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Forbes Goes Back to 1992

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.

Advertisers and Blogs

The blog medium started out pure and focused on content, and that is what drew in the masses. Every word was an opinion that was blatantly unbiased (or more often biased, but still blatant about it) and could be trusted.

Then the ads came.

Blogging is definitely a much more mature medium than it was a couple of years ago. Now, many of the top bloggers are making a decent living from their blogs. Granted these bloggers are in the minority compared to the entire blogging population, it goes to show that traffic (aka eyes-glued-to-your-page) sells.

There may be a case where your company starts a blog and it becomes immensely popular. If you are smart (and somewhat lucky) your company will create an industry blog that becomes the place to turn for expert views for that industry. If that happens then without a doubt you will have companies looking to sponsor your blog.

However, many people feel that advertisers kill the purity of the blog format. Even worse are “sponsored entries” that show up on blogs because a company has requested that the blogger write about their product.

This scenario will grow quickly in the very near future. Blogging is enjoyable and if you can make money from the practice, it becomes even more enjoyable. The down side is that many readers will consider the blog to become just another sellout and I do believe that would be the case if the money began to dominate the content.

Well placed, non-obtrusive ads are fine to many and completely understandable to most. As long as the trust between writer and reader is not broken the ads should cause no harm.

Salesman, Blogs, and Fark

First here is the order of events:

After reading the above articles, the following two things should be abundantly clear.

  1. Popular blogs, like Calacanis’, have major pull when it comes to major industry publications like Wired.com. Especially during months when news is quite slow.
  2. If you are going to post advertorial content, then make sure the world knows it was paid for. Otherwise you have to fight the people which come out quickly in masses.

Is it okay to make money from your blog? Yes. Is it okay to write sponsored entries that are clearly labeled as “sponsored?” Yes. Is it okay to betray the trust of your readers? The trust that gained you the audience and what helps to keep your audience growing? No.

Blogs are meant to be a transparent medium and therefore everything involved in the site should be made transparent. Ads are ads. Don’t try to trick your readers. Readers are smart; sooner or later they figure things out.

Microsoft to Unveil Blog Service in Japan

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.

Interview: Khoi Vinh of Behavior

What good are weblog entries about weblogs permeating design and business if you can’t read about their usage on the front line?

Khoi Vinh of Behavior Design, an NYC-based deisgn firm, talked to us recently about the XHTML/CSS redesign of his company’s website, and how they used MovableType to manage their Flash calendar. So without further ado, here we go.

[Read more…] about Interview: Khoi Vinh of Behavior

Google Apologizes on Weblog

After the Google shutdown earlier this week (when all web workers let out a collective *GASP*), our favorite search engine explained what happened on their corporate weblog:

“A very small percentage of our users and networks – most notably, a few media outlets that write about us — were heavily infected with MyDoom, so our systems temporarily blocked their queries. By noon, service for all our users had been completely restored.”

I don’t know about other areas, but here in the metro Washington, D.C. area Google was blocking my queries for about 5 hours – 5 of the most intelligence-free hours of my life. But they dealt with it like a champ and talked directly to their customers.

PR disaster averted, IPO about to explode all thanks to a blog.