Edu-bloggers directory. George has built a partial list of edu-bloggers, along with affiliations. This kind of thing should really go into a wiki or something of the sort... [Seb's Open Research]

Dave Pollard has collected great input from Salon bloggers on the usability of the Radio Userland blog tool. A lot of the concerns reported in there should inform the design of any blog tool. Question 1 is full of ideas on how to publicizing your blog. [Seb's Open Research]

Hello MarketingFix readers. We hope you enjoy our site. Robert, John, Olivier, Steve and myself are quite pleased with this little site we've created, we don't mind telling you. Our first public post was on October 5, 2002, which means we've been at this for more than six months. Since then, traffic has continued to grow and we've developed a modest sense of reader community, with many of you occasionally posting comments to our postings (tho we'd love to see more of that) and many more of you contact us directly via email.

Well, we've been plugging along steadily for a while in the same mode, but we're on the verge of revamping much of the site. Before we do, we'd like to here more of your feedback...

[MarketingFix]

Alf Eaton: "Thinkbot is an easy way to find other people who are thinking about the same things as you. I call it Ridiculously Easy Thought Sharing. I hope it works."

If I'm not mistaken, this is "The modified Reed's Law meets Jabber". Here are precursor and follow-up posts on this new ridiculously easy service.

[Seb's Open Research]

Today we launch a live, syndicated feed of industry press releases and news items. The feed is available as RSS 2.0, as ... [Loosely Coupled weblog]

Brand As Navigator - WSJ Compares the Search Engines. 

The Wall Street Journal's Cranky Consumer column (Page D2 today, no link) compared search engines on various tasks - finding a specific product, finding a local business, etc.  Recommendations - Froogle for finding the radio,  AOL's yellow page service for zip-code based searching of local businesses.  Singled out for criticism - MSN, for being the least clear about graphically distinguishing paid- from un-paid search results.

I tried out MSN's search and I see what the Journal is talking about.  In fact, if I hadn't read the Journal's article, I wouldn't have been able to figure out which hit results were paid-for (they have a small 'about' link next to them which, I imagine, no one clicks) and which hits were on page one because of relevance. One has to question why MSN goes to these lengths to obscure what Google's communicates easily).

Search engines can function as powerful brand directories but not if there is a disconnect between user expectations and user experience.

[The Trademark Blog]

About six weeks ago, Stuart Mudie predicted "It won't be long before new fathers, instead of handing out cigars, send pictures of their new-born children live to their moblogs from the birthing room." and now Kurt Easterwood has done that.

[Smart Mobs]

Blogs can link firms, customers [Sun-Sentinel] by Jeff Zbar

Instead of creating a new Web page and going through the process of reposting each time he had something new to add, Ryan Clement of SunFriendlyProducts.com decided to blog. Now, each time he comes across a new bit of research, Clement posts a blog to his site as easily as if he were sending an e-mail. "This is a more convenient way to share data, and it helps us gain awareness about our resources," he said. "It's a great way to spread the word about what we do."