In Online Communities and the Future of Culture I claimed that all kinds of culture-makers were getting online because it rewarded them with more meaningful contacts with people who can appreciate their work. Here are a few blogs by musicians that I happened across lately.

• Phil Jones' BeatBlog - "what would happen if a culture did try to blog music, to create little fragments of rhythm and melody, to hyperlink through them?" Reusable Music Objects. I like.
• Brad Sucks -  "I write, record and produce songs in a small home studio and put them on www.bradsucks.net for people to download without copyright and hopefully enjoy. I'm also releasing the audio source files for all of my tracks in case people want to mess around with them or collaborate with me."
• Violinist blogs
• InTune diaries - A Scoop site.
• SongTrellis - seems to be a Manila site for a community of musicians

If you know of any others, please leave a comment! Hopefully Google will index this and help other musicians find one another.

Reuters: Yahoo! goes for Google with revamp

Yahoo!'s goal for the new products remains the same as always -- to boost users and revenue from Internet queries -- and Weiner was quick to deny the changes are a direct assault on Google's market share.

The new setup, however, includes a number of Google-like features, including a more tightly integrated image search and small boxed text ads on the right side of the page.

What Warfighters Can Teach Business Leaders. Literally from it's earliest issue, Fast Company has looked to the best minds and most effective units in the military for lessons about strategy, tactics, and execution that can be applied to business. At a moment in which the attention of the world is focused on military conflict and its aftermath, we've assembled a collection of articles that may change how you run your company -- and shape how you behave as a leader. [Fast Company]

A wonderful group of relevant stories amd lessons

iMedia Connection: A Return to Contextual Relevancy

Joe Jaffe takes a close look at Contextual Relavancy and it's place in the online advertising world. It's not just matching message with content.

comScore: Ford Closes Gap Among Online Hispanic Auto Shoppers

The comScore Media Metrix analysis, based on a panel of more than 50,000 U.S. Hispanic Internet users, revealed that in February 2003, the Ford Motor Company (including espanol.fordvehicles.com) earned the top ranking among major automotive manufacturers based on U.S. Hispanic visitors.

...

In February 2003, more than 1.2 million Hispanics – fully ten percent of the online Hispanic population – visited at least one automotive manufacturer Web site. Among these, Ford Motor Company attracted 355,000 unique visitors and General Motors drew 353,000 unique visitors. These results are in sharp contrast to the Total U.S. population, in which General Motors led with 5.7 million unique visitors and Ford held the number two ranking, with 4.2 million visitors.

I blogged about the work of Tyler, Wilkinson, and Huberman in regard to the detection of social networks by analysis of email patterns. Important prior work in this field has been done since 1998 by Yukio Ohsawa et al, including Featuring Web Communities Based on Word Co-occurrence Structure of Communications.

In these studies since 1998, Ohsawa et al applied original techniques (e.g. KeyGraph) visualizing the structure of a document, e.g., a sequence of messages. As a result, significant words, leading people, messages, words, or web pages have been extracted. This method is already used in leading companies for discovering significant on-line communities and significant messages in them.

These methods take advantage of the "small-world" structure of graphs, i.e. the clusters and by "Chance Discovery," a theme on which the American Association of Artificial Intelligence hold a symposium last fall.

A summary of chance discovery methodology is more suitable for lay readers.

NYT: Internet Has Impact on Home Sales

"Real estate brokers are seriously looking at Internet marketing in a way they never did before, and their timing is extremely good," said Blanche Evans, editor of Realty Times, an Internet news service that follows the residential real estate market. "Their customers are online more than ever."

Analysts said very few people actually buy their homes online — exotic homes on eBay are the rare exceptions. But according to the National Association of Realtors, the trade group for brokers and agents, 41 percent of consumers last year used the Internet to research homes before making a purchase — equal to the percentage of consumers using newspapers for that purpose. The number of online home shoppers is expected to rise significantly when the association releases new statistics next month.

Has Media Interest Increased Since Google Bought Blogger?

At Blogs4Business.com, my blogging seminar and consulting arm, we have been tracking major media interest in blogging by tracking the word "blog"  Obviously, as a blogging evangelist I am prejudiced but the numbers seem to validate that there is a surging media interest in blogging.

Articles tracked on News.Google.com for the word 'blog'

• Jan. 151
• Feb. 225
• March 655

March generated 4.33 times as many articles as January! Google News tracks over 4,500

What has generated this trend in media interest in blogging?  

1. Google's purchase of Pyra's Blogger (mid-February) brought blogs and blogging to a higher level of attention
2. Wire service articles from Associated Press and Reuters were picked-up by local media
3. The war with Iraq and the discovery of 'war blogs' has driven blogging interest in the press through the roof.

Any media attention in blogging increases interest in how businesses can successfully incorporate blogging into their communications programs.

As an example of this premise - last week a local newspaper, The Sun-Sentinel in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, wrote an article entitled "Virtual army unleashes the blogs of war" and the author (Christine Winter) wrote a business blogging article (Marketers can spread the word with Weblogs) a few days later. Christine even included a few quotes from the BlogAnswerMan himself. Thank you Christine.

Marketers can spread the word with Weblogs [Sun-Sentinel] by Christine Winter

A Boca Raton-based entrepreneur, John Lawlor, who has an advertising and permission-based e-mail marketing background, has set himself up as a blogging consultant, known as The Blog Answer Man (bloganswerman.com). He offers seminars to businesses interested in pursuing the new technology as a marketing tool.

He describes a business blog as a "merger of discussion boards, personal Web sites, e-mails and e-mail newsletters." <more>