Sunday, March 2, 2003

Sports Markup Language Sports Markup Language: This was released in November, but I didn't know about it until now. Major news agencies have settled on an XML format to describe all sporting events. (See docs.) I don't know details of actual feeds --... [JD on MX] Can't wait to see the Flash-powered sports tracker app! 9:37:38 PM

blogs4business.com Aha! Another marketer gets it, and wants to share it with Corporate America! Right on! Here's the top of this weblog: This is a BlogPowered website from JohnLawlor.com. Blogs4Business aims to explore and inform marketers on the responsible and effective use of blogs (weblogs) to communicate to their prospects and customers. John Lawlor is currently launching 10 Palm Blogs, a business blog company. He is available for business blog consulting, including b-blog strategy, blog implementation and the management of business blog-sites. 866.44B.BLOG or 561.750.8095 john@johnlawlor.com. Listen up, all you web software companies (you know who you are): sell weblog creation and distribution tools to marketers. 9:25:30 PM

Dr. Pepper Blogs for Raging Cow Dr. Pepper will use blogs to promote new drink by using a blog-related twist on viral marketing. Dr Pepper hopes to develop a "blogging network" to hype Raging Cow and "be part of the 'in the know' crowd." Doc Searls disagrees with the idea by saying, "In my view blogs are the antidote to viral marketing." [Blogroots] ...And yet, here we all are talking about it! 9:20:49 PM

Use of XML by the Legal System XML can be used for many things, including describing written agreements, or mediating disputes that arise as a result of electronic agreements. Jerry Lawson of the net.law.blog has a great post entitled XML and Online Dispute Resolution Conference about the recent ODR-XML conference hosted by the University of Massachusetts Center for Information Technology & Dispute Resolution of which he was a panel member. Apparently, Bob Ambrogi was an organizer. Keep up the good work guys. XML is important stuff, even if many lawyers haven't yet realized it. Eventually they will. [Ernie the Attorney] 9:15:56 PM

The Corporate Weblog Manifesto. Thinking... Genrally good points. Could be cleaned up a bit, since many points are the same thing reworded. Perhaps he just wanted to emphasize things... The Corporate Weblog Manifesto. Thinking of doing a weblog about your product or your company? Here's my ideas of things to consider before you start. 1) Tell the truth. The whole truth. Nothing but the truth. If your competitor has a product that's better than yours, link to it. You might as well. We'll find it anyway. 2) Post fast on good news or bad. Someone say something bad about your product? Link to it -- before the second or third site does -- and answer its claims as best you can. Same if something good comes out about you. It's all about building long-term trust. The trick to building trust is to show up! If people are saying things about your product and you don't answer them, that distrust builds. Plus, if people are saying good things about your product, why not help Google find those pages as well? 3) Use a human voice. Don't get corporate lawyers and PR professionals to cleanse your speech. We can tell, believe me. Plus, you'll be too slow. If you're the last one to post, the joke is on you! 4) Make sure you support the latest software/web/human standards. If you don't know what the W3C is, find out. If you don't know what RSS feeds are, find out. If you don't know what weblogs.com is, find out. If you don't know how Google works, find out. 5) Have a thick skin. Even if you have Bill Gates' favorite product people will say bad things about it. That's part of the process. Don't try to write a corporate weblog unless you can answer all questions -- good and bad -- professionally, quickly, and nicely. 6) Don't ignore Slashdot. 7) Talk to the grassroots first. Why? Because the main-stream press is cruising weblogs looking for stories and looking for people to use in quotes. If a mainstream reporter can't find anyone who knows anything about a story, he/she will write a story that looks like a press release instead of something trustworthy. People trust stories that have quotes from many sources. They don't trust press releases. 8) If you screw up, acknowledge it. Fast. And give us a plan for how you'll unscrew things. Then deliver on your promises. 9) Underpromise and over deliver. If you're going to ship on March 1, say you won't ship until March 15. Folks will start to trust you if you behave this way. Look at Disneyland. When you're standing in line you trust their signs. Why? Because the line always goes faster than its says it will (their signs are engineered to say that a line will take about 15% longer than it really will). 10) If Doc Searls says it or writes it, believe it. Live it. Enough said. 11) Know the information gatekeepers. If you don't realize that Sue Mosher reaches more Outlook users than nearly everyone else, you shouldn't be on the PR team for Outlook. If you don't know all of her phone numbers and IM addresses, you should be fired. If you can't call on the gatekeepers during a crisis, you shouldn't try to keep a corporate weblog (oh, and they better know how to get ahold of you since they know when you're under attack before you do -- for instance, why hasn't anyone from the Hotmail team called me yet to tell me what's going on with Hotmail and why it's unreachable as I write this?). 12) Never change the URL of your weblog. I've done it once and I lost much of my readership and it took several months to build up the same reader patterns and trust. 13) If your life is in turmoil and/or you're unhappy, don't write. When I was going through my divorce, it affected my writing in subtle ways. Lately I've been feeling a lot better, and I notice my writing and readership quality has been going up too. 14) If you don't have the answers, say so. Not having the answers is human. But, get them and exceed expectations. If you say you'll know by tomorrow afternoon, make sure you know in the morning. 15) Never lie. You'll get caught and you'll lose credibility that you'll never get back. 16) Never hide information. Just like the space shuttle engineers, your information will get out and then you'll lose credibility. 17) If you have information that might get you in a lawsuit, see a lawyer before posting, but do it fast. Speed is key here. If it takes you two weeks to answer what's going on in the marketplace because you're scared of what your legal hit will be, then you're screwed anyway. Your competitors will figure it out and outmaneuver you. 18) Link to your competitors and say nice things about them. Remember, you're part of an industry and if the entire industry gets bigger, you'll probably win more than your fair share of business and you'll get bigger too. Be better than your competitors -- people remember that. I remember sending lots of customers over to the camera shop that competed with me and many of those folks came back to me and said "I'd rather buy it from you, can you get me that?" Remember how Bill Gates got DOS? He sent IBM to get it from DRI Research. They weren't all that helpful, so IBM said "hey, why don't you get us an OS?" 19) BOGU. This means "Bend Over and Grease Up." I believe the term originated at Microsoft. It means that when a big fish comes over (like IBM, or Bill Gates) you do whatever you have to do to keep him happy. Personally, I believe in BOGU'ing for EVERYONE, not just the big fish. You never know when the janitor will go to school, get an MBA, and start a company. I've seen it happen. Translation for weblog world: treat Gnome-Girl as good as you'd treat Dave Winer or Glenn Reynolds. You never know who'll get promoted. I've learned this lesson the hard way over the years. 20) Be the authority on your product/company. You should know more about your product than anyone else alive, if you're writing a weblog about it. If there's someone alive who knows more, you damn well better have links to them (and you should send some goodies to them to thank them for being such great advocates). Any others? Disagree with any of these? Sorry my comments are down. Now Hotmail is down too. Grr. Where's the "Hotmail weblog" where I can read about what's going on at Hotmail? So, write about this and link to it from your weblog. I watch my referer links like a hawk. Oh, is that #21? Yes it is. Know who is talking about you. [The Scobleizer Weblog] 9:09:06 PM

Signing at Booksmith in SF next Wednesday I'm going to be doing a signing and reading from my novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, at San Francisco's Booksmith, in the Haight, next Wednesday, March 5, at 7PM. Who knows, I may even read from something else, too! (Reminder, you can keep up with signings and readings here). The best part of reading at the Booksmith is that they make up these super-keen author trading cards. I've always dreamed of having a trading card, a wildly popular 12" action figure, and fanfic... One down, two to go. LinkDiscuss [Boing Boing] Anyone else going to this? Would love to meet others in the blogosphere... 9:05:44 PM

Google Rolls Out Content Targeted AdWords Here we go... IAR: Google Rolls Out Targeted Ads Google is expanding its paid listing model beyond search results page and will allow advertisers to have AdWords appear on Google's content sites which include HowstuffWorks, Weather Undergound, and recently aquired Blogger. Through new program, called "Content-Targeted AdWords," Google can syndicate its listings to Web sites beyond those with which it has long-term deals. The listings appear in the banner or skyscraper space on Web sites, a placement that obviates the need for costly re-designs, and they're tailored to the content on the page. Google's launch comes just days after Overture said it would roll out a similar offering this year. Posted by Steve Hall at 11:30 AM Comments: (post your comment) [marketingfix] 9:04:39 PM

High-speed bullets and high-speed photos Stunning gallery of very high-speed photos of bullets being fired through things. LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Brian!) [Boing Boing] Fun! 9:02:51 PM

Liveblogging Open Spectrum Conference Cory Doctorow is liveblogging the Open Spectrum conference at Stanford [Smart Mobs] Yes another local conference. I really really must start playing in the sandbox if I'm going to meet the other kids. 8:57:06 PM

Liveblogging DRM Conference The Digital Rights Management conference in Berkeley brings the opposing forces together in the war over the future of innovation. Our own smartblogger Bryan Alexander is liveblogging it for Mindjack. Dan Gillmor wrote a column on it today. (Via boingboing) [Smart Mobs] Another local conference that I didn't make an effort to attend... dangit! 8:56:10 PM

Um, Dave, so Microsoft is claiming... Um, Dave, so Microsoft is claiming that FrontPage lets you build weblogs, huh? Well, here's how you figure out if Microsoft is pulling a marketing trick on you, or not: 1) Does it report to weblogs.com? If not, it's not a modern weblog tool. 2) Does it generate an RSS/XML file? If not, it's not a modern weblog tool. 3) Is it easy to post? (Does it have one button posting?) If not, it's not a modern weblog tool. 4) Does it support the Blogger API? The MetaWeblog API? If not, it's not a modern weblog tool. Microsoft named me one of the top five FrontPage users in 1995, and I'm not seeing any reason to abandon any of the modern weblog tools for FrontPage 11 (stuff like Radio UserLand, Moveable Type, Blogger, or Mike Amundsen's Erablog.net stuff). [The Scobleizer Weblog] Another case of marketing getting confused between a fad and a real trend. Weblogs and RSS feeds require real integration, not just re-purposed product descriptions. 8:45:58 PM

Here's what Google can do for weblogs... Here's what Google can do for weblogs that would be a service to the weblog community -- classify and group them. Give me an accurate list of all the librarian weblogs, and all the lawyer weblogs, and all the weblogs of people who have implemented an XML-RPC stack. You get the idea. They have been able to do this with news stories, it seems they should also be able to do it with weblogs. This is the biggest unsolved problem I see in this world, and I don't know how to solve it, it's not what I do. Postscript: Tom Matrullo wants this too. [Scripting News] One of the interesting phenoms of weblogs is their constant state of change. Today I blog about the blogosphere, yesterday I blog about buying my first house. Perhaps some want to read only the blogosphere posts (so I offer RSS channels) but others want to read about me. That's why this isn't a column or a newspaper. it's about me. And it's in constant flux. How do you categorize that? 8:27:46 PM

Aggregating Your Life into One Page The Shifted Librarian gets RSS aggregators more than most: Will Richardson is starting to "get" it: More RSS Thinking "I think I'm starting to understand why Jenny and so many others are really hot on RSS and its potential. The more I mull over the scenarios of how it might work in the classroom, the more interested I get. Aside from the rather mundane (at this point) concept of having kids subscribe to different feeds for information gathering and research purposes, the whole idea of using RSS for basically schoolwide communication is really wild. I know that I'm assuming a lot here, like teachers and administrators and parents will a) be open to the technology and b) care enough to use it." Now take another giant leap for mankind and imagine a news aggregator that has your local newspaper's headlines, news from your municipality, programs you've noted interest in from the park district, announcements from both your kid's school and teacher, status reports from your kids' sports teams, a notice of the "special of the day" from the local coffee shop you love, and on and on and on. Yes, it's an information explosion contained all on one page and you don't have to do the work! That's why I think RSS (or something very much like it) will be very big. On cell phones, PDAs, tablets, and laptops, it makes great sense for portability. Of course, we'll need better aggregators and they'll have to support services like authentication, prioritization, multimedia, and things we haven't even thought of yet. The key will be to create an aggregator that looks and acts like a web page. You won't call it an aggregator. Instead it will be sold as "the daily news you want" or something like that. It will have a catchy name that my neighbors would understand and actually try. It won't be a "technology" - it will just be useful. And wouldn't it be great if it was brought to you by your local public library! [The Shifted Librarian] I think she's absolutely right, and I don't see any of the current players in the desktop news aggregator space going this far. The out-of-box experience has to be very simple, like asking for a zip code then using a GeoBlogger-like system to find Intl, nation, regional, and local weblogs. Also, like asking for a list of interesting, then suggesting a set of blogs that fit those categories for subscription. 8:25:57 PM

Netflix Signs Up One Millionth Customer This one is for Tony G. As much as customers love using Netflix, many people have been predicting their downfall. They're still a small company, and have now attracted competition from Wal-Mart and Blockbuster, among others. Most people still expect Netflix to end up as yet another dot com footnote, so you can practically hear the glee coming out of them as they announced that they've surpassed their one-millionth customer. They're hyping the fact that they've reached one million subscribers faster than AOL did. They're now hoping that this is one case where a first-mover advantage does help. They've got the brand, and now they're hoping the large number of subscribers will give them the clout to keep their costs low to remain profitable. Of course, when you're competing with Wal-Mart, that's a tough battle to win. They have more clout than anyone when it comes to keeping product costs down. [Techdirt] Only to see a little guy compete and win, I wish them luck! 7:43:35 PM