Thanks to a kind invite from Doc Searls, I’ll be hosting a panel at the Syndicate conference in San Francisco on December 13th. The panel is on ‘Emergency Syndication’. I’ll be talking about my experiences with the Slidell Hurricane Damage blog and the subsequent Recovery 2.0 discussions. Britt Blaser will be talking about the work we’ve been doing together to evolve his Spirit of America infrastructure for Katrina relief. & Zack Rosen will be talking about the great work his team did with the KatrinaPeopleFinder project.

Hope to see you there. We’ll be doing new shirts for this as well. (Notice a trend?) Anyone wants to get together (ahem, Mr. Arrington, Ms. Rouge?), let us know.

Update: They just posted up my pic & bio on the speaker pages. (Note: tough to photograph yourself.) They cropped out the destruction I had strategically placed in the background. Get it, we’re talking about hurricane blogging here, right? Such artistic subtlety. Here is the full photo.

Technorati Tags: brittblaser, doc searls, syndicate san francisco, Weblogs Work

So we’ll be at The Blogging Enterprise, a blog conference in Austin on November 2.

I’ll be speaking at the session on citizen journalism, sharing insights gleaned from a month of disaster blogging.  If you’re in town then, be sure to say hello.  I think we’re doing a new batch of t shirts, so ask me for one.  Who else will be there? Steve Rubel, Shel Israel, Matt Mullenweg, Charlie Wood, Jon Lebkowsky and lots of other cool people. We’re pretty stoked. John Moore of Brand Autopsy may also be there, which would rock.

Charlie posts a note that some folks will be getting together at Chuy’s the night before.

Also: a reminder that we’ll be at the Web 2.0 panel at the UT biz school the night before. That will also be rocking good, and there will be a t shirt involved. (A small, good thing I take pleasure in these days.)

Technorati Tags: austin, blog+conference, shel+israel, steve+rubel, thebloggingenterprise, Weblogs+Work

Ken Yarmosh has just posted an extensive interview with Tony Conrad, CEO of Sphere, a new blog search service now in closed beta testing.  Om Malik has been using Sphere for months now, and posted his thoughts here.  Also, Business Week’s Stephen Baker has a podcast interview with Tony & search guru Mary Hodder. 

One of the first things we do with a new client is help them set up an RSS reader and fill it with relevant reads. What a great moment it is when the lightbulb appears overhead and they realize they can make their favorite Web pages come to them. (Take their info to go, as it were.) Steve Rubel offers up a list of ten RSS hacks (RSS = Really Simple Syndication). A few of his tips:

Build Feeds for Your Favorite Writers Wouldn’t it be great to have a feed for your favorite columnist or journalist? Some sites, like ESPN, already offer these. But most don’t. Here’s a trick. Search for their byline and/or their column title on Yahoo! News and then subscribe to the search as a feed. For example, here’s a Yahoo! News search for Dr. Mac – Bob Levitus with the Houston Chronicle. The search has a link to this feed. Now anytime there’s a new column from Dr. Mac, they come direct to me via RSS. Here’s another feed I built to track Ed Baig’s columns. The trick is setting up the right search. (Hint – this hack works nicely for sites that don’t have feeds)

Find Cool Stuff with a del.icio.us Inbox Feed One of the most powerful tools I use to find stuff to blog about is my del.icio.us inbox. This tracks all bookmarks people are adding to the community under certain tags that I have flagged. The nice part is, I don’t have to continually hit the site to scan these. My inbox has an RSS feed. (Bonus tip – use del.icio.us to build yourself a custom vidcast feed)

Find New Desktop Wallpaper with Flickr I like to change my desktop wallpaper as often as I eat. So I used to subscribe to Webshots Premium. No mas. Thomas Hawk posts new original images every day in Flickr that are just incredible. I subscribe to his feed and download ones I like.

Last week I sent my final email to my electronic distribution list and much to my surprise it caused quite a stir. First, several folks were upset that I sent them an email that seemed to be SPAM. Still others were glad to connect in a new way – via RSS. Finally, a few were upset that I declared “email newsletters are dead.”

This final reaction surprised me. I assumed that everyone agreed, boy was I wrong! Clearly I had underestimated the investment various professionals continue to make in their electronic newsletters. Our IT services company, Architel, provides support for various companies that continue use electronic mailing lists. Each time a client sends out a mass-email Architel’s engineers must work with AOL, Yahoo and other ISPs to remove the client from their blacklists. Architel spends hundreds of hours per year to keep their clients’, who insist on using mass-mailing lists, email systems available to all networks.

Why do users of mailing lists get blacklisted? Sometimes a person on the mailing list forgets that he signed up for the list. For example, this guy, an editor of a magazine, slammed me in his blog for sending him SPAM. He could have just as easily reported my email to his ISP as SPAM and our domain would have been blocked from the ISPs servers. This is clearly the most common reason companies get blacklisted. Still other firms use automated software that can detect ‘mass-emails’ and submit them to popular blacklist providers. The recipient will never see the newsletter and the sender’s domain will likely be blocked by various providers.

Finally, professionals put time and effort creating weekly or monthly newsletters. Studies suggest that technology (such as SPAM filters) are blocking more than 50% of recipients and readership is less than 10% of this number (i.e. 5% of the total number addresses on the mailing list). The truth is, very few people are seeing their work. How can you get it to the right people? at the right time? forever (not just on the day you send it out)? Start blogging instead – your blog lives forever – your posts live forever – and those who are interested in your material will read it when they need the information.

Technorati Tags: blog, dallas, dfw, email, newsletters

BMW is pulling the plug on its four year old ‘The Hire’ smash-hit short film series.  WIRED magazine awarded the series the "Best Excuse for Broadband" award in 2001.  If you have not seen the series check the episodes out at BMWfilms (episodes include: Ambush, Chosen, The Follow, Star, Powder Keg, Hostage, Ticker and Beat the Devil).  BMW also create a comic series based on the episodes found here.  BMW is going remove the films from it’s website, so you need to act fast if you want to see the show that over 100 million people have watched over the past four years.  To learn more about the marketing genius behind the films click here.

Chris Shipley reports from BlogOn today about the Blogging in the Enterprise study. 90% of the marketing/communications folks surveyed said they are currently or plan to use blogs as part of their marketing programs. Chris notes that as a significant uptick in interest in business blogging since the last BlogOn. I’d say it’s a slam dunk.

Technorati Tags: blogon, business+blogging

A top ten list of blog design usability issues.  Short version:  make it simple for new readers to find what they want & understand who you are, so they can explore & make a decision about you.  Other tips:

1. No Author Biographies

Unless you’re a business blog, you probably don’t need a full-fledged "about us" section the way a corporate site does. That said, the basic rationale for "about us" translates directly into the need for an "about me" page on a weblog: users want to know who they’re dealing with.

It’s a simple matter of trust. Anonymous writings have less credence than something that’s signed. And, unless a person’s extraordinarily famous, it’s not enough to simply say that Joe Blogger writes the content. Readers want to know more about Joe. Does he have any credentials or experience in the field he’s commenting on? (Even if you don’t have formal credentials, readers will trust you more if you’re honest about that fact, set forth your informal experience, and explain the reason for your enthusiasm.)

2. No Author Photo

Even weblogs that provide author bios often omit the author photo. A photo is important for two reasons:

• It offers a more personable impression of the author. You enhance your credibility by the simple fact that you’re not trying to hide. Also, users relate more easily to somebody they’ve seen.
• It connects the virtual and physical worlds. People who’ve met you before will recognize your photo, and people who’ve read your site will recognize you when you meet in person (say, at a conference).

A huge percentage of the human brain is dedicated to remembering and recognizing faces. For many, faces work better than names. I learned this lesson myself in 1987 when I included my photo in a HyperCard stack I authored that was widely disseminated on Mac-oriented BBSs. Over the next two years, countless people came up to me and said, "I liked your stack," having recognized me from the photo.

Also, if you run a professional weblog and expect to be quoted in the press, you should follow the recommendations for using the Web for PR and include a selection of high-resolution photos that photo editors can download.

3. Nondescript Posting Titles

Sadly, even though weblogs are native to the Web, authors rarely follow the guidelines for writing for the Web in terms of making content scannable. This applies to a posting’s body text, but it’s even more important with headlines. Users must be able to grasp the gist of an article by reading its headline. Avoid cute or humorous headlines that make no sense out of context.

Your posting’s title is microcontent and you should treat it as a writing project in its own right. On a value-per-word basis, headline writing is the most important writing you do.

Descriptive headlines are especially important for representing your weblog in search engines, newsfeeds (RSS), and other external environments. In those contexts, users often see only the headline and use it to determine whether to click into the full posting. Even if users see a short abstract along with the headline (as with most search engines), user testing shows that people often read only the headline. In fact, people often read only the first three or four words of a headline when scanning a list of possible places to go. Sample bad headlines:

• What Is It That You Want?
• Hey, kids! Comics!
• Victims Abandoned

Sample good headlines:

• Pictures from Die Hunns and Black Halos show
• Office Depot Pays United States $4.75 Million to Resolve False Claims Act Allegations
  (too long, but even if you only read the first few words, you have an idea of what it’s about)
• Ice cream trucks as church marketing

This last headline works on a church-related blog. If you’re writing an ice cream industry blog, start the headline with the word "church" because it’s the information-carrying word within a context of all ice cream, all the time.

In browsing weblog headline listings to extract these examples, I noticed several headlines in ALL CAPS. That’s always bad. Reading speed is reduced by 10% and users are put off by the appearance of shouting.

BusinessWeek has a piece on AOL’s acquisition of Weblogs Inc., during the course of which they point out the following reasons blogs are big for business:

• cheap
• easy to update
• geared for niche markets & passionate readers
• feed word of mouth on the Web
• generate feedback from readers

[via Kevin @ Lexblog]

Technorati Tags: blogs, business+blogging

David Sifry, of Technorati, has updated his latest numbers for blog growth, foregrounding the problem of fake blog/spam blog (splog) growth as well. Key observations:

• Tracked weblogs continue to double every 5 months (a contstant trend)
• 2 to 8 percent of new blogs are spam blogs
• Despite lots of chatter among high profile bloggers, he says the data don’t support that we are having a worse spam attack now than in previous rounds

Meanwhile, Chris Pirillo, Mark Cuban, Matt Haughey, Jeff Jarvis and Tim Bray scream about the spam blog problem this weekend. We monitor blogs for several clients, and spam blogs have certainly made our work less efficient and as effective the past week or so.

Technorati Tags: blogs, chris pirillo, david sifry, jeff jarvis, mark cuban, matt haughey, splog