Helping companies communicate better
Directly from Om Malik’s inside sources, Om discusses Six Apart’s imminent purchase of LiveJournal. In his own words:
The deal is a mix of stock and cash, and could be announced sometime later this month, according to those close to the two companies. If the deal goes through, then Six Apart will become one of the largest weblog companies in the world, with nearly 6.5 million users.
Last month I wrote about the Fear of RSS and why companies should learn to embrace the technology. Today, I found a review on Forbes.com of the new Industry Standard website. The worst part of the website according to them is:
The site lets you subscribe to RSS feeds, a complicated, XML-related way of reading news which doesn’t serve much purpose here.
Say what?!?! Clearly Forbes has lost touch with the world of today because in my experience RSS is as simple as putting the url of the site in my newsreader and having it check the feed daily. When it’s updated it reads the new headlines and lets me know. Heck, even if I didn’t have a newsreader or web browser the RSS format lets me read the article just by looking at the code itself.
It’s sad to see a major publication post such opinions which are obviously ill-informed.
This morning Microsoft handed Reuters a press release outlining their new blog service to be released initially in Japan.
It seems there is little difference between this new publishing platform and already existing blog software like Squarespace and Blogger, but M$ wants to get their hands in everything:
“Microsoft just wants to get its fingers into every pie that it can. Today it’s blogging. Tomorrow it’ll be a search engine. Next week it’ll be jacket-powered palmtops or some such crap.”
—Slashdot Comment by Scowling
Microsoft has openly said Google is a competitor, so it makes sense that after Google acquired Blogger, Redmond would fire back with their own service.
Will this impact blogging in a positive way, or will this maybe-too-late entry into an over-saturated market fall by the wayside? Only time will tell.
Since this past Saturday, more than 70% of the traffic coming to my personal website has been from Googlers searching for terms like “hPod” or “blue hPod”. Apple announced new iPods on Monday, and then verified that they were producing an HP-branded blue iPod based on the 4th generation model they just came out with. So why is this so amazing?
Weblogs are chock full of archived information, and when I wrote about the HP iPod (or hPod for short) rumor, I wrote about it back in January (my site is currently being redesigned live, so please forgive me!). That little page has been dormant for 7 months, but just sprang to life upon the thousands of Googlers who clicked on the link in the search results.
The Googlebot visits my site dozens of times per day because I update it very frequently. It may visit your site once or twice a week, or it may visit your site 20 times per hour – it all depends on your PageRank figure and how often you update it. Some have said that weblogs are ruining Google search results, but I feel the opposite is true. If breaking news just happened 30 minutes ago, and you want the latest news, it’s not going to be a full-blown New York Times article yet. If it’s not national news, then CNN won’t be covering it. So you turn to Google, and find that a few bloggers have already written down the facts, added their $ .02, and packaged it nicely on their website. Instant gratification.
If a weblog pops up on the first page of Google results, there’s a reason for it. It’s not just there because they happen to have written about your query, it’s there because of the hundreds or thousands of people who have linked to that weblog in the past, thus validating its credibility and reliability. If a thousand people link to a weblog and think that it is a worthwhile resource for news, then guess what? In my opinion, it is a valid news source.
There are lots of ways for your business to save money, no matter what size it is. We’re small business owners ourselves, so we know first-hand what you or your company may be going through.
Your business needs proper software and technology in order to function most effectively, however don’t get into the mindset that you “have” to purchase a full Oracle license to run a small database, or that you “have” to purchase Vignette in order to have a dynamically-powered website. There are tons of tech-alternatives out there that may fit your need without bursting your budget. Note: These recommendations are in no way tied to product endorsements or advertising. We just wanted to give you some ideas of how to save your company’s money — keep in mind that these solutions may not fit your business needs, so your mileage may vary.
If you run a small ecommerce website where you don’t have thousands and thousands of people simultaneously querying the database, why not switch to MySQL? For small- to medium-sized databases it performs just as well as the big guys, but at a fraction of the cost. And by fraction, I mean it’s free. It still runs standard SQL, so you don’t need to learn anything proprietary to use it.
If your company isn’t neck deep into ASP or .NET development, why not move to Linux? If you have a small tech team, and performance and stability is at the front of your mind (and what else would be?), then you may be able to save your company money by moving to an open source operating system. No more expensive product upgrades, no more serial number nightmares, no more huge security holes or nasty viruses (for the most part). Now that you’re running Linux, you can move over to Apache and bask in it’s warm, beautiful glow. Apache runs the world’s largest websites, so I’m sure that it’s good enough for yours. It’s amazingly stable and extensible, and you’d be hard-pressed to find something you want to do with it that’s not already documented on the internet somewhere.
D. Keith Robinson moved an entire hospital’s intranet to MovableType — software that is traditionally thought of as a “weblog tool”. Nope, not anymore. You can use weblog software (such as the free and open-source WordPress, among others) to power your entire company’s website. Distributed authorship, workflow publishing, version control, and easy updating without shelling out tens of thousands of dollars for commercial content management systems. Companies are making the switch to low-cost solutions such as MovableType and WordPress everyday, so why not give it a shot?
The Business Logs team is physically separated — Paul’s in Florida, Matthew’s in Illinois, and I’m in Virginia (for now). Sometimes chatrooms just aren’t enough, so instead of killing our cellphone bills, we just fire up iChat, hook up an Audio connection, and chat away. Now all you pay is the cost of an internet connection, and you can have real-time voice conversations with anyone in the world for free.
These are just a few tips for saving money, they may not work for you, but on the other hand they may save you thousands of dollars.
This entry was spurred by Adriana Cronin-Lukas’ entry on her company’s website, Big Blog Company. A quote, if you will:
“Calacanis blogs (and Denton’s for that matter) have a mission, sell as much advertising as they can by generating hits for their blogs. Can’t blame them for trying, but it shows the fundamental misunderstanding of blog audiences, individuals that feel they are getting something valuable and a distinctive alternative to professional or industry media and publications.”