services such as Blogger.

The Netherlands: approx 600,000
ref: Loic

Philippines: approx 75,000
LJ + Pinoy. Could be significantly larger as writers are using Anglosphere services.

Poland: approx 1.5 million
onet.pl 825,000, Tenbit 228,000 , mylog.pl: 134,500, eblog.pl: 90,00, Blog.pl: 70,000, Blogi.pl: 37,500, Blogx.pl: 44,000 and Ownlog.pl: 13,500 = 1,442,500 + minor services= 1.5 million

Russia: approx 400,000
LJ: 218,000 users. Loic claims 800,000 but I’m putting the figure at 400,000 without any hard evidence, although likely more

South Korea: approx 20 million
See posts here and here + notes from previous blog counts.

Spain: approx 1.5 million
Terra.es reports 1 million MSN Spaces + others.

Ukraine: 50,000
Loic, not updates from last quarter

United Kingdom: 2.5 million
1.5 million UK residents using Spaces as of the end of June (Terra.es ). 227,000+ UK users on Live Journal. Anglosphere problem in estimating figure as many UK bloggers using US services, see notes from July blog count.

United States: approx 30-50 million
Impossible to calculate although there are 4 million on LiveJournal and 3 million on Spaces. Reports that Myspaces hosts 20 million and I’d be guessing that most of these are US based. The US figure would also represent the highest number of abandoned blogs as well.

By host (over 500,000)
Note: these are based on known and rough figures based on media reports and other sources. If you are a blog hosting company and are not included here please send me your user data and I’m happy to add it.

Xanga: 40 million
re: WPXI

MySpace: 20-30 million
most recent number here. Not sure how many are blogging though, have read the figure was 20 million hence 20-30 million, these are also “private blogs” and are not indexed on sites such as Technorati.

MSN Spaces: 18 million
Terra.es + growth over the quarter

Blogger: 15 million +

Cyworld: 13 million

SixApart (Live Journal/ TypePad, MT): 11 million
SixApart figure in recent media releases

Planet Weblog Service: 6 million
Leading South Korean blogging provider (same as last qaurter as no new figure available)

Yahoo Blogs Korea: 3 million

Skyblog: 3 million

Bokee: 2 million

Greatest Journal: 1.16 million

Other US Live Journal clones: 1 million
ref: Perseus

onet.pl 825,000,

Persian Blog: 520,000

October 10, 2005 at 05:27 PM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink | TrackBack (215) | Top of page | Blog Home

1 week comparison: SearchFox, Feedster, Pluck, Bloglines, Rojo, and NewsGator

1 week comparison: SearchFox, Feedster, Pluck, Bloglines, Rojo, and NewsGator - Techblog

RSS readers being compared:

1. SearchFox
2. My Feedster
3. Pluck Online
4. Bloglines
5. Rojo
6. NewsGator Online

Areas of Comparison:

* Account Settings (AccSet)
* Search Features (Search)
* Clippings / Favorites (ClipFav)
* Results Pages (Results)
* Managing Feeds (Manage)
* Directory Browsing (DirBro)
* Special / Other (SpecO)

October 5, 2005 at 12:38 PM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink | TrackBack (12) | Top of page | Blog Home

Picking the Best Online RSS Reader

Picking the Best Online RSS Reader

July 12, 2005
By Brian Livingston

Brian Livingston Getting good numbers on the most popular online readers of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) isn't easy, as I said in my column last week.

I published figures in that column on the top 20 RSS readers, both online and client-based. The figures were provided by FeedBurner, a free service that handles more than 70,000 RSS feeds. Client-based RSS users are easily counted (each personal computer is counted once per feed.) Web-based readers, by contrast, self-report a subscriber count for each feed as part of HTML's so-called User-Agent string.

My column showed that My Yahoo tops every other RSS reader, claiming 59% of all RSS subscriptions. Bloglines come in at No. 2 with 10.4%. Since some RSS feeds are turned on by default for many new My Yahoo users, I also published a Top 20 list that excluded the 10 most popular feeds. In this second list, Bloglines came in first with 19.5% of subscriptions, while My Yahoo dropped to sixth place with 6.7%.

In separate interviews this week, spokesmen for My Yahoo and Bloglines differed over how their online services count subscribers.

Scott Gatz, senior director of personalization products for Yahoo.com, says My Yahoo counts (and reports to FeedBurner) only those subscribers who've actually logged into their online accounts within the last 30 days. "I understand that Bloglines counts the total number of people who've ever subscribed," he says.

Mark Fletcher, the founder of Bloglines, confirms that his service reports every subscriber, even those who haven't checked in for months. Asked what percentage of Bloglines accounts have logged in lately, Fletcher demurred: "I'm not exactly sure what we can release." He cited a recent acquisition of Bloglines by Ask Jeeves as one reason exact figures can't be given out. "As far as I know, My Yahoo is the only one that monitors activity," he states.

Greg Reinacker, CTO of NewsGator Technologies, says that his company's Web-based RSS reader, NewsGator Online, reports "everyone who hasn't canceled." Both Bloglines' and NewsGator Online's counts, therefore, would be lower if only those users who've logged on in the past 30 days were reported.

If only half of Bloglines' users have been active within the past 30 days, Bloglines would represent only 1/10 as many total RSS subscriptions as My Yahoo, not 1/5 (as shown last week in Table 1). Not counting the 10 most popular feeds, Bloglines would represent only 46% more subscriptions than My Yahoo, not 192% more (as shown in Table 2).

My Yahoo Is Biggest, But Is It Best?

By any measure, My Yahoo is a huge online service that delivers news and entertainment feeds of all kinds to 25 million users, according to the company. Yahoo's Gatz makes a strong case that My Yahoo is the best online RSS reader, for the following reasons:

• Non-RSS feeds. Yahoo has worked for more than 10 years to integrate constantly updated information from a wide variety of sources. This includes stock quotes, localized weather, current air fares, alerts to new e-mail (for users of Yahoo addresses), and more. Much of this information will never be available as an RSS feed. Stock prices, for example, may change thousands of times a day.

• Mobile information. My Yahoo has integrated its feeds into a mobile product for users of advanced cell phones and other portable devices.

• A dashboard to your life. With its easy page customization, My Yahoo aims to be "a dashboard to your life," not just an RSS reader, Gatz says. Once you get the layout the way you want it, My Yahoo offers you a view of just those bits of information you need to check every day.

Unlike Bloglines and NewsGator Online, My Yahoo does not use the right side of its two-column layout to show the full text of news items. Instead, both columns show only headlines (and, optionally, summaries). You must click a link to open a new window to see the full text. If you wish to see links in a left-hand pane that display the full HTML in the right pane when clicked, you might prefer Bloglines or NewsGator.

Bloglines Zooms Ahead With The Blogerati

Bloglines, which was established as recently as 2003, has become extremely popular with bloggers and those who thrive on reading blogs. Reports abound of Bloglines users who've subscribed to hundreds of different RSS feeds.

According to Bloglines' Fletcher, his service is designed to make the user's experience fast and efficient:

• You open it, it's marked as read. The default behavior in Bloglines is not to show you an item you've previously seen, once you've opened a particular RSS feed you subscribe to. This behavior can be changed to retain items until you specifically delete them. But Fletcher believes Bloglines makes RSS reading fast, which users like, even if they're logging on to their Bloglines account from different machines (and therefore might want to see an item more than once).

• Universal inbox. Like Yahoo.com, Bloglines encourages users to create e-mail accounts ending in Bloglines.com. "You can create an unlimited number of e-mail addresses at Bloglines.com," Fletcher says, "and they'll show up in your Bloglines accounts." This can reduce the number of browser windows you need to open to follow all of your e-mail and RSS notifications.

• Saved searches. Both Bloglines and NewsGator Online have the ability to save a search, so you can check it later. "NewsGator requires you to pay for that service, whereas Bloglines has that for free," Fletcher says.

NewsGator's Reinacker disputes that, saying NewsGator Online users get up to three saved searches, called "smart feeds," for free. Paying users of various premium service levels can save between 10 and 150 searches.

NewsGator Covers The Waterfront

NewsGator Online may have achieved a lower growth rate than Bloglines because NewsGator's Web-based service originally charged a fee. Now that the basic service level is free, NewsGator Online is rapidly gaining users, in addition to the client-based versions the company offers, Reinacker says.

Aside from NewsGator Online, the company is perhaps better known for integrating with such corporate applications as Microsoft Outlook, Exchange, and Active Directory. NewsGator's synchronization software allows feeds to be updated across different computers, including mobile devices.

The company's Web-based service, NewsGator Online, offers several features that other online RSS readers can't currently match:

• Job bulletins. In partnership with the employment service Work.com, NewsGator Online allows users to subscribe to help-wanted listings within any given radius of their chosen city. Reinacker cites this as an example of many up-to-the-minute services NewsGator is planning.

• Integration with Media Center Edition. People who own a PC with Microsoft's Media Center Edition can get multimedia feeds, including video. The service is accessible to MCE users by clicking Online Spotlight, News and Sports, NewsGator MCE.

• Podcasts that come to you. Perhaps the most compelling new feature of NewsGator Online is its support for "podcatching." This buzzword means automatically downloading audio and video programs that are posted on the Web. If you have NewsGator's free FeedStation application (now in beta) running on a home PC connected to an iPod, you can do amazing things, Reinacker says. "If you're at work, and you see a podcast you want, you click to download it to your iPod at home. This also works with Windows Media Player. FeedStation actually downloads the stuff and puts it in your playlist at home."

This support for podcasts was recognized by Audible.com, a large Internet source of audio material, when it announced on June 24 that its content is now available via RSS through FeedStation.

John Federico, a marketing executive with Audible, said in an interview that this capability is currently supported only by FeedBurner, which integrates with NewsGator and its client-based subsidiary FeedDemon, and not other RSS readers.

"There's a link in Bloglines, and you click the link and download the podcast manually, and many people are happy with that," Federico said. "They probably have something [automatic] in the works, but not yet."

Conclusion

If you absolutely have to have stock quotes and local weather included on the same page as your online RSS feeds and other news, then My Yahoo is the only choice for you. The variety of sources that My Yahoo integrates is unparalleled.

For everyone who needs the ability to read a set of RSS feeds on different machines in different settings, NewsGator beats the competition. NewsGator's early support for podcasting, and its wide product range, which scales from a single user all the way up to the needs of a multinational enterprise, gives you the widest set of options to choose from.

Remember, online RSS aggregators allow you to read your feeds almost anywhere in the world, but they're not for everyone. Web-based RSS readers, for example, cannot easily download intranet feeds. These require ID-and-password authentication when a user is outside the corporate firewall.

In a future column, I'll examine client-based RSS readers, which solve this and other problems that can stump browser-based services.

Brian Livingston is the editor of WindowsSecrets.com and the coauthor of "Windows Me Secrets" and nine other books. To subscribe free and receive Executive Tech via e-mail, visit our signup page. Send story ideas to him via his contact page.

October 5, 2005 at 12:37 PM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink | TrackBack (40) | Top of page | Blog Home

Shoppers use blogs for bargains

BBC NEWS | Technology | Shoppers use blogs for bargains

Consumers are starting to use weblogs, or blogs, as guides to what they should and shouldn't buy, finds a survey.

More than three-quarters of those questioned in the research said they had consulted blogs before shopping.

Respondents said they trusted blogs because they were written by real people and based on actual experiences.

The survey suggests that blogs could soon rival other media as sources of trustworthy information about products and services.

Daily data

In the survey of attitudes to blogs most of those questioned, 77%, said they thought the regularly updated web journals were a useful way to get insights into the products or services they should buy.

As many blogs were the work of individuals, many believed that they were more honest and reliable because they were not subject to the same marketing pressures as corporate or commercial websites.

"Consumers are tired of marketing gloss and so the interest in blogs is not surprising," said Paul Halfpenny, product manager at survey sponsor Hostway.

"We all want impartial advice and information, as far as consumers are concerned blogs deliver this," he added.

The messages on blogs about the merits or mistakes in gadgets or consumer goods can reach a huge audience, said Mr Halfpenny.

Those most likely to let opinions on blogs influence what they bought, 83%, were those in the 25-34 age group.

As yet, though, the research found that consumers still thought almost every other form of media was at least as trustworthy as blogs.

Almost half, 49%, thought blogs were as credible as articles in magazines, 46% thought web journals were as trustworthy as newspapers and 40% thought web logs and TV news programmes were just as reliable as each other.

September 28, 2005 at 09:00 AM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink | TrackBack (1) | Top of page | Blog Home

Consumers tune into blogs

Internet Daily: Blogs eat into traditional ads for shoppers - Advertising - Airlines - Electronic commerce - Entertainment and Leisure - Internet Services - Internet Software - Media - Mobile phones - Retail - Travel - Wireless Technologies - Transportation - Internet - Wireless - General

By Frank Barnako, MarketWatch
Last Update: 11:40 AM ET Sept. 27, 2005
E-mail it | Print | Discuss | Alert | Reprint |

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) - Technology is making it easier to ignore mainstream media advertising. Instead, consumers are using Web logs, mobile messaging, comparison shopping Web sites, and word-of-mouth to make buying decisions, according to Forrester Research Inc.

Date released Tuesday by the firm reported 10% of consumers read blogs at least once a week, compared with 5% a year ago. Really Simple Syndication feeds (RSS) are used by 6%, compared to 2% in 2004.

"Technology has given consumers an option to tune businesses out, and tune each other in," said Chris Charron, a Forrester (FORR: news, chart, profile) vice president, in a statement. "On the flip side, technology has given businesses an opportunity to gain greater customer insights at a lower cost," by monitoring blogs and Web sites and message boards "to uncover consumer insight and accelerate the innovation of products, services, and design," he said.

PubSub begins industry blog rankings

A list of the most "Fashionable Blogs" is the start of an effort by PubSub.com to chart influence and popularity of Web logs catering to special interests and businesses. The first list targets fashion, and has been compiled by a newspaper reporter who ranked what she thought were the top fashion blogs, said Bob Wyman, chief technical officer of PubSub Concepts Inc. If you were an advertiser, and saw which blog was most popular in your product category, you might be interested in using it for your own marketing, he explained. "We hope to do this in the future with PR blogs, law blogs, marketing blogs, as soon as we can find the domain experts who can maintain those lists," Wyman told ClickZ News. Fashionable Blogs listing.

TV still the 800 lb. gorilla

A study of consumers' daily use of media concluded the average person watches television four hours a day and spends two hours a day on the PC. The Middletown Media Studies II, conducted by researchers at Ball State University Center for Media Design, found 96 percent of people spent a third of their day using two or media at the same time, most often the Internet and television. Bob Papper, a co-author of the study, said, "As a society, we are consumers of media. The average person spends about nine hours a day using some type of media, which is arguably in excess of anything we would have envisioned 10 years ago." Television is still the 800-pound gorilla because of how much the average person is exposed to it, Papper said. "However, that is quickly evolving. When we combine time spent on the Web, using e-mail, instant messaging and software such as word processing, the computer eclipses all other media with the single exception of television." For more information about the research.

The MarketWatch Internet Daily podcast is available through the Apple iTunes Music Store. Listen or subscribe here. You can also hear it on the CBS Radio Network.

September 28, 2005 at 08:58 AM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink | TrackBack (5) | Top of page | Blog Home

Blogs: Foundational Tools for Network Building

Monday, September 19th, 2005

By Elizabeth Albrycht, Blogging Planet | weblog: CorporatePR
EDITORS’ CHOICE | Building Blogging Communities
http://www.globalprblogweek.com/2005/09/19/albrycht-blogs-network-building/

There has been much written about blogs since Global PR Blog Week 1.0 as they pertain to public relations: their attributes, their strengths/weaknesses, their power to persuade and their risks, to name a few subjects (check out the New PR Wiki for a plethora of links and resources). What I’d like to do here is to look at blogs a bit differently: to discuss how they are foundational tools for network building.

Over the past year I have become increasingly convinced that the primary function of corporate communications/public relations today is network building. By that I mean that all of our strategies and tactics need to be focused on building, extending and nurturing the entire universe of connections (by which I mean people) possible for an organization. You could argue, of course, that this has always been the function of communications, and you’d be right – to a point. When we identified our key audiences and decided upon the strategies and tactics to use to influence them, we were indeed nurturing a network, but a decidedly lopsided one in which all of the power resided with the organization (at least in its own “mind”) and the audiences existed to passively consume the information we provided them with. Now, I don’t want to endlessly parse this portrait of traditional command/control communications here. Rather, I want to explore how blogs, in particular, and participatory communications tools in general, can be powerful tools for building more complex and more effective networks.

First of all, why this focus on networks? What is so special about them? The way I usually explain it is this: By investing in, building or hosting the connections, links or pathways between and among your key audiences, you will be well positioned to use these networks over time to persuade people to action, to respond to a crisis, to leverage current market conversations and to improve your business overall. To put it in slightly more technical terms, I am relying on interpretations of Metcalfe’s Law and Reed’s Law. The former states that the value of the network is the approximately the square of the number of users. The latter states that when you enable connections between nodes on the network to take place, the value of the network grows exponentially. What that means for our subject is that you should be motivated to grow your network in terms of numbers of connections as well as to enable members of that network to communicate with each other as well as with your organization. Participatory communications tools like blogs are particularly well designed to help you do both of these things.

By focusing on network building, we move away from the hyperbole of BLOG and begin to think about how to use blogs pragmatically, as powerful communications tools. A prime reason blogs are such good tools for network building is that they are link-heavy, and the link is the core technology for making networks visible. I believe the visibility of a network contributes to its effectiveness because that very visibility reinforces its presence and influence to its members.

There are already tools available to help you visualize the network of connections an organization, or a person, has. For example, there are a variety of sites in which you can type in a url and immediately receive a graphical representation of its links (e.g., Opte Project, MyDensity.com) or track online conversations (Blogpulse, Technorati, PubSub). By examining these links, nodes and connections, a professional communicator can quickly grasp where the most influential connections lie. As time goes by, and these tools become more sophisticated, they will become ever more important to the public relations function.

In the past, it was much more difficult to see your network, as connections had little sharable physical manifestation. A business card sitting in a rolodex on your desk is a far more difficult to assign value to vs. a visible link on a website or blog. One of the implications of this visibility is that it makes the results of our work more easily measurable, making our work more justifiable (always nice at budget time).

To restate then, blogs are important tools for network building because they give you a place to generate visible links, both incoming and outgoing. By enabling comments and encouraging trackbacks, you are creating visible links. By commenting and trackbacking yourself to other blogs, wikis, websites and so forth, you are also creating links. That is why it is so important that, beyond just producing a blog yourself, you are contributing to others.

We can find another argument for using blogs as network-building tools in the social networking concepts of strong ties and weak ties. According to Wikipedia, “Strong ties are those such as kin relations and close personal friends,” and weak ties are “loose acquaintances such as those connections made at a party.” Mark Granovetter, in his groundbreaking article, “The Strength of Weak Ties” (The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 78, No. 6., May 1973), argued that “weak ties…are more important for personal advancement, such as getting good jobs, than the strong ties of family and friendship.” Robert Putnam developed this theory a bit further in his book, Bowling Alone, where he surmises that weak ties act as “bridging social capital”. A bridging form of social capital is “outward looking and encompass[es] people across diverse social cleavages.” (Bowling Alone, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000, 22) Furthermore, “bridging networks…are better for linkage to external assets and for information diffusion…Moreover, bridging social capital can generate broader identities and reciprocity…” (ibid, 23)

My argument is that as professional communicators, we need to focus on building these weak ties via online networks. This doesn’t mean abandoning the activities we already pursue via in-person and other forms of communications, of course, but we should start viewing these activities as part of our overall network-building objective.

The challenge with this objective is that it is extremely tricky to build the social capital needed to nurture network building online. People are very quick to point their virtual fingers at corporations who misstep, and they are not inclined to believe anything corporations say these days. We have witnessed a mass breakdown of social capital between corporations and people over the past couple of decades, and that will not be overcome easily or quickly. However, the consequences of this breakdown can be severe (decreased share price, talent recruitment problems, over regulation, etc.) and it would well behoove corporations to begin mending these bridges sooner rather than later. Blogs represent a new, powerful tool for doing just this. As I have written before, it isn’t as simple as just launching a blog. Rather, corporate representatives have to be active contributors to the conversation.

One of the core mantras of public relations is that having someone else speak credibly (and positively one hopes!) about your organization and its products or services is more valuable in terms of persuading people to take positive action than a corporation speaking for itself. This remains true in the blogosphere. The challenge is to first find the influential people (not tremendously difficult) and to enter into an ongoing conversation with them (the hard part for corporations). A lone PR person trying to speak on behalf of his or her corporation isn’t enough. Rather, one should consider viewing his or her entire organization as full of spokespeople: employees, partners, customers – in fact, all relevant audiences. These people are already talking to each other at meetings, tradeshows, on the phone, and at the local pub. They talk about your organization, make recommendations and offer criticisms. Increasingly, they are doing it online, where they can easily link up, driving increased visibility of corporate issues (and, sometimes, dirty laundry). These people already have weak ties/bridging social capital with other individuals and groups. Isn’t it better to engage with them, so you can gain access to these bridged networks vs. trying to create the bridges yourself (which, in some cases, may not be possible)? These audiences also represent scale. Their sheer numbers can be a tremendously valuable asset when you are trying to grow a broad network! Companies like IBM and Sun have recognized this and embraced employee blogging.

Network building requires communications professionals to acquire new skills and utilize new tools. Given how new some of these are many of their longer-term implications are difficult to predict. Furthermore, fast and furious changes in technology and social practices increase the challenge. The good news is that there is a strong group of worldwide professionals, represented here, who are working very hard to understand this new world and share our thoughts and experiences with our colleagues. I can’t think of a more interesting time to be a professional communicator!

As always, I am very interested to hear you reaction to the ideas presented here. Please feel free to comment or contact me directly at ealbrycht at gmail dot com.

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About the author

Elizabeth Albrycht is a 15-year veteran of high technology public relations practice and co-founder and co-producer of the New Communications Forum, a conference series designed to bring journalists and marketing and PR professionals together to learn how to use participatory communications tools. She has authored articles on blogging, RSS and other new tools for PRSA’s Tactics magazine, the IABC’s CW Bulletin, and the Future of Work eNewsletter, and has presented teleseminars and in-person seminars on new communications tools for PRSA. She is a member of the Future of Work, PRSA and the IAOC, and an alliance partner at Blogging Planet. She blogs at CorporatePR and is the editor of Future Tense, a Corante blog that explores the future of work.

September 19, 2005 at 08:33 PM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink | TrackBack (23) | Top of page | Blog Home

What is RSS, and Why Should You Care?

What is RSS, and Why Should You Care?

By Chris Sherman, Associate Editor
August 30, 2005

This week, SearchDay takes a close look at RSS, a web publishing format that's transforming information delivery for both publishers and users.

RSS has been around for some time now, and savvy users have come to rely on their RSS "feeds" as a fundamental channel for keeping up with current events and discovering new information. But RSS is still somewhat confusing for many people, and with good reason—it's an emerging technology that's still going through massive growing pains, even as it changes the way we consume information.

Today, I'm going to attempt to get my arms around a definition of RSS, what it is and isn't, and why it's important for both searchers and search marketers. Tomorrow I'll look closely at RSS search tools and how they work. Thursday will be dedicated to RSS readers, the software that makes it easy to find, subscribe to and read information published in RSS format.

What is RSS?

Depending on who you talk to, or which version of history you choose to believe, RSS has a number of meanings. According to the Wikipedia entry on RSS, the acronym has morphed several times due to squabbling over standards.

RDF Site Summary (RSS) came first, introduced with the My Netscape portal in March 1999. My Netscape was one of the first customizable portals, and RSS was a key component that allowed users to add specific types of content from a wide variety of sources with relative ease.

Rich Site Summary followed shortly thereafter, in July 1999. This RSS standard was jointly created by Dan Libby, author of Netscape's RDF Site Summary, and Dave Winer, author of a similar format called ScriptingNews.

At this point, Netscape lost interest in the standard. Winer moved forward with his own work, but another group called RSS-DEV produced a different flavor of the standard. In August 2002 Winer put forth an enhancement to his version of RSS, calling it Really Simple Syndication.

Confused? Wait! There's more! In June 2003 yet another working group formed to propose a new format called Atom. Controversy still runs high in the standards community. The good news is that we non-technical types don't really have to worry much about acronyms, standards or other minutiae to use RSS.

The bottom line is that the providers of RSS tools have worked hard to make it very easy for anyone to both create and consume RSS feeds. Once you have a basic (very basic) understanding of the technology, you can pretty much ignore all of the controversy and simply take advantage of all of the rich content available in RSS format.

Acronyms aside, RSS fundamentally is a relatively simple specification that uses XML to organize and format web-based content in a standard way. Content owners create an RSS feed, an XML formatted web page which usually consists of titles and brief descriptions of ten or so articles elsewhere on the site. Because feeds are created using the RSS standard, they can easily be read by a software client called an RSS feed reader or aggregator. Most feed readers can handle all of the current standards.

What's different about RSS feeds vs. straightforward web content? Not much, really, but one key difference is crucial: Content published in an RSS feed is typically set up to send out notifications whenever new material is available.

This makes the new content immediately available to feed readers and RSS search engines. Contrast this with ordinary web pages, which are essentially passive and generally aren't accessible to most of us until search engine crawlers find and index them. And then, once indexed, these pages stand relatively little chance of being surfaced by web searchers.

That's why RSS is important, and why its something every serious web searcher should be using. RSS feed readers allow you to subscribe to feeds that you know contain important or useful information, and your feed reader will notify you immediately whenever new content for your subscriptions is available. In short, once you've identified a useful resource that publishes an RSS feed, you can virtually skip searching for it altogether.

RSS has other virtues, as well. Because RSS is popular with both bloggers and news media organizations, you can use RSS search engines to find information in near real-time. For example, with the Indonesian tsunami or the London bombings, RSS search engines allowed users to locate information, images and videos posted by people on the scene hours before traditional media sources had similar eye-witness coverage.

How do you identify web sites that publish RSS feeds? That's the focus of tomorrow's SearchDay, RSS Search Engines.

August 31, 2005 at 03:39 PM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink | TrackBack (63) | Top of page | Blog Home

State of the Blogosphere, August 2005, Part 1: Blog Growth

Technorati Weblog: State of the Blogosphere, August 2005, Part 1: Blog Growth

Posted by Dave SifryDave Sifry on August 02, 2005. Tags: Blogosphere

Well, it is that time again! It has been almost 6 months since the last State of the Blogosphere, and so the team at Technorati and I have put together some high level information on what we've been tracking. Today I'll focus on the macro growth of the blogosphere, both in the number of bloggers out there, as well as in the growth of new blogs per day. You can compare the chart below to the charts from October 2004 and March 2005.

August 2, 2005 at 04:18 PM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink | TrackBack (8) | Top of page | Blog Home

One blog created 'every second'

BBC NEWS | Technology | One blog created 'every second'

The blogosphere is continuing to grow, with a weblog created every second, according to blog trackers Technorati.

In its latest State of the Blogosphere report, it said the number of blogs it was tracking now stood at more than 14.2m blogs, up from 7.8m in March.

It suggests, on average, the number of blogs is doubling every five months.

Blogs, the homepages of the 21st Century, are free and easy to set up and use. They are popular with people who want to share thoughts online.

They allow for the instant publication of ideas and for interactive conversations, through comments, with friends or strangers.

Global voices

Technorati is like a search engine that keeps track of what is happening in the blogosphere, the name given to the universe of weblogs.

It relies on people tagging - giving keywords to - their blogs or blog posts so that its search engine can find them.

Free blogging services such as those provided by MSN Spaces, Blogger, LiveJournal, AOL Journals, WordPress and Movable Type were also growing quickly, said the report.

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.

It also pointed to the growth in moblogs, blogs to which people with camera phones automatically send pictures and text.

Other services, such as the Google toolbar and the Flickr photo sharing website, have implemented "blog this" buttons, which also make it easier for people to post content they like on the web straight to their blogs.

The voices in the blogosphere are also sounding less US-centric, with blog growth spotted in Japan, Korea, China, UK, France, and Brazil.

Varied sphere

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, online 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.

Blogs have played a part in highlighting issues that journalists have not covered. They have also proved to be a valuable communication channel for journalists in repressed countries who have no other publishing means.

They have recently shown how they can also complement and enhance mainstream press in coverage of events, such as the recent London terror attacks.

The Technorati report did not, however, break down the blogosphere in terms of gender use.

Over the weekend, the BlogHer conference took place in the US, which saw a gathering of almost 300 bloggers talk over blogging issues which are pertinent to women, and to men.

August 2, 2005 at 04:12 PM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink | TrackBack (4) | Top of page | Blog Home

The Culture of Participation

Business 2.0 :: Online Article :: Future Boy :: The Culture of Participation
By Erick Schonfeld, July 18, 2005
Blogs, wikis, Flickr, Zazzle. These are not the names of strange aliens from other planets. They are the expressions of an emerging culture right here on Earth. It’s a culture in which every citizen is a publisher, photographer, programmer, or product designer. It’s a culture that's blurring the lines between amateur and professional, consumer and creator. It’s the culture of participation.

Blogs have given rise to millions of citizen journalists, all self-publishing maniacally in search of an audience. Wikis, of course, are group blogs that turn the participation dial up a notch by allowing multiple authors to contribute to the same webpage. The photo-sharing website Flickr is a natural consequence of the spread of digital cameras: Snap pictures, download them to a computer, and upload them to the Web (where friends, or anyone else, can see them). Video will be next.

But the culture of participation goes beyond blogs, wikis, and showing off your digital photos. Joe Kraus, one of the original founders of Excite, is now CEO of JotSpot, a corporate wiki subscription service. He says, "I think wikis are the tip of a larger trend: do-it-yourself."

While wikis make it easy for people to publish a communal website, Kraus thinks "the next leap is to make it easy for people to publish an application." He's talking about taking a lot of the stuff that people currently manage in Excel spreadsheets and making it simple to publish those things on the Web as applications that can, say, track deals, contracts, projects, or wedding invitations. In other words, he wants to make it easy for people to create their own custom software and share it with friends and colleagues without having to know how to write a single line of code.

The basic premise of the culture of participation is that any content that can be created digitally can be shared with the world. And, consequently, any digital content can be turned into a product and sold on the Web. That's the fundamental insight of a startup called Zazzle, which has been quietly building a business over the past two years by allowing anyone to upload digital images to its website and print them on T-shirts, posters, and greeting cards. Starting today, Zazzle will also sell stamps that can be customized with pictures of your dog or Mickey Mouse. (Branded images from Disney, Fox, and other companies are available for mixing and matching as well.)

Here's the catch: Zazzle is more than just a do-it-yourself site. Many people choose to make their photos or artwork available to anyone who visits. Zazzle has thousands of branded images on the site, but hundreds of thousands more are contributed by individuals. Members generally receive a 10 percent royalty every time one of their images is used for a T-shirt or poster Zazzle sells. (Disney and Fox get many times more than that.) "The marketplace succeeds only if we can offer something for everyone," explains Zazzle CEO Robert Beaver. That's why he offers the full spectrum, from Winnie the Pooh posters to sci-fi artwork created by freelance graphic designers. It's worth noting, however, that the majority of Beaver's sales (he won't reveal an exact figure but claims it's in the millions) come from the customer-generated images.

Zazzle takes the idea of consumer participation (and mass customization) to a new level. Not only is there an almost infinite variety of product combinations that consumers can create on the site, but if they don't find what they like, they can add their own digital creations to the mix. "It allows people to express their creativity in digital form and then allows them to turn those into products either for themselves or for other people," explains Ram Shriram, who recently participated in a $16 million venture investment in the company with John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. (Both Shriram and Doerr were also early investors in Google.) Shriram adds, "I clearly was not just looking at it from the perspective of T-shirts and posters. I think this idea ultimately can be bigger."

Someday the culture of participation will enable not only personalized stamps but personalized fabrication of things like electronics, automobiles, and furniture. Somebody just has to figure out how to bring computer-aided design software to the masses. Maybe that can be Joe Kraus's next startup. It's not such a crazy idea. If the Web teaches us anything, it's that a lot of people out there would rather make things themselves than rely on some company (or corporate IT person, for that matter) to do it for them.

July 22, 2005 at 01:15 PM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink | TrackBack (12) | Top of page | Blog Home

Microsoft Will Swallow RSS

Microsoft Will Swallow RSS - Yahoo! News
Lance Ulanoff - PC Magazine
Tue Jul 19,10:53 AM ET

I've heard comedians say that there are no new jokes, just the same ones delivered with new circumstances and characters. Sounds implausible, but it turns out life is a lot like comedy. New things rarely happen; we live in a state of almost perpetual déjà vu—very similar things have happened before. This theory can also be applied to technology. The same scenarios play out over and over again, and no one seems to notice.

This occurred to me recently when Microsoft announced that the next versions of Internet Explorer (7.0) and Windows (Longhorn) would integrate RSS (Really Simply Syndication) support. It was also the way Microsoft announced this, telling PC Magazine editors in one meeting that RSS and subscribing are "the next stage of evolution" of the Internet. It was evident that the Redmond software giant now believes that RSS is the next big thing. Well, RSS is big, but it's happening now, and it's being used throughout the Internet and on client desktops to push/pull relevant content.

As always—and this, too, is familiar—Microsoft's embrace of this relatively new technology is nearly as tight as a death grip and will, apparently, stop just short of that so it can subsume RSS inside its popular operating system and browser technology.

On the surface, this is good news for end users. Internet Explorer will, on its own, automatically discover RSS feeds; and Longhorn—and other apps running inside the new OS—will be able to build feed lists based on a new set of RSS extensions that Microsoft plans on posting to a common source receptacle known as Common Code. Company execs even added that their way of organizing feed lists would be better than existing methods that force you to maintain separate feeds in each reader.— Continue reading

Was this paranoia, or did something about Microsoft's RSS announcement seem oddly familiar? I searched my mind and then it hit me: DOS 6.0. Way back in 1992, when Microsoft announced and first demonstrated DOS 6.0 at PCMag's offices, company representatives were especially excited about the inclusion of integrated memory management, also known as MemMaker. Early systems had a 640K RAM (known as conventional memory) limit. So an entire industry grew around expanding that to 1MB, integrating things into what we like to call "upper memory". MemMaker took over that job, even rewriting autoexecbat and config.sys files to free up as much conventional memory as possible. DOS 6.0 included a host of other utilities, including antivirus, backup, and file transfer, but the Redmondonians were also very excited about the hard disk compression utility, Double Space. Don't laugh. Our hard drives were tiny back then, and being able to turn 200MB of storage into 400MB without buying another hard drive was a big deal.

The only problem with Microsoft's cheery development achievements was that there was already a thriving "third-party" utility business in, notably, the memory management and disk compression space. Memory managers included NetRoom, 386Max, QEMM, and QRAM. The compression leader was Stacker from Stac Electronics.

I remember wondering how these companies would react to Microsoft's entry into their market. With these utilities built into the OS, would there be any need for these third-party utilities? While compression company Stacker reacted as, perhaps, many of us expected and sued Microsoft—with whom it had previously had discussions about possibly including Stacker in the next edition of Windows—other competitors were not nearly so combative. When asked directly, utility suite and memory management utility company execs "welcomed" Microsoft into the space, saying that it would raise awareness about the whole class and that people would naturally try out MS's offerings but then turn to their full-featured solutions.

That's not exactly what happened. Within a few years of DOS 6 shipping, those utilities (and the companies that built them) had disappeared.

So what did RSS reader companies say in 2005 when asked about Microsoft's RSS plans?

"I think [Microsoft's announcement] is great," Greg Reinacker, NewsGator's founder, told PC Magazine. "It's companies like Microsoft that can, by building things into a browser, really build a market for RSS…. They're exposing it to the masses, which can only help companies like ours."

Wow, talk about déjà vu. Of course, what choice does Reinacker have? Admit that we've seen this before and then bid his customers a fond farewell? Let's face it, Microsoft's pattern is well known and pretty much unstoppable. Anyone remember 1995—Windows and the Internet?

After DOS, Microsoft "discovered" the Internet in 1995. The company had ignored it through much of '93, '94, and half of '95, as it tried to develop and launch Windows 95. The first Win 95 didn't even ship with Internet Explorer. It wasn't until Service Pack 2 that it first appeared. Microsoft returned to form, though, in 1997 when it released
Windows 98, featuring a deeply integrated Internet Explorer 4.0. Again, the embrace of the "new thing" was deep, strong, and deadly for the competition. In another echo of the RSS announcement, Microsoft even began rolling out its own form of HTML—DHTML. It started showing up in all of its applications. There were "HTML" tags that no one recognized, but Microsoft wanted everyone to use them and was even glad to share the spec freely.

It isn't hard to figure out what happens next in the Longhorn-IE-RSS scenario. IE 7 will launch later this year, and Longhorn will finally arrive in 2006(?), both sporting easy-to-use, seamlessly integrated RSS capabilities. The whole industry, including competitors, will cheer. Then they'll have this pang, a flash of déjà vu, and wonder what hit them.

July 19, 2005 at 05:16 PM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink | TrackBack (12) | Top of page | Blog Home

Cellphone journalism

TheStar.com - Cellphone journalism

"The content of any medium is always another medium." — Marshall McLuhan

Rarely has the truth of a sociological observation smacked us in the face with more force than it did two days ago, when local readers of both this newspaper and the National Post were confronted with images so purposefully grainy, they seemed to be diffusing before our very eyes.

Justifiably, much has been made of these cellphone photographs of the aftermath of the London bombings as a defining moment in "citizen journalism."

"The participatory nature of the news coverage of the London bombings ... erases the line between those affected by the news and those who cover the news," wrote Tim Porter on his media blog, First Draft.

What's fascinating is the way this new-media phenomenon is couched in old-media concepts.

"There was a cliché that journalists write the first draft of history, '' Dan Gillmor, founder of Grassroots Media, told the New York Times. "Now I think these people are writing the first draft of history at some level, and that's an important shift."

Given the almost instantaneous posting of hundreds of "amateur" photographs on the website Flickr, it seemed less like a collaborative first draft than a multitude of different drafts. The result wasn't so much a Rashomon-like narrative as a disorienting din of storytellers, each reading from a different book — one that might, in time, end up comprising one epic, unfinished manuscript.

There are still, however, two sides to every story.

"The accumulation of data, and then of context, becomes the story we need to read," Gillmor wrote on his blog. "It's not just one story, and it never was for people who wanted more than superficial coverage.

"We need the citizen journalists' coverage, and need better ways to get at it. But early this morning, for the context I craved, I turned to the professionals first — online, of course ..."

Perhaps what those blurry images ultimately accomplished was a reaffirmation that, as McLuhan observed, "the personal and social consequences of any medium — that is, of any extension of ourselves — results from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves ... "

— John Sakamoto

July 10, 2005 at 09:20 AM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink | TrackBack (2) | Top of page | Blog Home

Workflow for Movable Type released

Movable Type - News - Workflow for Movable Type released

Anil | 02:28 PM

Workflow, a new plugin for Movable Type 3.1x, has just been released by David Raynes. While we don't usually feature new plugins as part of our news about the Movable Type platform, we thought it was worth pointing out because Workflow adds a powerful new area of functionality, and also marks a milestone for the growth of our plugin community.

First, the features: Workflow lets you limit control of publshing rights to certain authors in your Movable Type installation, allowing other people on the system to act as editors and review entries before they're published. Administrators can control who has rights to any of these levels of permissions. Plus, authors can transfer ownership of a post to other authors and they'll be notified by email when the transfer happens.

Workflow Screenshot

In addition to the features in this plugin, the ecosystem for Workflow is just as compelling. As David has noted on his blog, the Workflow plugin is being offered with a paid commercial license. Though there have been DropCash campaigns to raise money for plugins in the past, and other plugin developers are charging for their plugins as well, it's exciting to see some of these efforts evolve from being projects to becoming products.

Just as exciting, David's announced a plugin architecture for the Workflow plugin, complete with a plugin contest. The full details of the contest haven't been released yet, but seeing David go from being a Plugin contest winner to hosting his own plugin contest in a little over half a year reflects just how much the opportunities around weblogs have grown.

If you can get past the mind-bending idea of plugins having their own plugins, it really shows how plugin developers have taken a place next to strategy consultants, content mavens, and implementation experts in benefitting from the rise of Movable Type as a platform for professionals.

We'll be following up on these ideas on the Professional network site in the weeks to come, to help developers working with plugins, whether you're trying to make a living with your work, just help raise your profile as a consultant, or if you want to make free plugins just to make working with Movable Type more efficient and enjoyable.

June 12, 2005 at 02:07 AM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink | TrackBack (20) | Top of page | Blog Home

Bloggers take on European elites

BBC NEWS | World | Europe | Bloggers take on European elites

By Kevin Anderson
BBC News website

Etienne Chouard's e-manifesto against the treaty
Etienne Chouard's manifesto drew record numbers of hits

The French newspaper dubbed Marseille law teacher Etienne Chouard "Don Quichotte du non".

Mr Chouard did not much care for the EU Constitution, but instead of simply voicing his upset to his neighbours, he wrote an essay and set up a blog to explain why he was voting 'Non'.

Just ahead of the vote, his blog was getting 25,000 hits a day and his anti-constitution broadside had been photocopied, faxed and blogged about across France.

Despite overwhelming support for the constitution by the governments of both France and the Netherlands and a huge media campaign by political leaders in both countries, voters have rejected the constitution.

And just as the media and political establishment in the US found during last year's presidential election, European elites have now felt the sting of these online upstarts, the bloggers.

An 'enormous force'

Mr Chouard, the teacher turned blogger, has become a folk hero for the 'Non' campaigners who rebelled against what they saw as an out of touch political elite.

Fans posting to his blog have asked where they can send contributions to erect a statue of him in Marseille,

He took issue with the 66,000 word constitution saying that it would be difficult to amend and that it did not lay out the separation of powers between agencies.

The "Yes" campaigners argued that the blogs were perpetuating myths and half-truths, French internet consultant Stanislas Magniant told the BBC.

But those opposed to the constitution found the internet in general and blogs in particular as one of the ways to get their message out, he said.

"Proponents of 'No' have said the mainstream media have been shamelessly in favour of the 'Yes'. They said the internet was the main area where the democratic debate can take place," he added.

But it was not just Mr Chouard, Nicolas Vanbremeersch of the blog Publius actually expected more online activism than took place in France after the role of blogs in the US presidential campaign last year.

But he told the BBC News Website that both "Yes" and "No" campaigners used the internet and weblogs extensively.

However, the "Yes" side's internet efforts were too late and too little.

"The 'No' side, the extreme left, was very organised on the internet. The 'Yes' side has been late in taking up blogs as interactive tools," he said.

The political left already had many internet sites ahead of the constitutional campaign and they quickly launched blogs for the campaign, he added.

Mr Magniant is not ready to say that blogs were a determining factor in the referendum, but he does believe that blogs dramatically lowered the barrier to entry to take part in political debate.

"In terms of grassroots power, (blogs) have been an enormous force," he said.

June 5, 2005 at 12:13 AM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink | TrackBack (4) | Top of page | Blog Home

Now British bloggers are hogging the headlines

Now British bloggers are hogging the headlines - Doors - Times Online

By Dan Sabbagh
The 'new medium'
BRITISH blogging is beginning to score some hits. Last week Holy Moly (holymoly.co.uk), the showbusiness gossip site, was the first to reveal that Mark Thompson, the Director-General of the BBC, once bit a colleague — while frustrated Conservative Party supporters said that they were turning to the internet to help get their message across.

That might appear small, but if the American experience is anything to go by, blogging will gradually develop into a medium in its own right, challenging the traditional authority of newspapers and broadcasters. Already, British audiences are growing rapidly, which means that influence and money will follow.

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Click here to find out more!
In the US, it was the Drudge Report (drudgereport.com) that first named Monica Lewinsky; powerline.com that humbled the CBS anchor Dan Rather, who had accused George Bush of dodging military duties; and it was bloggers that forced the resignations of Trent Lott, as Senate majority leader, and CNN�s head of news Eason Jordan.

Holy Moly may lack the brand recognition of Matt Drudge, but in the past 18 months, when development became more serious, the gossip site has added 150,000 subscribers to a weekly newsletter that reached only 3,000 readers before, and claims to be visited by 2 million unique users a month.

Stories are short; the site reads like a newspaper diary with attitude and the most recent mailout speculates that Jude Law has pulled out of appearing in Ricky Gervais�s forthcoming comedy Extras, and that Vinnie Jones has run up the biggest annual mobile phone bill of any individual in the UK (�18,000).

Holy Moly is based on the belief that the �best blogs come from people writing what they believe, with no agendas � these days it is very refreshing to hear that kind of authentic voice�, according to its founder, who prefers to remain anonymous in an attempt to maintain his site�s mystique and protect his day job at a television broadcaster�s online production arm.

A similar search for authenticity underpins Tim Montgomerie�s thinking. Montgomerie is a former adviser to the previous Tory leader, Iain Duncan Smith, and has raised �15,000 to launch conservativehome.com, a news and views website that is sympathetic to but independent of the Conservative Party.

Montgomerie�s belief is that �many are wiser than the few�, meaning that he hopes, optimistically, that readers will generate content. The site asks visitors to use the blog to �bring attention to stories in your local community or to the latest examples of BBC bias�, and its founder hopes that �new media can break down the old media monopoly�.

Holy Moly, meanwhile, is still largely seen as a source for newspaper stories, although the site is beginning to emerge as a competitor in its own right, as in the case of the Mark Thompson story. The future Director-General once bit a colleague in an act of horseplay that backfired, a tale recounted in an e-mail exchange that had been kicking around some Fleet Street newsrooms for several days.

But it was the website that was the first to publish, supported by a willingness to take more risk (it helps that Holy Moly has not been sued). �Mark Thompson was the perfect Holy Moly story: silly, stupid, surreal and 100 per cent true,� said Holy Moly�s webmaster, who decided after checking out the story overnight to �send it out to 150,000 people in 30 seconds�.

Every major newspaper picked it up, and the slew of ensuing questions prompted the BBC to confirm that it was true, leading to widespread publication the day after. Holy Moly was not credited, however. �Newspapers, and particularly the tabloids, are only beginning to admit how much they use Holy Moly and (rival) Popbitch for stories.�

In a sign of the growing optimism amongst bloggers Holy Moly hopes to start making money. For now the site is run part time, supported by a network of �about a hundred sources� but the idea is to provide an �alternative news feed� in conjunction with an unnamed broadcaster.

Advertisers, though, have been turned off by the explicit language that is used. �That would mean changing the editorial tone, which is the whole reason why people come to the site�.

British blogging is still essentially a hobby � Montgomerie is also running his Conservative site part time while he looks for more backing � but it is