An interesting article on blogs ... an extract


When it came to the criticism emanating from Boing Boing, Scoble simply... agreed. "MSN Spaces isn't the blogging service for me," he wrote. Nobody at Microsoft asked Scoble to comment; he just did it on his own, adding that he would make sure that the team working on Spaces was aware of the complaints. And he kept revisiting the issue on his blog.

As the anti-Microsoft crowd cried censorship, the nearly 4,000 blogs linking to Scoble were able to see his running commentary on how Microsoft was reacting. "I get comments on my blog saying, 'I didn't like Microsoft before, but at least they're listening to us,'" says Scoble. "The blog is the best relationship generator you've ever seen." His famous boss agrees.

"It's all about openness," says chairman Bill Gates of Microsoft's public blogs like Scobleizer. "People see them as a reflection of an open, communicative culture that isn't afraid to be self-critical."

link via Dave Winer


Why There's No Escaping the Blog

Freewheeling bloggers can boost your product—or destroy it. Either way, they've become a force business can't afford to ignore.
By David Kirkpatrick and Daniel Roth

Below is some information I found at a site called Jack Myers. He is an advertising industry analyst and in this article he is projecting advertising spending for 11 major media for 2005. I have only included the infromation for online advertising and a chart that is in the article. What is interesting to note is the dramatic growth of online advertising and as the chart indicates, the new money is flowing from lower growth rates in 9 out of the other 10 media segments.

Quote:

Online advertising will continue to grow at rates reminiscent of the late 1990s when the industry was emerging from a virtually non-existent base and was gaining legitimacy. After several years of testing, most major national advertisers are now shifting budgets from website development, research & development, and IT infrastructure into marketing budgets targeted to online media, including search engine and behavioral targeting. Search engine growth will slow slightly to 25 to 30 percent, but even traditional banner and pop-up ads will experience 20 to 25 percent increases. Internet video advertising and content sponsorships will be the recipients of growth approaching 40 percent as broadband penetration increases and original content developers offer new opportunities. Yahoo!, AOL and MSN will benefit from a significant share of these more targeted broadband revenues, but their growth from traditional online advertising will be under twenty percent. Advertisers are also shifting funds to websites developed by traditional media suppliers such as ESPN, Wall St. Journal, New York Times, Conde Nast, local newspapers and local TV stations. Popularly branded online content will generate the greatest share of online revenue growth in 2005.

 

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Just a few years ago, as dot-com companies started to tank, many analysts had predicted that some free Web content and tools would disappear or dwindle. But "free is certainly making a huge comeback these last 12 to 18 months," says Olivier Travers, a technology consultant in the U.K.

 

The sustained rebound in Internet advertising has played a big role in the continued free-for-all.

 

Today, free content is often mixed with paid content in some way. For instance, the link to this story is free, part of the Journal's effort to draw in new readers by offering a public link that might get a lot of blog play. The Journal is about to be joined in the Dow Jones family by CBS Marketwatch, a mostly free service that also sells subscriptions to newsletters and data.
Some people believe strongly that all of it should be free; others are still into putting up walls. It doesn't have to be either or and, in many cases, it shouldn't be. Exclusive clubs create buzz. Exclusive sites don't. There's nothing wrong with mixing free content -- which of course isn't free to produce -- and some premium content available only to subscribers.

 

While no single company is responsible for so much of the Web remaining free, Google has played a powerful role.

The Mountain View, Calif., company has, in a matter of just six years, reached $1.35 billion in first-half revenue and $143 million in net income, almost entirely by getting advertisers to pay to reach its user base. As Google has grown, it has picked up other tech companies along the way and made their paid products free. In July, it bought Picasa and turned the company's photograph-organizing software free. "The first thing Google does after each and every one of its acquisitions is turn a fee service off and make it free,"

Google's free tech tools and others' have enabled ordinary Web denizens to create their own free content. Last year the company bought Pyra Labs, which makes software to publish frequently updated Web sites with links and commentary, and made the company's Blogger software free. These tools and others have sparked a proliferation of new free content online, like political blogs and Wikipedia, the popular encyclopedia maintained by thousands of users.

At Google, "the ethos is definitely as big as possible, as mainstream as possible, and that definitely means free," says Evan Williams, co-founder of Pyra Labs.

Wired contributing editor Chris Anderson has obtained a book deal following the wide distribution of his now-infamous Wired article on the long tail of blogs.

He's also started a blog to help him think out what he'll write (and keep interested parties advised and interacting along the way to the book) ... stretching out his own tail, as it were.

... wirearchy ? Which term do you like better ?


I just ran across this whilst googling for something else. I noted that these two academics coined the term "hyperarchy" in 1997 ... that was the year I came up with "wirearchy". For my tastes, wirearchy is more evocative than hyperarchy, and more comprehensive ... the "hyper" refers to hyperlinks, while "wire" can cover that off and include the surround-sense of middleware and integarted systems (which imo have much more impact on our lives, our instritutions, our business models, and our sociology than many people realize or give them credit for.

Anyway ... introducing "hyperarchy", by Evans and Wurster. My emphasis and sardonic comments added.


The word "hyperarchy" was defined by Philip Evans and Thomas Wurster in the Harvard Business Review, September-October 1997, Page 75. Evans and Wurster suggest that digital communication enables everybody to communicate interactively with everybody (duh !).

The term takes its name from the "hyperlinks" of the World Wide Web and the "hierarchy" of current commerce models. Not only is the WWW a hyperarchy ... but so too is a deconstructed hierarchical supply chain within an industry ... and also object-oriented programming in software or packet switching in telecommunications. "The hyperarchy challenges all hierarchies, whether of logic or of power, with the possibility (or the threat) of random access and information symmetry," say Evans and Wurster. They subsequently released a book in 2000 on the hyperarchy: Blown to Bits: How the New Economics of Information Transforms Strategy

A hyperarchy is the inverse of a pyramid, the antithesis of a hierarchy


And ... of course ... they left the sociology of interaction - the stuff of life and society - more or less out of (this extract).

Stewart henshall has been thinking, working and writing a lot these days, it look like. The vacation must have charged his batteries (even more than usual).

And in the midst of all his research and thinking as the unofficial strategy department for Skype, he's found the time to try out a new tool that he likes:


Audio Video Blogging

Just testing out Userplane's new A/V blogging tool. It's simple and easy to use. I just created a quick "testing" post. It's certainly easy to use. Beyond stop / start there is really no editing capability. Get it right or erase and start again. In this format it could be used as simple briefing and status report updates. When this converges with voice mail.. then it may be a whole lot more personable and persuasive to leave a video mail. The act of just recording a video will probably raise your energy level.


A/V Blog
by Userplane


Summary:
Neat easy to use tool. I'm trying to insert it in a wikispace I'm working on. I'm also thinking about whether to simply replace the photo on the blog here with a short introductory video. Will have to think about the content. Alternatively it could become a little "this week I'm exploring... or thinking about". With the interests in podcasting it's introduction is timely. To do anything substantial in this area... additional functionality is required. Still the short burst have merits.

.... shall we do likewise here in the Pacific Northwest ?

Why not?

Found on Loic LeMeur's blog. Loic is the representative or partner for Typepad in western Europe.


The BigBlogCompany in London trains journalists to blogging


The BigBlogCompany, fully dedicated to blogging organizes training sessions in London. Great idea.

Hugh Macleod of Gaping Void gets into one of the most interesting areas of impact the Web has on the intersection between creative work and the commercialization of content.

I think that this is what Wired was looking at with its recent issue that offered a free CD of music to use.

Is the interactive future inevitable ? I think that's the point of this recent post by Ming the Mechanic that highlights the issue that 15 lines of code in Python provides an effective P2P application ... P2P exchange will never be fully controlled from on high, by the corporations.

Increasingly it will be a world of information that is constantly flowing, fed with original and re-mixed, re-combined bits and pieces of information. Humans combining this bits and pieces will always be the final filter, as they take in the information and turn around and push info back out ... publishing to a blog, or email, or to a file that will be saved in their own Personal Server. A Personal Server will be a simple and easy to use "electronic filing cabinet" that accomodates both the diligent person's need for structure and the ad-hoc nature of many peoples' inforaging habits.

From Gaping Void:


In a recent gapingvoid post, Microsoft employee/star blogger Robert Scoble asks the question about his employer:

Can we turn this aircraft carrier around? I don't know, but I'm having fun trying!


Richard then counters with this point:

A collapsing empire or an aircraft carrier in search of a handbrake turn are both behemothic (mmm, neologism?). Open source trends (I include blogging in that - it's open source publishing) can't actually rescue them. Indeed, I propose a different analogy to either of you. Open source software and blogging are the small mammals to M$'s and big publishing's dinosaurs. Even without the meteorite, the big lizards are doomed.

I work for a small publishing company, and the big question I'm trying to answer is one posed by Hugh and others a while back: how do you cope when bundled content is dead? What do those of use whose revenue model is bundled content and intermediation do five years from now when a generation of media consumers is used to creating their own bundles? M$ has the same question to answer: when software development doesn't rely on big gangs of coders and creators and distributors and consultants - on overhead, basically - what then?



And then I pipe in:

Richard, good point. What you have illustrated is the often corrupting influence of taking your company public.

At least in the USA, a private company can go, "The goalposts have moved. Screw it. Move on. Build a new biz model which relies on 2,000 people, not 60,000. Have it up n' running by next Christmas".

Because a public company is ALWAYS beholden to Wall Street, it cannot do that. It can only do stuff which is good for the next Quarter.

What is good for the business is not always good for Wall Street, and vice versa.

If MS does have a meteor, methinks it's the same meteor that once happily gave Bill Gates billions of dollars. The one that will insist MS remain a large, cold-blooded lizard, and forbid it to change into a small, furry mammal.

If MS goes under, it will not be Open Source that puts MS out of business. MS's owners (i.e. Wall Street) will put MS out of business.

Bill and his top management are extremely smart people. I'll wager they already know all this, and already have a possible exit strategy well thought out. I'll also wager Robert and people of similar rank at Microsoft have no earthly clue what it is.

But who knows. Predicting the future is a hazardous business. So is underestimating Microsoft.


Suffice it to say that two worlds are colliding here ... a monopolistic outlook on personal-productivity software (Word, excel and Powerpoint) and the world where easy-to-use blogging tools and an increasingly effective infrastructural of link management are creating a new environment for creating and exchanging information.

No wonder Microsoft has come out with MSN Spaces. This intersection - Microsoft personal productivity software and the capabilities for self-expression offered by blogs - is where the world will come to life on the Web over the next decade or so.

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose (The more things change, the more they stay the same).

From Harold Jarchge comes this useful question (where have we seen this before). As blogging's impact grows, more bigger software companies are eyeing the space ... but why would any organization spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on solutions to this issue, wheb they can try out pilot projects for a few thousand (mostly the consulting to get some human dynamics expertise and support(, and then scale to need.


Plus ça change ...
Submitted by Harold on Sat, 13/11/2004 - 15:32. OpenSource | Technology | Work

Rick Bruner, of Business Blog Consulting, notes that enterprise vendors, like Canada's own OpenText are moving into the bloggging space to sell their products. I have the same question as Rick though; " ... but I don't understand why any company would pay $50,000 and $150,000, according to the article, for blog software ..." It seems to be that the hype cycle around blogging is growing, and companies will spend a lot of money on "blog" software without first doing their homework. Like learning management systems (LMS) and later learning content management systems (LCMS), some organisations will spend a significant amount on "enterprise blog applications" only to find out that it's not so much the technology as the processes and implementation that are really important.

My advice is stick to the open source (e.g. Drupal) or ASP's (e.g. TypePad) for your blogging pilot projects. After a good test period you can decide whether to adopt a platform, modify an OSS one, or purchase an enterprise version for big bucks. With so many low cost options for blogging, there is an existing solution for most organisational requirements.

Lots in here to think about ... an extension of the logic and sociology associated with an increasingly decentralized business environment, and world.


To Steven Levy I said, "If you're into blogs to make money, you're into it for the wrong reasons." That was part of a longer explanation, only some of which made it into the article (which is how these things go, and that's fine). Anyway, here I am, being niched as The Guy Who Says Blogs Are Not For Making Money.
 
However, I didn't say that.

Fact is, I have nothing against making money with blogs. What I tried to do at Bloggercon III, and in my conversation with Steven (who got it, and also tried to pass along the same understanding), was enlarge the conversation beyond making money with blogs, into making money because of blogs. I said that in my write-up for the session. I tried to say that in my series of questions for the session. As I've said often, and about many subjects, the logic is AND, not OR.
 
But that's not what a lot of people heard. And that's certainly not the impression they got from Steven's Newsweek piece.

So let me make this as clear as I can. I have nothing against making money with blogs. Hell, I'd love to make money with IT Garage, and I'm watching closely what Nick and Jason and Tony and Hylton are up to, because they're among the leaders at figuring that out. Chris Nolan, too, as a stand-alone journalist. Also Dan Gillmor. Same are Doug Kaye, Marc Canter and too many others to name here, each in their own ways.


See, I think the future of periodical publishing, and of journalism itself, will be built mostly by individual bloggers and indivdidual blogs, and by a new breed of publishers who harvest and republish (and, yes, pay for) goods from the wide open ranges where bloggers roam, and post, free. The day will come when the top print publications will be comprised of prose and pictures provided by blogs and bloggers.

 
The same thing will happen with television. And music. Movies too. (Although the rights-clearing mess is a huge hold-up there.)

 
Think of it as de-industrialization. Or de/re-industrialization. New industries rebuilt within and around the shells of the old ones. And old ones adapting, finally, to conditions that offer whole new frontiers of prosperity that only open up when they quit protecting the Old Ways of Doing Things (for example, by locking up archival "content" so only paying customers can see it).


Whatever replaces advertising (as we've known it) is also essential to the prosperity of these new journals. Is it just going to be whatever Google and Yahoo and Blogads do? No. It will be all that and much more. (Like, for example, a way to voluntarily pay -- even a small amount, micropayment style) for subscriptons to RSS feeds, just like we voluntarily pay for public radio and TV broadcasts.
 
Meanwhile, I still think there's more money being made because of blogs than with them. Problem is, I have no hard evidence for that. There also are not many people, besides myself and Dave Winer, who are interested in talking about it.

So maybe that's the take-away here.

Blogging in general, and business blogging in particular, is poised to become a multi-million dollar industry.

 

2003 and 2004 saw massive growth in the numbers of blogs in existence. Blogs are now commonly found discussed in both the mainstream media and among many members of the general public.

 

Blogs are now sitting on the brink of an enormous breakthrough as a business tool.

 

http://blogbusinessworld.blogspot.com/2004/12/blogging-as-industry.html