Paul: Blogs

Sun, 26 Feb 2006 00:44:16 GMT

Cool Photo App

Check out the new program by Albert Lai of Bubbleshare Looks like a winner to me.

Sat, 04 Feb 2006 21:03:51 GMT

It will be interesting to keep an eye on this. I don't see much of a chance for this in our shop.

Forresterâ€™s corporate blogging solutions evaluation, Part 1. I'm conducting a review of corporate blogging solutions this quarter and could use your help in the process. Forrester has been doing evaluations -- we call them waves of technology solutions for the past few years and we thought this... [Charlene Li's Blog]

Sun, 13 Mar 2005 20:28:13 GMT

Blog Hosting - Steps for hosting a blog. The first installment in a range of info guides to help you setup blog hosting for personal and business blogs. Blog hosting : weblog host features Once you have registered your domain name, you will need to find a blog hosting provider. When comparing blog hosts, be sure to look at all ... [Blog Weblog]

Thu, 03 Feb 2005 02:33:36 GMT

Blogging at Public CIO.

Public CIO Magazine has an article on blogging by Blake Harris that I'm part of. Blake asked a lot of good questions and we talked for a while.

That is why the Utah state government's brash foray into blogging stands out. A few months after becoming Utah's CIO in 2001, Phillip Windley began blogging personally.

"It wasn't very long after that -- a month or so -- that I realized there could be a lot of value to an organization if there were people inside the organization who blogged," Windley explained. "I could see how when I wrote stuff on my blog, people who worked for me and people who worked in IT throughout the state, as well as others, would respond to it. I thought, "This is cool. I've got a channel to essentially talk to these people.'"

But Windley also wanted to hear what these people were thinking and saying. So he assembled a little program, negotiated a price for up to 100 licenses with UserLand, and offered anyone in Utah state government a free blog for a year if they wanted to start blogging. Although blogs were little known among the general Internet population back then, about 35 people took him up on the offer.

Many of these blogs eventually died for various reasons. "Some people just don't like to write," said Windley. "And there was some institutional backlash against it. There was>From Government Technology's Public CIO Magazine
Referenced Wed Feb 02 2005 16:00:46 GMT-0700

[Phil Windley's Technometria]

Sun, 19 Dec 2004 16:46:27 GMT

First there were blogs, then wikis, then podcasts, now Wikicasts?.

J.P. Stewart revealed, in an IM message to me, another innovation: the WikiCast. I left a message over there. Anyone can. You just need to know the phone number to call and leave a message. It's a mixture of a Wiki, dial in audio, and RSS/podcasting.

[Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]

Sun, 19 Dec 2004 16:43:09 GMT

Dvorak teaches blogging to newbies, MSN desktop shortcuts site opens.

What a great into to this. I need to send this out to my friends who need some prodding.

John Dvorak: Understanding and Reading a Blog for Newcomers.

Sat, 18 Dec 2004 23:37:31 GMT

Onfolio 2 beta 1 ships.

Let's be honest. As much as I like NewsGator, RSS Bandit, SharpReader, and FeedDemon (they each have their advantages) the RSS News Aggregator that'll work for the mass market HAS to be built into the browser.

That takes us to today. OnFolio just shipped a beta of their new RSS News Aggregator. It's awesome.

It works on Firefox or IE. It gives Dave Winer his all-in-one-page newspaper view that he's been asking aggregator makers to give him. Lots of fun little features. Search, built in. It's actually a little database running on your desktop. Very nice.

[Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]

Fri, 10 Dec 2004 23:27:44 GMT

Draft of a book proposal.

Shel Israel posted a book proposal draft today. Join the discussion. That's terrifying, to tell the truth, but no more terrifying than sending Tim O'Reilly or Gary Cornell an email pitching them a book project. Blogger]

Tue, 16 Nov 2004 01:13:54 GMT

I will have to track down a copy of this in the AM.

Forrester report on corporate blogs. I just published a report on the corporate use of blogs, including best practices on when and how companies should be creating them. You'll need to have a subscription to Forrester to access the full report. Hereâ€™s the executive... [Charlene Li's Blog]

Thu, 28 Oct 2004 01:08:58 GMT

Forrester RSS feeds. - Forrester launched it's official RSS feed page with three choices: WholeView2 (which gives you excerpts of all of the research produced) and two sub-feeds, one for IT-oriented research and... [Charlene Li's Blog]

Consultants and fear of corporate blogging

Tue, 26 Oct 2004 00:37:43 GMT

Consultants and fear of corporate blogging

What an interesting concept. It seems like only a week ago or so that a research analyst in my Department sent me an invite from a top IT consulting company about blogging and the impact for organizations. I've been bugging him to look into blogging for over two years since his job is dispensing information and research to others. Dispensing it via a blog is a natural. He always told me the places/people he got his informantion from Gartner, Forrester, NOREX, Nascio ect., didnt have blogs so there was no way for him to get good and reliable information. We suscribe to them all so he gets all the information he needs and shares it willing via email.

Soooo... I was very pleased when he sent me an invite to an upcoming event discussing blogging in organizations. I sent him a long message telling him I was glad to see the big IT consultant folks getting into the space now. I thought it was a double edged sword since consultants make big $ based on their recommendations. Someone with a $40 dollar software package could create a blog, get a "reputation" and provide competition the the established consulting companies. The fact that they could speak freely about products w/out the legal fears of big companies might help a blogger, but not neccessarily accuracy! . Actually, that is not a good thing but it is totally possible.

I ended up by telling him thanks, but the cost of the conference was way more then I could afford plus I wasn't conviced it was safe enough to blog in my organization quite yet anyway.

Then I stumbled across a new blog by Forrester analyst Charlen Li where she stated.

...I'm currently researching how companies should go about blogging (it's a piece that I'll be producing as part of Forrester's Client Choice program -- clients get to choose from a number of different and topics and lo and behold -- blogging was #1). And Robert Scoble comes out with a very thoughtful post piece discussing the fear that holds companies back from setting up blogs.

In the course of my work, I frequently talk with companies struggling with what to do about blogs -- all the pros of connecting with your customers offset by tons of scary legal scenarios.

As I mentioned earlier, this is Forrester's first blog .....<emphasis added>

Looks like the evolution is occuring. :) I look forward to reading more of Charlenes posts as she learns more about how the medium is changing the old rules.

Wed, 20 Oct 2004 01:53:55 GMT

Are you afraid to blog?.

This is a great article. It comes on the heels of a coworker asking me about blogging in my organization. I may work for Scoble, but I as I mentioned to my co worker, we are just not ready for it.

Corporate Fear.

Fear of being different. Fear of telling your boss your ideas. Fear of speaking up in meetings. Fear of going up to someone you don't know and introducing yourself. Fear of doing something that might destroy your career.

Fear of weblogging.

It's time we get over our fears.

I meet a lot of people around the industry. Almost everytime I meet someone, I ask them "do you have a weblog?" That's my way of saying "I like you and want to hear more of your ideas." Even deeper: I want a permanent relationship with you (and not of the sexual kind, either).

I've asked this question of people at Apple. Google. IBM. eBay. Real Networks. Cisco. Intel. HP. Amazon. And, yes, here at Microsoft.

Too often the answer is "I couldn't do that."

"Why not?" I ask.

"Because I might get fired," is often the answer. I hate that answer. It's an example of corporate fear. An artifact of a management system that doesn't empower its employees to act on behalf of customers.

I find this fear disturbing. Imagine being a flight attendant with this kind of fear. "Sorry, I can't talk to the passengers in this plane today cause I might get fired."

I'm not the only one who sees it, either. John McCain, in the September 2004 Fast Company, went looking for courage.

Lately, more and more people, both inside and outside of Microsoft, have been asking me for ways to convince their boss to "get" weblogging. Translation: they are trying to overcome their fears (and/or get their managers to empower them).

Lately I've been answering with one word: Kryptonite.

"What?"

Kryptonite. Lately I've been asking audiences I've been speaking to "who knows the Kryptonite story?" 75% do.

If you don't know the story, do a Google search for Kryptonite and "Bic Pen". We'll wait.

We just watched the destruction of an American brand. 75% know about it. Why? Because of one or two weblogs and the new word-of-mouth network. Yes, Engadget and Gizmodo do have that kind of power. Engadget alone has 250,000 of the most influential readers the world has ever seen.

My second question is: "What have you heard from Kryptonite about this issue?"

Not a single person has been able to tell me the answer yet (yes, they have an official response on the home page of their site, but no one in my audiences has been able to articulate the answer to me). Why not?

I went looking for the answer. I searched Google for "Kryptonite Weblog." None found. "Kryponite blog." None found. I went looking for executive names. None found. So, I couldn't look up whether any of the execs had a blog.

Only a press release on the home page. No way to have a conversation. No way to tell the company off. I looked for comments from the company on Engadget and BoingBoing. I didn't find any, but maybe they are there somewhere. Dave Sifry, founder of Technorati, tracked the Kryptonite story in the blogosphere and did some interesting graphic analysis.

Want to motivate your boss to get blogs? Have him do some homework on the Kryptonite story and look at the brand equity that has gone away due to their response (or lack thereof).

Here's what's going on: the word-of-mouth networks are becoming more efficient at a time when people trust large corporations less and less.

The time it takes for an idea to be hatched, found by Slashdot, and then reported in the mainstream media, is now about five weeks.

Next time around it will be even faster.

Why? The word-of-mouth networks are becoming more efficient.

Today there's 4,305,245 weblogs, as reported by Technorati.

Yeah, maybe only 55% of those are actually being published to (Dave Sifry, founder of Technorati says). But look at that growth curve. The blogosphere is eight times as large today as it was in June 2003! If those trends don't get your attention, nothing will. Go back to sleep.

But, a corporate blog isn't just a good place to talk to the world whenever there's a crisis. If that's the only reason you let your employees blog, you'll be missing the really good stuff here.

"OK, what are the reasons I should let my employees blog?"

Here's my observations:

1) People don't trust corporations. Especially big and successful ones like, um, Microsoft. Come on, be honest, none of you really trust us to do the right thing, do you? So, how do we show you that we're trustworthy? We need to invite you deep inside our corporate structures and talk to you like human beings. It's exactly why Channel 9 resonates with so many of you.

2) People don't like talking to corporations. Again, be honest, if you saw a press release from a big company asking for you to provide feedback on something, would you? Hey, Microsoft has had "mswish@microsoft.com" for a long time. Even when I was a customer of Microsoft's, I'd never send anything to that address. Why? I never thought anyone was listening. Do any of you feel any differently? Yet I get so much email now giving Microsoft feedback about our products that I can't keep up (I'm four days behind).

3) That old "markets are conversations" thing. If you haven't read the Cluetrain Manifesto, why not?

4) Which is more believeable? A press release from, say, Ford Motor Company, or a few blog entries from the people who designed the new Ford Mustang's powertrain.

That Ford blog is just inspiring. Here are people who obviously love what they do, have been empowered to share their love.

Yeah, it isn't perfect. I notice a bit of marketing talk seeping in there (someone slap me when I do that!). And where are the darn permalinks and RSS feed? Grrr. Ford: your customers want a permanent marketing relationship with you. You are so absolutely close to completely getting it. Go the extra 10%.

5) Blogs build customer evangelists. I learned at the MSN Search Champs that people WANT to be evangelists for your products, they just need to be included in the business. "Huh?" I can hear some of you asking. You know, include your most passionate customers from the very start of the product planning cycle. Don't think that works? It's time you go back and meet Amy, the customer evangelist at the Christopher Creek winery in Sonoma. She had such an impact on me that I'm talking about that winery months after my visit to Sonoma. Now THAT'S evangelism. I wish she had a blog, I'd love to read her thoughts on the wine industry. By the way, Christopher Creek doesn't have a blog. What a missed opportunity! A worse tragedy? Amy, the evangelist, isn't featured on their Web site.

6) Blogs build market momentum and get adoption. Ask Buzz Bruggeman, CEO of ActiveWords, about this one. He's gotten world-class reviews in the newspapers you all love and know (just a week or so ago ActiveWords was in the New York Times). But he gets more downloads of his product when I linked to him than when a famous "USA" newspaper wrote a glowing review. They have millions of readers. What am I missing here? Yet I've had product managers for products that make billions every year tell me that they'll just advertise in national newspapers and get the same "kick" that blogs will get them. (They look at my puny 4,000 readers per day and laugh. Keep laughing, but do your homework and ask Buzz about his experiences -- he's not the only one who's noticed this. Ask Nokia (or, even the marketers at Microsoft) about how important a good link on Engadget is).

How many Xbox Live subscriptions has Major Nelson (aka Larry Hryb, programming director on Xbox Live) sold? I bought one cause of his blog. I know there's others. Aside: By the way, Larry, your latest item was obviously written by someone in marketing. Don't do that anymore. You'll lose your credibility. Your authenticity. Your voice. Tell the marketing guys to get their own blogs if they want you to post that kind of stuff. You can always link over. Human minds are excellent pattern recognizers. We can tell when something doesn't fit.

Be like Dallas Mavericks' CEO Mark Cuban. He said, on his blog, "The point of my blog is to try to tell the story behind the story that is in the paper." Most journalists only have 10 to 30 column inches to write about your product. Yes, celebrate everytime your product gets written up by the New York Times (believe me, Buzz does, he calls me everytime he gets written up). But, use your blog to explain more. Will the New York Times explain all the new graphics that are available for the Maytag SkyBox? No, but their blog sure does!

A well-done simple blog will make you an authority. Hey, looking for real estate in Southern California? If you read a blog like this one, does that make you more or less likely to use the team of Fran and Rowena?

Anyway, that's enough, gotta go do some email and get some sleep. What else could we do to help you get over your fears? Should we come over and wack your boss upside the head? Here's a little secret. You should do just that. He or she might fire you, but then if you don't blog the market might fire you anyway. Just ask the folks over at Kryptonite.

[Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]

Wed, 20 Oct 2004 01:43:10 GMT

Gartenberg says that some SHOULD be afraid of blogging.

Michael Gartenberg: Robert offers a lot of risky corporate advice.

"Some organizations have the right culture that can allow for blogging to take place with minimal disruption and actually enhance conversations. Robert Scoble is fortunate to be working for one of them. Other organizations need to deal with three separate issues and they are not all the same and they can each be dealt with over time."

[Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]

Wed, 29 Sep 2004 00:50:27 GMT

CNET posts video on RSS.

CNET has posted a cool video tutorial on RSS. Great to send your friends and coworkers who are wondering about what RSS is.

Thanks to Terry Heaton for linking to that. Yeah, that's on my linkblog too.

Update: Dave Winer is asking "where's the credit?"

[Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]

Sun, 08 Aug 2004 22:14:11 GMT

A nice explanation.

Blog Tutorial | What is a blog ?. For more documentation on blogging with WordPress, visit Douglas Campbell's online blog reference : Intro to Blog What is a "blog"? "Blog" is a short version of "weblog", which is a term used to describe web sites which maintain an ongoing chronicle of information. One definition says, "A ... [Blog Portal]

Google,Blogs and blogweblog.com

Sun, 08 Aug 2004 22:00:22 GMT

An interesting story about Google,Blogs and blogweblog.com/

Since I don't have a google email adress I decided to do a search to see if I could score one. I ended up at one of those sites that has raffles and helps folks link up to swap/sell/share addresses. I spied an artiicle about a blog, http://www.blogweblog.com/ that would consider swapping an invite for link. I figured, what the heck and checked it out. Sure enough, this link http://www.blogweblog.com/ now is on my blog making me elligble. But the real interesting thihg about it was. I liked the blog!!! It contained the type of thing that interests me. That means I get to add ANOTHER blog to add to my aggregator plus I geta chance to get a google email invite. Such a deal! They had a whole area dedicated to inside stuff at google.

P.S. Please send google invites to PAULinMich at aol.com Thanks :)

Fri, 16 Jul 2004 00:26:39 GMT

Great ideas here. I have tried to interest people and they always say iut is to hard to do. THhis lets them see just how easy it is.

How to Start a Blog. I'm sure there's a million of these on the net, but I get asked occasionally by friends how to start a blog, so here's a collection of tips that I wrote to a friend recently. Now they're written down somewhere... [Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog]

Sat, 10 Jul 2004 00:19:44 GMT

WSJ Mentions Newsreaders.

Blogs Help You Cope With Data Overload -- If You Manage Them

"To help juggle all those blogs, I've started playing around with a relatively new phenomenon called a newsreader. Rather than forcing you to jump from one blog to another to keep up with new entries, newsreaders bring together the latest postings from your favorite blogs in a single place." [Wall Street Journal (free article)]

A throwaway article about RSS and aggregators that focuses entirely on blogs and doesn't once mention the fact that there are some big time news sites that offer feeds. Hmmm... I wonder why they would ignore such an important fact? Could it be because the WSJ has yet to embrace RSS and offer feeds of its own?....

[The Shifted Librarian]

Sun, 20 Jun 2004 01:18:32 GMT

Tell the world about your favorite news aggregator.

Over on Channel9 they are talking about their favorite RSS and Atom News Aggregators for Windows. What's yours?

Why use a news aggregator? Reading blogs in a news aggregator is 30 times more productive than reading them in a browser.

[Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]

Wed, 19 May 2004 01:03:43 GMT

Wicked (Good) Wikis. Collaboration and Messaging Analyst Stowe Boyd has a seriously great article on wikis in Darwin . Its a good intro to wiki, compares them with weblogs, highlights their emergent properties and role as social tools. ...Wikis are built upon an inherently open model of social interaction and collaboration, with very little constraint placed on the participants. In a sense, this puts the onus back on the members of a project group to self-police: to build structure out of the minimalist forms... [Socialtext]

I also liked this description of blogs

Much of the value of a blog network is the social capital that is built from relationships. People read each others' blogs to see what their friends (and enemies) are up to, and then they add value by linking, commenting and elaborating what is being said. The implicit or explicit "swarmth"[online reputation] that individuals accumulate can be a vital indicator of their worth to the organization — who trusts whose recommendations, whose proposals seem to garner the most attention and who is a respected authority — which can be more effectively managed (if managed is the right word) in the social matrix than in the command-and-control hierarchies that still seem to form the architecture of most businesses. Non-social solutions — such as traditional content management solutions, portals and newsletters — cannot compensate for the missing social dimension that social tools engender. ("Social Tools: Ready For The Enterprise?" Cutter, January 2004)

The same social interactions seem to take place in Wikis, but at a faster pace and with a more intensely collaborative feel. Wiki structure is so open it can be morphed into any of a variety of collaborative modes

Wed, 19 May 2004 00:49:28 GMT

Plogs. Michael Schrage has a great article in CIO on the Virtues of Chitchat, or using a blog for informal IT project communication. He calls an informal project weblog a plog, extolls their benefits for project members and management alike. So... [Ross Mayfield's Weblog]

Tue, 11 May 2004 01:53:03 GMT

Here Are a few great feeds that have appeared recently.

Reuters now offers RSS feeds.
Project Gutenberg provides a feed for new ebooks added to the collection.
Syndic8.com has way more feeds than I thought it did. They are quickly approaching the 100,000 milestone! [via Lockergnome's RSS & Atom Tips]
Here's a great quote from a blogging presentation by George Siemens: "RSS will be bigger than blogging." [via Weblogg-ed News]
"Westlaw Intraclips can now be delivered via RSS!" [LawLibTech] See it in action (in the "KM" folder). This is huge, and hopefully it's just the beginning of getting these types of feeds from database vendors!

[The Shifted Librarian]

Tue, 11 May 2004 01:39:51 GMT

Google unveils new version of Blogger. Google on Monday rolled out an updated version of its Blogger online self-publishing service. The new version features an enhanced dashboard, the ability to post blogs via e-mail, a shared comments function, and author profiles. [InfoWorld: Top News]

Maybe I need to fire up that old blogger blog of mine again.!

Wed, 05 May 2004 00:46:41 GMT

Conference Weblog Tips.

Lee Lefever: What Conference Organizers Need to Know About Weblogs.

[Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]

Tue, 27 Apr 2004 00:21:37 GMT

Mid-Year NASCIO Meeting. Dave Fletcher is blogging highlights of the mid-year NASCIO (National Association of State CIOs) meeting in Chicago. Just the type of thing for folks around here to read.