Friday, April 29
Business Blog Roundtable Podcast: Listen to business blogging experts talk about posting to blogs
by
Tris Hussey
on April 29, 2005 03:20PM (PDT)
In addition to my duties with Qumana, I am a professional blogger and blog consultant in my own right. I blog for several sites professionally and more for fun. Part of blogging is the social aspect of meeting people and building friendships with them. So as I lead off my post about this new podcast series: "It all started with an e-mail... " In this 55 min podcast listen to five leading business blogging expert talk about how often to post to your blog. We go into search engine considerations, recency, "evergreen" vs news posts, and much more. Please have a listen and leave comments, e-mail, or Skype me with feedback 
Tris Hussey is the Chief Blogging Officer for Qumana Software and Managing Director of Qumana Services. He can be reached at tris AT qumana DOT com or tris AT trishussey DOT com.
Thursday, April 28
Hey, where did the homepage go?
by
Tris Hussey
on April 28, 2005 01:16PM (PDT)
And hey, what's so special about June 13th? Okay, first things first. If you've visited Qumana.com lately, it's changed. We've been working on creating software to make posting to your blog easy, fast, and fun. And, if you're a blogaholic like me you have multiple blogs using a myriad of blogging platforms so we made that simple too. The thing is, of course, that QumanaPro, while cool, also had a lot more firepower than most bloggers needed. So we've been working for a while on something we've been calling QumanaLE or QLE for short. If you were at Northern Voice you got a peek at it. It's even better now. So what we decided to do was to pull back and focus on QLE and other related projects. Downloading of QumanaPro, well, we're trying to limit that. If you paid for QumanaPro, don't worry we will take care of you. Your investment hasn't gone down the drain. We appreciate that you paid your hard-earned money for our software and when June 13th rolls around--and probably before then--you'll be first in line. Now, why June 13th? Well, it is a Monday, kicking off a new site and new product with a new week makes sense to me. It's also my late father's birthday. My superstitious side just couldn't resist. I know he'd be proud of what I'm doing, so I'm honoring that by launching on his birthday (he would have been 69 this year). It's the least I can do, isn't it? If you have any questions, just zap me a line. If you already have a copy of QLE, ping me. We've got lots of cool stuff up our sleeves and we'd like you to let us know what you think--and we might share cool stuff with you. 
Tris Hussey is the Chief Blogging Officer for Qumana Software and Managing Director of Qumana Services. He can be reached at tris AT qumana DOT com or tris AT trishussey DOT com.
Sunday, April 24
Major League Baseball Empowers Fans to Blog
by
fred
on April 24, 2005 01:01PM (PDT)
I am actually quite shocked that this idea has taken so long to become a reality. Talk about a great way to get your audience, fans and market involved. Done right, this is a powerful tool that can only bring loyality to a very high level. Cudos to Major League Baseball.
Friday, April 22
Make your blog swim with the sharks! (for better SEO)
by
Tris Hussey
on April 22, 2005 05:59PM (PDT)
Typically I've been using Thomas Korte's excellent blog feed submitting page but I think I'm going to be changing my ways thanks to a tip from Diva Marketing-- Diva Marketing- Feed Your Blog To The Shark!--I'll be using Feed Shark. Pretty straightforward interface. Enter your feed in step one, then press the relevant buttons in step 2, then paste a little code onto your blog in step three--I think this step is mostly for Feed Shark to track themselves and not your blog as they claim. You might be asking yourself, especially if you're new to blogging, why you'd want to take the step of actually submitting your blog feed to the blog and regular search engines. Essentially the reason is time. When you submit your blog feed to these engines, it's like adding your feed to their news aggregator. So not only do you let the online world know that you've posted something new when the server pings out, but the search engines--like people--will also check periodically (usually nightly). Functionally this means that people--like me--will have an easier time finding your blog in our searches of the blogosphere. Now, my only criticisms of Feed Shark are that a) the process isn't as automatic as Thomas'--you only have to visit the individual site if there a problem or error with his tool--and b) it lists directories/indices that many blogs wouldn't/shouldn't be listed on--.NET and ASP developer directories, for example. Beyond those two, I think it's a good step for new blog owners. One note, some engines don't like Feedburner feed URLs so have your "real" syndication URL handy, just in case.
Tris Hussey is the Chief Blogging Officer for Qumana Software and Managing Director of Qumana Services. He can be reached at tris AT qumana DOT com.
Sunday, April 17
Steve Rubel Has A Few Important Items About Blogs to Report
by
fred
on April 17, 2005 11:01AM (PDT)
Some interesting news items reported by Steve Rubel in the last few days in his Micro Persuasion blog. - Feedster and The Boston Globe have partnered to launch a new site that aggregates what bloggers are saying about the Boston Red Sox
- More U.S. Adults Are Reading Political Blogs April 15, 2005 InformationWeek: More than 2 out of 5 online U.S. adults have read a political blog, with more than a quarter reading them once a month or more.
- Yahoo has launched a brand new news site that you can use to read any RSS feed. Once again, Yahoo shows they get RSS.
- Corporate Blogging is rising according to theInvestor's Business Daily: Blogs are moving beyond personal musings and taking on a new role: corporate communications. A growing number of businesses are using the blog format to promote products, interact with customers and shareholders, conduct market research and distribute company announcements.
Wednesday, April 13
Dina Mehta on tagging
by
Tris Hussey
on April 13, 2005 11:48AM (PDT)
Dina Mehta, who I Skype IMed with a month or so ago (she is an Anthro-geek like me...yes my B.A. is in Anthropology), is wondering about tagging-- Conversations with Dina:Tagging questions. Now if there is anyone who will be able to say good things about tagging, it's an Anthropologist. Tagging seems to have fallen by the wayside of late. It isn't being talked about much. Sure folks are using them, but are they using them? Personally, I haven't found a use for tags yet. I don't really use del.icio.us or Furl much. The idea of folksonomies just doesn't have a solid technology base yet. A tool that can really be built and grouped around. I think Flickr tags are closest, but not quite. Sure I tag my posts using my Blogware categories, but I don't seek out related tags and don't visit the Technorati tags area as much as I did when they started. So...what's next? What is in store for tags? If my guess is right, lots.
Monday, April 11
IceRocket Refreshes Blog Search
by
Tris Hussey
on April 11, 2005 06:05PM (PDT)
Great news for the info junkie in all of us. IceRocket is tracking 10 million blogs-- Micro Persuasion- IceRocket Refreshes Blog Search-- Blog Searching on IceRocket.com - Blog Maverick. Cool. Why? Because you can search IceRocket and save the results as XML...heck it's auto-generated for you. Sure I use Google for my day-to-day searching. But IceRocket searches have a solid place in my feedlist--right at the top with my other searches. I'd remember to use it more if there was still a Firefox toolbar. Ultrabar as pretty darn good, problem was it broke at version 1.0 of Firefox and I couldn't get it installed since. Now it doesn't seem to be available at all. Psst...IceRocket...create one of those little searchlets that Firefox has in the addressbar...I'll even help test it. Then work on the whole search bar--I'll help test that too. Regardless, I'm glad that IceRocket is keeping up. Well with Mark Cuban as one of your investors, who has his own successful blog, you very well couldn't say "Blogs? What are blogs?" Could you? ;-). Any bets on when they hit 15 million? Tris Hussey is the Chief Blogging Officer for Qumana Software and Managing Director of Qumana Services. He can be reached at tris AT qumana DOT com.
From the Blogosphere to the Syndisphere
by
Tris Hussey
on April 11, 2005 05:37PM (PDT)
This is the subscription economy we're talking about. Not the Blogosphere so much as the Syndisphere. In this ecosystem, the contract is based on continued attention, not captured attention. It leverages a form of broadcast couch potato dynamics, where inertia keeps you tuned from ER to Leno to Today. When CSI broke that cycle, it was a big deal. In the Syndisphere once you've signed on, it takes more effort than its worth to sign off. Unsubscribing requires real motivation.[Bold mine for emphasis]. This could mean two things, one you better keep writing good content or be lost in the shuffle, not dropped per se, but ignored. Become one of those "I'll read it when I get around to it"...I have a whole group of "Second tier" feeds in this list. I read something cool once, but I don't check them often because they haven't pinged back on my radar yet. Two, this means you need to keep writing good content so you don't get dropped out right, because RSS advertising is the next big thing on the horizon. The pundits agree on this. In order to get good revenue from a feed you're going to have to work to stay on the "must read" list. Sure you're going to have an off post, but man, don't slack off. Now here is the next big thing in the article: Nowhere is the pressure felt more than the trade publishing business. Branded aggregators are the order of the day, as publications try to stem the tide away from their portals and into the Syndisphere. As we move from the page view model to the attention model, publishers are playing a futile game of chicken–waiting for their competitors to jump into feed advertising first. Google and Overture have already made the new rules clear: advertising will only work if it is perceived as information. [Bold Steve's, underline, mine ]
The branded aggregator. White-label something easy and cool, pre-stocked with your feeds and have your ads inserted into the content. Yes, the users might delete your feed but they will still see your ads. And as Steve says above, ad relevancy is the key. Something that ads to the content. Goes with it. A "wow coffee makers are cool...here's an ad for a free ebook on brewing better coffee"--from a coffee purveyor. So welcome to the Syndisphere. We blog, we syndicate, we publish. Soon we'll make money at it too.
Friday, April 8
RSS Advertising...it's coming and fast
by
Tris Hussey
on April 8, 2005 11:02AM (PDT)
RSS advertising. It's what bloggers are really waiting for to monetize their writing. Google AdSense sounds great, but there is a teeny, tiny flaw--if no one visits your site, no one sees the ads, if they don't see the ads they can't click on them, can they? Like Fred Wilson I receive more traffic from my RSS feeds (because I publish the full article in my feed). So, frankly, AdSense ain't workin' for me. I'm earning, without revealing actual amounts, diddly/squat. But times they are a changin'... Wilson has been getting about three times the number of RSS requests for his blog as he gets page views. He's been running contextually targeted Google AdSense ads on his site; he recently implemented a new service from FeedBurner that inserts contextually targeted Overture ads into his RSS feeds and measures feed "views." Incredibly, after only three days of testing, he discovered the effective clicks and revenue yield from Overture ads in RSS views were almost equal to his AdSense page views. In other words, using a new technology to insert and measure ads and audience, he can monetize his existing RSS readers at a rate that should double his total online ad revenue.
RSS is the way to efficiently disseminate, gather, and digest news and information. Marketers need to be on top of this. And investors, investors well this is going to start exploding in the near future. RSS is starting to make in-roads for the average computer user. Lektora is certainly a great example of this. All I can say is: watch this space.
Tuesday, April 5
From WiFi to WiMax
by
fred
on April 5, 2005 05:46PM (PDT)
In technology there is always something bigger and better around the corner. WiMax is the catchy name for a new wireless standard. Similar to how 802.11 was marketed as WiFi, WiMax is the consumer-friendly branding of 802.16, or high-speed wireless broadband, capable of spanning greater distances than WiFi. Whereas WiFi typically provides wireless broadband service up to 150 feet in so-called hot spots, WiMax is capable of covering a radius of three to 10 kilometers (about two to six miles).
Monitoring the chatter--Oi! Not even half the solution!
by
Tris Hussey
on April 5, 2005 10:21AM (PDT)
 Brian Teasley wrote a timely article on ClickZ-- How to Monitor the Chatter--this is something that I help clients do all the time, and I do for myself as a de rigueur part of my job. So I'm thinking that he's going to do a review of the major blog tracking tools out there-- PubSub (my favourite), Technorati, Feedster--nope. All he talked about was Intelliseek's BlogPulse and the BlogPulse Trend tool. Granted, these are great tools. But then he talks about monitoring Usenet newsgroups. Hmm. How many folks still use them? I figure you could probably use Google or Icerocket or other web-based search engines to search this area of the Net, but how many folks use Usenet anymore? More importantly, hasn't the blogosphere supplanted Usenet as the place where people go for info (and brand bashing)? Brain, I know Pete Blackshaw also writes for ClickZ and that he works for Intelliseek, but I think you owe it to your readers to give them more that one tool option for tracking their brands and sites online. Yeah, BlogPulse is cool, but take PubSub. Here's a tool that let's you search tons of information and, if you're a total info junkie like me, have the Firefox or IE sidebar open all the time set to Latest Messages and just watch stuff tick by in real time. Sometimes being able to catch mentions early can mean the difference between a PR campfire and a PR forest fire. When it comes to monitoring the Internet for information about your company, having a good toolkit, with a little redundancy built, is essential.
It's still blogs...that's the way to link for search engines
by
Tris Hussey
on April 5, 2005 10:02AM (PDT)
Gerry McGovern still doesn't get it-- Links- How the Search Engines Find You (Part 2). I left a comment on the last SEO article and didn't hear back from him (I'm not surprised). He's still focused on traditional Web 1.5 websites, linking in the old fashioned way. I'll say this again, build your traditional website, fine--though personally I'd go for a Bryght site because you get far more features and it's SEO friendly from the get go, and this is what I'm setting SMBs up with--but start a blog. Write about your topic area--Gerry did talk about this, I'll give him credit for that--and just make sure the links to your main website are in your template. Maybe even have as a footer to all your posts something like "If you'd like to learn more about XYZ Company: About us [link to website]" or "Brought to you by XYZ Company [link to website]". This will start the process. Of course blogging is all about linking anyway so linking to the source article will help. And don't natter at people to link to you. If you write interested stuff, people will link to you. Heck write something controversial and you're almost guaranteed to get some traffic! The rules have changed. Blogs make traditional SEO look like black magic. Blogs are SEO, SEO is blogs. Disclosure: I am a Bryght reseller.
Friday, April 1
The grocery store doesn't take trackbacks
by
Tris Hussey
on April 1, 2005 09:14AM (PST)
Buzz Marketing with Blogs by Susannah Gardner--I'm not going to get into the whole was it right or wrong thing, that's not my place. What this is, though, is a reflection that we all live in the real world. We have to eat, house, and clothe ourselves and family. The bank doesn't take blog comments as payment on your mortgage and the grocery stores doesn't take trackbacks. Sometimes we all have to do things to make short-term cash. Sometimes we do what we just have to do. People ask me when I say that I'm a professional blogger--or syndicated online writer--"so can you make a living doing that?" My answer is "almost". Writing takes up a lot of time--correction, writing doesn't take me long, research, research takes awhile. Consulting, as many of us already know, is more lucrative. This is we started Qumana Services. This is why I do blog consulting and writing as an extra. This is why I often stay up late writing, worrying, or both. Because the grocery store doesn't take trackbacks.
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The inaugural Business Blog Roundtable: Apr 25, 2005: Discussing posting frequencies
Dave Morgan wrote yesterday about what is on the horizon--
