Saturday, February 15, 2003

iMakeNews Launches Biz Blog Tool The blogosphere was busy today. iMakeNews has kick started the business of blogs... Technology Marketing: Business Wakes Up to Blogging iMakeNews, a provider of hosted email marketing solutions, has just introduced DirectBlog, a weblogging tool geared for corporate communications. [marketingfix] Here's an excerpt... iMakeNews, a provider of e-marketing solutions for businesses, is launching its weblog management or 'blogging' service, DirectBlog. The new service enables businesses to harness the power of weblogs, which provide untapped channels for e-marketing, knowledge management, sales and collaborative communications. Through DirectBlog, organizations will be able to publish and email customized and personalized weblogs to highly segmented groups. DirectBlog will be available to companies an iMakeNews' reseller network in April 2003. "Business weblogs will have an enormous impact on the way companies relate to their customers and other interested parties," said David Shnaider, a founder of the online services ZDNet and Prodigy who advises iMakeNews. "They let individuals easily create continual communications in their areas of expertise, providing a valuable service. And by tracking the usage, companies can gain new insights into the topics and products that are of greatest interest to their customers." I'll explore this more and report back. I hope they can produce a rich weblog experience. 10:28:23 PM

Google buys Blogger Dan Gillmore is reporting that Google is buying the small company behind Blogger, Pyra Labs. I have been wondering for some time where Google was at with the regard to the weblog pheonmena and, well, this is clearly a direction. I am having difficulty seeing Google moving from a "finding stuff on the web" strategy to a "generating content" one, but hey, they do good work and more power to them for validating the weblog space. [Rands in Repose] That's what makes this so interesting. Google isn't getting into content creation, the bloggers take care of that for them. Google is about finding information, so the intriguing question is, what are they going to do to Blogger.com to make it easier to interlink all those blogs? 10:19:07 PM

Google buys Blogger! The question is, are any of these systems pursuing a desktop app strategy? Holy crap is right. Dan Gillmore speculates that Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL will also be buying or building their own weblogging systems. Congratulations to Evan Williams and Pyra team. Five people supporting 1.1 million webloggers? Amazing. [Blogging Roller] 10:15:34 PM

Google buys Blogger maker Pyra WOW! Via Dan Gillmor: Google, which runs the Web's premier search site, has purchased Pyra Labs, a San Francisco company that created some of the earliest technology for writing weblogs, the increasingly popular personal and opinion journals. And, later on: Developers... [Jeremy Zawodny's blog] 10:13:47 PM

Aggie 1.0 RC5 (or is that alpha 5?) It appears this early crowd of desktop news aggregators are relative newbies when it comes to releasing software. Bitworking released Aggie 1.0 RC5 friday.... ProsSMTP support is reportedly turned on site-scraping for regularly formatted web sites The pixel theme can add a [ Blog This] link from each entry, facilitating hit and run blogging! Cons: It's Broken out fo the box! We're not talking strange stuff, but basica functionality! You cannot add new feeds, it complains about a file missing, which is the local cache for the rss feed. Of course it doesn't exist yet I'm adding it! The Pixel theme is horriblyt slow, and this is due to sloppy coding. They have a reference to http://ntbhi22/ in... [Danno Ferrin: ... Speling Errors] 7:46:51 PM

Law.com - The year of the blog Law.com calls this the year of the blog - the article is by Robert Ambrogi, who recently started his own blog. [Ernie the Attorney] These proclamations always fall short, but perhaps a better way to look at it is that this will be the year that the majority of Internet users hear about and read weblogs. 12:12:29 PM

The LiveJournal boom Only 7% of LiveJournal users have paid accounts. UG! If they were smart, LiveJournal would be looking for ways to convert the other 93%, with a goal of getting the number of paid accounts up to 15% by the end of 2003. I also bet that a large majority of those free accounts are dormant, so perhaps their numbers relative to "active" users is much higher. And will they be able to keep those customers as they leave school and enter the workforce? Did you know that LiveJournal is probably the largest weblog service around? Their users seldom read weblogs outside LiveJournal, which is what makes them less visible to outsiders. Here's a company profile from late 2002 which states that LiveJournal boasts a total of 782,000+ users. Of these users, 64% are female, 93% are free accounts, and a large majority of the users are between 15 and 21 years of age. The 729,000 free accounts are made possible because of the 37,000 users that pay. When a user pays, they are contributing a little over $2 a month to pay for LiveJournal and the extra features they have access to. In case you want to see the impressive growth curve, here's a little zipped Excel file for you: LiveJournalStats.zip, based on the data here. (Scroll down to line 625.) I've estimated that if their membership continues to double every year, their user base will surpass in number the population of Canada around 2008. And here's another post on LiveJournal demographics at Unbounded Spiral, a blog that you'll surely enjoy if you like reading (or writing!) Ross Mayfield's weblog. [Seb's Open Research] 12:10:22 PM

Why Spy? Let 'Em Surf! My coursework in Organization Behavior would concur with this assessment. As a previous post pointed out, surfing is in decline, as the Internet becomes more a productivity tool and less a place for (random) exploration. Now that we've colonized this frontier, its time to plant crops and build homes. Your employees will start to do that naturally, and your IT departments should be supporting their efforts wholeheartedly. If you've read Techdirt long enough, you've seen me complain about study after study that talks about how much employees surf the web during the day. These studies are always sponsored by a company that sells web monitoring software, and the articles always take it as fact that people surfing at work is a bad thing. Every time one of these studies pops up, I argue that it's the web monitoring that is actually bad for business. There are a few exceptions, but for many professions, letting people take a few minutes off here and there to get stuff done or blow off steam is probably much better for the long term productivity. Here's the first real article I've seen in a major publication agreeing with the standpoint and saying that there are rewards for trusting your employees. As long as they get their work done, who cares if they check sports scores or play a game during the day? The article points out that there's a self-fulfilling prophecy effect - and if you show workers you don't trust them, they're more likely to be untrustworthy (and unhappy). [Techdirt] 12:04:46 PM

Sex Sells For Drugstore.com Wow, DrugStore.com is selling sex to the mainstream. Well, you're never going to generate much surprise when you tell people that "sex sells". However, Drugstore.com is taking that concept to another level. After realizing that there was tremendous demand for the "sexual well being" products, they've now opened an entire site based on sexual well-being, in order to drive more sales. While they claim it's been done tastefully and carefully, other companies have had difficulty in the past with investors who shy away from any company that openly admits that sex sells. [Techdirt] 12:00:47 PM

NetNewsWire Search Scripts AppleScript is one of Apple's secret weapons. Perhaps VB on Windows can do this, but I've never heard anyone talk about the kinds of interoperability that AppleScript creates between disparate applications. To coincide with the beta release of NetNewsWire Pro, I've uploaded NetNewsWire Search Scripts 1.0b1 to ScriptBuilders. This set of four scripts allows users to quickly search articles downloaded by NetNewsWire Pro and then view a report, with articles and links, in a browser. [AppleScript Info] 11:58:00 AM

Is Web Surfing A Dying Sport? With the decline of surfing, weblogs as they were originally conceived will also level off, although that may be increase their appeal: Let the truly diehard surfers find the cool stuff, and then read about it in their blogs. In the early days of the web, you could spend hours just jumping from website to website following where the links would take you. These days, however, people are more inclined to just go directly to the sites they know about, do whatever it is they want to do, and then move on. The internet, more than a time waster, has become almost (gasp!) practical. While people still use search engines to find stuff, it used to be that the search engines would send them on more random chases through the internet. Now, search engines are used to get directly where surfers want to go. Of course, I imagine a lot of this is a result of better search engines that don't send people off onto random pages. Also, people are becoming more savvy about searches, and knowing when a search takes them to the right or wrong websites. Of course, I still think there's a culture of random surfing going on. For me, though, it's all blog-oriented. I do most of my random surfing by following links from blog to blog - using the bloggers as a sort of guide, instead of just hoping to come across something new and interesting completely on my own. [Techdirt] 11:49:52 AM

finally got my new PB had to drive over to FedEx wednesday morning to get it... I don't know why I keep using my home address when I'm clearly not there to receive packages. Well, it's definitely a few steps up from my last machine: 800Mhz, 40Gb HD, larger screen rez, 512Mb RAM. It made a horrible sound when I first turned it on (in the CD bay area) and it seems to make a clicking sound whenever I (re)power up. But otherwise, all appears well. I got most of my home directory moved back, and now I'm fighting with iTunes to preserve my music library. Next up, a call to Apple to get a partial credit towards a new extended warranty. follow-up: the clicking sound has subsided, and I've almost got my setup back to normal. The bigger screen (higher resolution) is nice. Screen and disk space are just like garage space... it's always nice to get more, and then you fill it up right away! 11:46:32 AM

Movie mash-ups go mainstream with Mike Meyers' DreamWorks deal This is fascinating. Rip, Mix, Burn is going mainstream, and a big movie studio is going to clear all the legal hurdles for Mike. If his project becomes a hit, you can sure bet other studios will jump in, and then it's just a matter of time before DVDs come with masher software built-in. Kenny sez: "Mike Myers has inked an unusual production deal with DreamWorks in which the actor will insert himself, other actors and new plots into existing films to create new properties." The idea isn't new; Woody Allen (news) created new dialogue for a Japanese film and released it as "What's Up, Tiger Lily?" in 1966. More recently, commercials have altered old movie footage starring John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart and Fred Astaire (news) to promote beer, soda and vacuum cleaners. Myers is already known for his homages to pictures. In his previous film outings, including the "Austin Powers" trilogy and even "Wayne's World 2," Myers has re-staged or spoofed scenes from pics including "The Graduate""The Thomas Crown Affair" and the James Bond franchise. But the new deal with DreamWorks will have him take the tweaking to a new level. Myers' pact, which isn't a traditional first-look production deal but specific to the films made from sampling, will have DreamWorks acquiring the rights to films so the actor can use advancements in technology to digitally alter them. Link to Reuters story, Discuss [Boing Boing] 11:44:57 AM

RSS Feeds: Hitting the Right Audience I pointed out recently that while relatively few people are already using news aggregators, adding one to a blog is attractive. This is partly because the early adopters who do use them disproportionately tend to be key opinion shapers. More on this later. In the meantime, Howard Bashman provides one piece of evidence: both Republican and Democratic Senate staffers read his How Appealing blog. [net.law.tools] 11:41:08 AM