One indication of popularity of a band or music artist these days is how many friends they have on MySpace and how many times their music is played and commented upon. I recently came across a service that now helps you get those new friends. Contrary to the advice given in the classic Dale Carnegie book mentioned above, some new enterprising service provider, mysocialMarketing.com, now offers you a way to buy them. A package of 3000 to 6000 new friends is available for the unbelievably low price of US $149, a saving of $150 off the regular price.  10,000 profile views and song plays can also be purchased for an additional $299.

Here is one of their pitches:

"It's quickly becoming common knowledge that many major labels will not consider a band on MySpace unless they have at least 25'000 profile views!
Don't miss out on that opportunity simply because of a technicality.Ok, time to level the playing field! We'll now send unique people to your profile to rank up your views and song plays lightning fast."

I am seriously reluctant to advertise them, but at the same time these types of services need to be exposed. This is really bad for social networking.

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A new service that has been developing under the radar.

It's the brainchild of Steven Berlin Johnson, author of Emergence, Mind Wide Open, The Ghost Map, Everything Bad Is Good For You

and ...

John Geraci, a well-know builder of virtual communities

A high-profile investor and lots of high-profile angels and advisers .. in the first camp Union Square (Fred Wilson and Brad Burnham) ... and in the second

We've still got a great list of angels involved as well. Marc Andreessen just wrote in out of the blue to say that he really liked the site, and to ask if he could help out with the financing. Esther Dyson, John Borthwick, George Crowley, and Richard Smith -- it's a fantastic list of people to have behind you. (Along with our other founding investors, John Seely Brown, Mark Bailey, and Andy Karsch.)

Outside.In

Neighbors are registered users of outside.in. Each neighbor has a profile page that shows a bio, photo, neighborhood, website, plus all the stories, comments, and places they’ve contributed to outside.in. (Right now it’s a little tricky to find a specific neighbor, much less communicate with them — but we’re working on it!)

Stories and Comments are the content you add to outside.in about your area. When you add them to the site, they appear on the home page of the area you specified for everyone to see, as well as on your neighbor pages.

Stories are content that comes from other sites, like blogs or newspaper websites, that you submit to the site via the submit a story link in the right column of the page. Add stories to outside.in that relate to your neighborhood and that you find interesting and want to share with your neighbors.

Comments are content that you write yourself, directly to the outside.in website. You add comments to Places, which are any location or venue in your area. Add a comment to any Place you want, either to point out something you like, or just to talk about something interesting in your neighborhood.

Places can be everything from restaurants to playgrounds to schools — or even more subjective categories (most dangerous intersection, best spot for winter sledding.) Any story or comment can be attached to a Place. The cool thing about these Place pages is that the become an archive of everything that’s been said online about a given place — comments from outside.in Neighbors, blog posts, newspaper reviews, discussion threads.

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Can the Internet ever be controlled as governments might wish it to be ?

Blogging grows in China, despite obstacles.  I think I take issue with the headline ...  "Monster" ?  From whose perspective ?

Via the Globe and Mail

Beijing's censors unleash a monster
A farmer's son is using the blog to change Chinese web culture

The author of the banned articles, a young journalist named Fang Xingdong, was an outspoken critic of the software giant Microsoft. But two hours after his critical essays about the company were published on July 6, 2002, they suddenly disappeared from every website in the country, deemed too controversial.

"I had been one of the pioneers of the Internet in China," he recalls. "Yet after six years of being published on the Internet, suddenly I couldn't get on any websites."

Frustrated and angry, he talked to a friend who mentioned the emergence of blogging in the United States. He glanced at a few blogs. At first they seemed too primitive. But as he thought about it, he began to see the creative possibilities.

"I was very excited," he says. "I couldn't sleep all night."

Four years later, Mr. Fang is chairman and chief executive of China's biggest blogging empire. His company, Bokee, is host to about 14 million bloggers, a quarter of the entire Chinese market, and it gains more than 10,000 new bloggers every day.

Blogging has become the hottest media trend in China. And his company is so popular that it has attracted the interest of media tycoons such as Rupert Murdoch.

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A little more than a week ago Dave Sifry posted Technorati's most recent snapshot of the (continuing) growth and maturation of the blogosphere, including a number of analyses about how blogs continue to penetrate the media scene, the frequency of posting, where posts come from, and how Technorati is mitigating the scourge of splogs (or more accurately, taking steps to not count them).

Here's the concluding summary:

In Summary:

1. Technorati is now tracking more than 57 Million blogs.
2. Spam-, splog- and sping-fighting efforts at Technorati are paying dividends in terms of the reduction of garbage in our indexes, even if it does seem to impact overall growth rates.
3. Today, the blogosphere is doubling in size approximately every 230 days.
4. About 100,000 new weblogs were created each day, again down slightly quarter-over-quarter but probably due in part to spam fighting efforts.
5. About 4% of new splogs get past Technorati's filters, even if it is only for a few hours or days.
6. There is a strong correlation between the aging and post frequency of blogs and their authority and Technorati ranking.
7. The globalization of the blogosphere continues. Our data appears to show both English and Spanish languages are a more universal blog language than the other two most dominant language, Japanese and Chinese, which seem to be more regionally localized.
8. Coincident with a rise in blog posts about escalating Middle East tensions throughout the summer and fall, Farsi has moved into the top 10 languages of the blogosphere, indicating that blogging continues to play a critical role in debates about the important issues of our times.

The last two points are of significant interest, and here's a pie chart that gives us a sense of the spreading globalization of blogging:

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It's been happening for a couple of years.  It's now becoming more obvious.

Newspapers are urged to reach out to Web
BECKY BOHRER
Associated Press

NEW ORLEANS — Online journalists warned a meeting of newspaper editors Thursday that their industry's survival depends on how well they can engage and excite the masses of readers on the Web.

While delving into the digital age may seem daunting, "it's not nearly as frightening as what will happen to journalism if we don't embrace it," Jim Brady, executive editor of washingtonpost.com, said during the Associated Press Managing Editors annual conference.

The Internet provides opportunities for storytelling and interacting with readers that traditional newspapers do not, Brady and panelists at the conference said. From video and photo galleries to podcasts and blogs, the Web is opening new doors to entice in readers and otherwise build community.

"People are desperate for community," Jon Fortt, senior editor of Business2.0 magazine, said during a panel discussion on attracting young readers. That included jargon such as "widgets," which are blocks of information, and mentioned the value social networking sites can offer for finding story ideas and sources.

"They're looking to share ideas," Fortt said.

Some journalists view the rise of the Web culture as a threat to newspapers - and they should, Fortt said in an interview.

"It's a threat to our previous mode of packaging," said the 29-year-old Fortt, adding that he reads more news now than ever and gets most of it from the Web.

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Via CNN.com Technology

CEO bloggers communicate to the masses
September 18, 2006



SANTA CLARA, California (AP) -- Sun Microsystems Inc. CEO Jonathan Schwartz recently became "un blogeur" when he started publishing his Weblog in French and nine other languages.

Schwartz, whose online journal attracts 50,000 viewers each month, says going international will generate new customers attract prospective employees in Europe, China and elsewhere. That puts the 40-year-old chief executive at the vanguard of a trend in corporate communications, one that tears down barriers between executives and consumers.

"The blog has become for me the single most effective vehicle to communicate to all of our constituencies -- developers, media, analysts and shareholders," Schwartz said in an interview in his Silicon Valley office. "When I go out and have dinner with a key analyst on Wall Street or a key investor from Europe and ask them if they've read my blog, they almost universally say yes."

CEOs of smaller companies have already seized on blogs, and big companies are increasingly joining in -- despite the potential for disastrous backfires. In its unfiltered form, blogging lets them bypass the public relations department, journalists and industry analysts and speak directly to the public.

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How often can you count a two-time Olympic medallist as one of your friends?  Scott Goldblatt is a friend of mine and a fellow b5 blogger on the swim blog Timed Finals.  Scott is also visiting our fair Province covering the PanPac international swim meet in Victoria for b5 and Speedo.

Qumana is pleased to be the sponsoring/official blog editor for Scott at the PanPacs.  Scott is live blogging the events (watch out for the water and the laptop Scott!) and just posted his first podcast (hosted on Speedo's site).  Give a listen, because Scott has a great "radio voice" and for his first podcast, I think he rocked it.  Give a listen.

Scott has this to say about Qumana:

"Qumana has allowed me to blog "on the fly" here in Victoria at the Pan Pacs. The ability to save my thoughts offline within a single editor and blog live on the pool deck has been indispensable. Qumana allows me to write, edit, and publish the results and news as quickly as it happens."

I'm hoping to get over to Victoria to hang with Scott a bit this weekend.  Have fun Scott!

Tags: PanPacs, Timed Finals, Qumana, Scott Goldblatt, swimming

... will by definition mean advertising on your MySpace space.

As everyone who doesn't already know will find out soon, Google and Fox Interactive Media (FIM) have struck a deal whereby Google take over the search and advertising functions for MySpace, which will no doubt focus on delivering advertising into and onto MySpace.

It has to be assumed that part of that deal will be the use of Google Ads in the same way that they are being used by bloggers in the blogosphere.

Via The Hollywood Reporter

FIM links to Google in ad pact
By Chris Marlowe

Fox Interactive Media entered a $900 million search and advertising deal with Google on Monday that will substantially help the News Corp. subsidiary recoup the cost of acquiring the MySpace and IGN Web properties.

Sources report that top News Corp. executives began shaping the agreement while at their annual retreat last week in Pebble Beach, Calif. On Monday afternoon, News Corp. president and chief operating officer Peter Chernin said the final agreement had been signed "less than six hours ago" after several days of concentrated negotiations.

"This deal is the next step in our evolution as a significant interactive player," FIM president Ross Levinsohn said. "Forming a strategic partnership with one of the most innovative companies in the world to expand our business together, monetize our platforms effectively and leverage our combined scale will provide substantial growth for our businesses."

The three-year agreement calls for Google to take over the provision of search and related functions across all FIM sites with the exception of Fox Sports, which is not included because of an outstanding contract with Microsoft's MSN. Many of these functions previously had been provided by Yahoo! Inc.

You just have to believe that MySpace will put Google advertising at the disposal of the millions of MySpace users who create and share whatever it is they share on MySpace.

Well ... using Qumana and Q-Ads  you can already advertise on MySpace ... you can inject ads served up by Q-Ads directly into posts you can then publish to your MySpace page.

Just ask Jeneane ... she punked Qumana and MySpace both, by figuring out how to use Qumana and Q-Ads "in reverse", as she described in her recent post Punking Qumana

Ads with Posts Wherever You Go

Ads in MySpace? You can't do that! Yah well, it's my blog, and I don't know all the ins and outs, but I can put keyword ads in MySpace using Qumana in about 1.5 seconds.

Just type your post in Qumana, insert a Q-Ad by clicking the Insert Ad button, the insert your tags, and finally copy the text in Qumana's Source View into your MySpace blog.

Bingo--Your post is formatted, tagged, and even has an ad, all using one copy-and-paste from Qumana. NICE options to have. 

Hey, she also mentioned a bunch of other ways she has found to make blogging so much easier using Qumana.

Now, if only MySpace would provide the blogging community with an API so that we wouldn't have to take that last step of copy-and-paste

Tags: MySpace, Google, AdSense, Qumana, Q-Ads

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I had originally posted on this upcoming 'event' (number of blogs tracked by Technorati) last week, and had anticipated that the blog-o-meter would cross that line sometime on Friday, July 28, 2006.

Well, as of 14h00 pm PDT Technorati reports 49.9 million blogs, so I am (again) guessing that it will be sometime today ... if not, then certainly tomorrow.

A meaningless marker, for sure, but we all like watching and measuring things .. and it certainly doesn't seem so long ago that there were only 5 or 10 million blogs and blogging was still more often than not being bemusedly dismissed as a fad (hehe .. so cute that Forbes would put a blogging-focused article behind a paywall).

That was before newspapers and major online media properties began trying to incorporate blogging or other elements of interactivity into their online offerings.

It will be interesting to see what the next 12 months brings.

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When will that marker be reached ?

Tonight Technorati states it is tracking 49.4 million blogs, so I assume it will be towards the end of this coming week that the 50 million mark will be passed.  Friday ?  Next weekend ?

Certainly many of them will have been abandoned some time ago, or shortly after being created, and no doubt many are moribund or generally inactive ... but Technorati is still tracking them.

And it's interesting .. and useful for us ... to note that they are still being created at a rapid clip.

It was on September 18th, 2004 that I posted that Technorati had just crossed the 4 million blog mark.

So, there have been at least 46 million new blogs created in just over 22 months by the time the 50 million mark is reached on Technorati. That's a heckuva growth rate.

You'd think that at least one or two million of the bloggers who have kept on blogging would want a simple, elegant, effective and free offline blogging tool ... like Qumana.

If for no other reason (though making blogging easier is a big benefit) than to avoid the frustration they seem to experience when whatever blog platform they are using experiences a service outage (which is at least as frustrating as the dropped call cell-phone experience that is now such a problem that the cell industry's advertising focuses on the issue).

I also wonder how many of the 50 million are from countries such as Spain, Argentina, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Mexico, Central American countries, California ;-), France (and Quebec ... technically not a country, but ...), Holland and Germany.  Bloggers who blog in those languages now have access to Qumana operational in their native language (German coming in  a day or two).  Good thing Qumana plays nice with Typepad ... they have a growing base of users in those European countries / languages.

Surely more than a handful will want to try it out.

Tags: Qumana, Qumana Spanish, Qumana French, Qumana Dutch, growth of blogging, Typepad, Typepad Europe

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Via a Globe and Mail update ...

eBay Canada offer member blogs


eBay Canada has introduced eBay Member Blogs to build up an eBay community. The blogs add to the company's member forums, about me pages and eBay reviews and guides.

With the Member Blogs feature, eBay users can create and publish journal-like entries within their own dedicated space and share personal experiences or discuss their categories.

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Not to late to post this, IMHO ... B5 Media announced a deal recently with Fox Networks (hat tip to Andy for reminding me to post) to co-brand four blogs following 24, Prison Break, Family Guy, and Bones. Personally, I'm a big fan of Bones, having a degree in Anthropology and specializing in physical Anthro and Archaeology. Okay, but enough about the blogs, what does this mean?

I think this is one of those watershed moments that we'll look back on in a year or so and see as a turning point in the blogosphere. Fox Media by partnering with b5 Media instead of launching their own blogs has acknowledged the power of an established blog network. They have also given a ringing endorsement of blogs as a way to connect with fans and sneak behind-the-scenes tidbits out. Oh and get a little advertising and branding in there too.

All good things, all things that will help the blogging medium push more into the mainstream as a source of information and news.

Disclosure: Arieanna Foley and I both author blogs on the b5 Media network.

Tags: b5 media, b5media, Fox Media, Bones, 24, Family Guy, Prison Break

Thanks to Eric Eggertson of the Mutually Inclusive PR blog for uncovering this interesting example of using blogging to reach out and listen to customers and the community from which the customers come.

VanCity to Launch Blogging Project

Canada's biggest credit union has never been afraid to try new things in the realm of community involvement. So it shouldn't be a surprise they're going to start "a user-driven blog" that has a community focus.

A recent job posting by VanCity called for a passionate blogger who can "animate an online community where people in the Lower Mainland & Victoria can find information, tools and connections to inspire and support change in their own lives, their communities, and the world."

The term position will see the blogger reach out to community members, help them take part, write for the blog, encourage discussions, "moderate comments, defuse conflict and occasionally arbitrate disputes."

VanCity has brought in online strategy firm Social Signal (local Vancouver folks) to set up the blog.

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Arguably, many seasoned bloggers' blog sites are already portals, and sometimes are even used by readers as such.  And almost certainly the major subject-area blogs are portals.

Here's an excerpt from a recent Globe and Mail tech review:

That leaves about a half-dozen Ajax-powered portals (Ajax being the technology that makes them fast and interactive), including Netvibes, Protopages, Pageflakes and Zoozio. Oh yes -- and there are a couple of little players named Google (with its google/ig) and Microsoft (with live.com).

Both Netvibes and Pageflakes have recently gotten venture-capital financing, so someone must see a future in the homepage frontier.

Richard MacManus of Read/WriteWeb is one of those. In a recent post, he says that what now appear to be just cool interactive homepages could become the portals of the Web 2.0 future, with all kinds of widgets and tools built in.

 In a sense, they could become a virtual desktop -- the tool you use to gather all the bits and pieces of your online life together, all of them interacting and updating automatically.

I think Richard might be right. I'm a big fan of Netvibes.com, in part because it is fast -- a lot faster than Google's ig -- and because it is flexible, with dozens of different modules (such as Flickr, del.icio.us and Digg modules) and features including the ability to add new tabs, click once and mark all items in a feed read, and so on.

Google's effort, much like its other tools such as Google Reader, verges on the lame. It seems slow and clunky, you only get three columns (Netvibes.com has four) and you can't add new tabs. Admittedly, those kinds of things aren't exactly a powerful barrier to entry.

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Anybody that will assiduously follow whatever and whomever Microsoft uses to replace Robert Scoble as an evangelist and *customer-listener* over the next year or so ... and develops metrics to chronicle whatever may happen ... will arguably have one of the most useful, and potentially most famous, case studies of the impact of effective externally-oriented blogging on the profile and perception of a high-profile technology company.

He's certainly done an awful lot for Microsoft in terms of positive relations with people and (potentially) customers.

Maybe Microsoft will make an offer to Dave Winer ?  That would be interesting !

Many people have reported on Scoble's departure.  The source I've used below is Mathew Ingram, to whom I offer thanks for his steady, balanced (imo), reliable and stimulating technology reporting.

The Scobleizer calls it quits — updated
Posted by Mathew Ingram @ 12:09 am on Sunday 11 June 2006

According to Tom Foremski at SiliconValleyWatcher and Andy Plesser at Beet.tv, the guy who is arguably Microsoft’s most famous person — at least as far as the blogosphere is concerned — is leaving the company. Robert Scoble, also known as the Scobleizer, is reportedly heading to podtech.net to be its corporate evangelist. Tom says that Scoble wasn’t happy working at Mister Softee, in part because they weren’t interested in paying for all his travels to conferences.

[Snip ...]

Update:

Scoble has posted a confirmation of his move, and goes on to counter the rumours about concerns over his travel budget and lack of support from Microsoft — totally not true, he says. He also says they “moved heaven and earth” to keep him happy, but he decided to make the move anyway. “It’s a rapidly-evolving part of my life,” he says. “I just made this decision and it got out before I was completely ready to talk about it.”

Best of luck to him.

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