Corporate Blogging on the nigh, BusinessWeek blogger says.

Stephen Baker at BusinessWeek writes The business blog backlash is nigh.

Well, that's cause many people got into blogging for the wrong reasons. They got in cause it was hot PR wise. Or they got in because they were goaded to by bloggers. Or they got in cause they were promised more traffic than showed up.

Those are the wrong reasons to blog your business.

What's the right reasons?

1) Have a scalable way to talk to your most passionate customers.

2) Build better Google rank for your business.

3) Find ways to make your business/product/team better. Customers, if they know you're listening, will send you all sorts of ideas and bug reports. Minutes ago Jeffrey Czerniak, for instance, blogged a bug with Microsoft Paint. I'll make sure the right team sees that and improves their product.

4) As a way to pull customers into your company which makes them feel more a part of it, and gives them stories that they can tell their friends. That's why Channel 9 works so well. I really don't care if millions of people visit. I care that folks like Mary Jo Foley or Joe Wilcox or Chris Pirillo or CreamHackered over on Neowin or Bob Stein over on ActiveWin (there are thousands of people like this, each of which have an influential audience) have a new way to learn about what we're doing.

See, lots of corporate types try to get a big audience. They think that big is important. It's not. To me, it's about scale. If I get the right 40 people I can launch another ICQ. That went out to just 40 people on November 1, 1996. In six weeks it had gotten to 65,000. Within a few years it had 100 million downloads. All through word-of-mouth.

So, CEOs, if you don't get blogging, that's OK. It gives guys like me who are seven levels down from the CEO something to do. :-)

[Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]
3:28:35 PM    
  
Tags and OPML and categories, oh my. Funny that Dave Winer should talk in his podcast today about a relationship between OPML and tags, because not an hour before the podcast was posted, I was in a brainstorming meeting where I thought tags might be the answer to a problem. I had just that moment promised myself to look further into tagging as a possible way of slicing and dicing content for different audiences and for various purposes. Now I don't yet see the exact relationship between tags and OPML that Dave said... [learnandteachonline.com]
3:06:20 PM    
  
OPML - An Awesome Experiment.

We’ve been following the evolution of Dave Winer’s OPML Editor for most of this year (TechCrunch Profile). We’ve experimented with it, but never fully understood all of the incredible potential that it has to organize and distribute information..

Now we get it. We’ve created a directory, in OPML format, of every TechCrunch company profile. Dave has put the TechCrunch directory up on Scripting News. The directory updates on Scripting News automatically as we update the OPML file. All of our content is therefore available on the Scripting News site.

This is just a start. We’re working on the taxonomy and interface. But this is an interesting experiment in using OPML to solve real-Web problems. If you’d like assistance in working with OPML, please email us and/or check out OPML.org.

[TechCrunch]
3:02:42 PM    
  
ProNet: SpamLookup and Categories on Learning Movable Type.

Elise Bauer's Learning Movable Type has helped countless people understand the intricacies and harness the power of Movable Type and we thought it was worth pointing out two essays recently published there.

The first, written Neil Turner (who just celebrated his three year anniversary using Movable Type), is entitled "Making the Most of SpamLookup" and is essentially the "missing manual" of the number one spam-fighting plugin now bundled with Movable Type 3.2. We'll be publishing our own docs on the plugin soon, but in the meantime it's one of the best resources for understanding how it works beyond just "perfectly"!

The second, "Understanding the Category Listing Code", was cowritten by Elise and award-winning plugin developer and MT consultant Chad Everett. This tutorial does a great job of showing you practical uses of category and subcategory tags that you can use right now by just dropping the template code into your templates.

We're always terribly excited when our users not only understand the power of Movable Type but also have the willingness and take the time to share their knowledge. Spend a day clicking through their sites and you'll undoubtedly learn a lot you may not already know. Thanks to all of you!

[Six Apart News]
2:58:14 PM    
  
Should Spaces Support OPML?. [technology filter]
2:57:43 PM