We blogged about it here and here and now it is gone. 

Guys like Fred at WeBreakStuff are starting to realize that most of us are not using web content in its original or intended form.  Instead we are using news readers like NetNewsWire to pull content from web sites and deliver it in text form to our readers.  Do you offer RSS/Atom feeds?  How do you feel about the loss of control feeds represent?

The professionals are nervous this week — worrying aloud about the ease with which any reader can turn into a writer.  Forbes is the latest, with an hysterical cover story about how blogs are coming to get you.  (Hysterical, as in, it’s pretty funny *and* batshit crazy all in one.)  It’s almost like a piece of performance art — a paranoid story about uneven, one-sided rants from powerful publishing entities contained in an uneven, one-sided rant from a paranoid but powerful publishing entity.  So meta it hurts.

Frankly, it’s so bad, I’m not going to offer a line by line critique.  I will say this:  they encourage firms to monitor the blogosphere and start their own blogs.  I would, too, though not to ‘fight back.’  We are counseling someone now about how to deal with negative blog posts, and our overriding message to them is that your own blog should not be about doing tit for tat on every distracting blog post out there.  Instead, add value.  Tie your name & brand to the right sorts of things.  We also don’t subscribe to the ‘blogs as weapons’ approach listed here.  We’d never be anyone’s huckleberry for that sort of foolishness. 

"Bloggers are more of a threat than people realize, and they are only going to get more toxic. This is the new reality," says Peter Blackshaw, chief marketing officer at Intelliseek, a Cincinnati firm that sifts through millions of blogs to provide watch-your-back service to 75 clients, including Procter & Gamble and Ford. 

I’m going to assume that they did a really long interview with Pete, and that this quote only looks like FUD because of the context it’s in.  Yes, monitor.  Sure, check out Intelliseek, but not because of some article-induced panic attack. 

Follow the discussion at tech.memeorandum.  Here are some of the early reviews of this piece:

Dan Gillmor

Steve Rubel

Chris Pirillo (nice one, Chris)

Robert Scoble

Jackie Huba 

Check out this podcast (not really since it is a RAM file) from American Public Media’s Markplace radio show. Patrick Hirsch interviews the people behind the English Cut Blog and Stonyfield Farm Blog.

Technorati Tags: podcast, npr, David Parmet, English Cut, Stonyfield Farm, Patrick Hirsch, Marketplace

Sweet piece in yesterday’s NYTimes on unofficial brand blogs – fan blogs for products like Barq’s (It Tastes Good) & services like Netflix. (Hey, didn’t we ask a bit ago where the Blockbuster evangelist blog was?) Lots of chatter in this piece about blogs as really great learning channels — open focus groups that broadcast the good, bad & ugly about products & companies. These are also great brand rally points — e.g. the Vespa projects kicked off by the Micropersuasion team. This, however, was a stunner:

Most of them are written without the consent of the companies that own the brands; a spokesman for Coca-Cola, which owns Barq’s, had not heard of Mr. Marx’s blog. 

Say what? The dude has been running a Barq’s blog since ’04 (with an url like thebarqsman.com) and you, tasked with talking up Coke products, tell the paper of record you have never heard of such? Sounds like the Coca-Coca company could use some blog monitoring services. I have just the team for you.

Technorati Tags: customer+evangelists

More and more lawyers around Dallas are upgrading their tired old web sites with fancy new Flash enabled sites. These new sites look great and frankly I really like the new looks. We think this is a big mistake.  Why?

First, search engines hate Flash websites. For example, Google reads the text on a page, but Flash creates nice images that Google’s searchbots cannot read. Kevin O’Keefe has a great post about this issue titled "Flash and search engines do not mix for professional services websites."

Second, design companies are making a mint off these new sites and are building in recurring revenue to boot. Flash talent is expensive increasing the upfront cost of building a new site in Flash. The ongoing cost is high as any change the firm might need requires the involvement of the Flash designer. You will be locked into paying high fees forever.

Here are some examples of great looking sites that do not rank well due to their use of Flash: Milbank, Merlo Kanofsky, and Jones Vargas. Who else agrees with us? How about Business Week and Google Blogoscoped (an SEO powerhouse).

Technorati Tags: google, flash, seo

In a first, Budget Car Rental is using ‘blogadvergaming’ as a marketing tool. Budget is hiding a $10,000 prize in four cities over four weeks giving away $160,000 total. Clues will be delivered on Budget’s blog in cartoon format (featuring our favorite cartoonist Hugh MacLeod). The ‘blogadvergaming’ program was organized by B.L. Ochman. Via Adrants and Business Week.

Technorati Tags: adrants, blogadvergaming, budget, budgetcarrental, hugh MacLeod

Steve Rubel is on a bit of a tear. Today he serves up a remixing of Creating Customer Evangelists, blog-style. His steps:

1. Use your blog to solicit feedback from your customers and then act on it 2. Blog away your best ideas 3. Find, listen, engage and empower your blogging influencers 4. Blog with a higher holy calling 5. Blog away coupons, tchotchkes and other freebies 6. Show your customers that you’re their greatest fans

He also has visual aids. Check it out.

Technorati Tags: blogs, customer+evangelists, steve+rubel

I might have to thumbwrestle the team over this, but I could probably be sweetalked into swapping Gahbunga for a standup Tempest or Galaga box.  I’m easy like that.  & nostalgic. 

Remember Gahbunga?  It was a neat little application for teenage girls, a hot-or-not for their camera phones.  Basically, you could take a picture of your date, send it to Gahbunga and get a rating from your friends or the entire Gahbunga community.  Our WebWork Team recently decided that there was not enough room on the boat for several of their current projects including Gahbunga.  The team is almost completely focused on the development of a set of Web 2.0 tools they are calling Big in Japan: Web 2.0 Toolbox.

No one on the WebWorks Team wanted to ‘own’ the project by promoting or adding features to it.  The team decided that the best solution would be to sell it on ebay so here is a link to the auction.  Own a dating service?  Own a dating website?  Want to start a cool little online dating business?  Maybe Gahbunga is for you.  Wonder if they will get any bids?